As I passed through on my way to the Philadelphia train I was amused by a wicker basket full of Scotch terrier puppies -- five or six of them tumbling over one another in their play and yelping so that the station rang. "Every little bit yelps" as someone has said. I was reminded of the last words I ever read in Virgil (the end of the sixth book of the Aeneid) -- stant litore puppes, which I always yearned to translate "a litter of puppies."
"A peculiar anthologic maze, an amusing literary chaos, a farrago of quotations, a mere olla podrida of quaintness, a pot pourri of pleasant delites, a florilegium of elegant extracts, a tangled fardel of old-world flowers of thought, a faggot of odd fancies, quips, facetiae, loosely tied" (Holbrook Jackson, Anatomy of Bibliomania) by a "laudator temporis acti," a "praiser of time past" (Horace, Ars Poetica 173).
Pages
▼
Monday, August 28, 2006
Dog Latin
Christopher Morley, A Morning in Marathon, from Shandygaff (1918):