Jamesy Stephens and W.B. Yeats once hired a Frenchman to teach them French together: he began with a quarter of an hour on the rules for the agreement of past participles: Jamesy at last broke in "Excuse me, M. Dupont, what is meant by the agreement of the past participle?", and W.B. said "I was just going to ask you, Monnshure, what is a past participle?"Hat tip: Ian Jackson.
"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, August 05, 2012
French Lesson
Letter from Stephen MacKenna to Stephen McKenna (October 29, 1927), in Journal and Letters of Stephen MacKenna, ed. E.R. Dodds (London: Constable & Co Ltd, 1936), pp. 247-249 (at 248):