In class he cried out to his astonished undergraduate students, "Flee to the mountains, for the end of all things is at hand." The Harvard authorities could no more tolerate this sort of challenge than they could Emerson's, and Very was relieved of his duties as Greek tutor.
"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).
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Sunday, May 17, 2009
How to Lose Your Job Teaching Greek
Robert D. Richardson, Jr., Emerson: The Mind on Fire (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), p. 303-304 (on Jones Very):