Carlyle could read and enjoy Homer in the original, having paid his tax to contemporary stupor by learning the language, but he had no love for the minutiae of Greek grammar, and failed in reverence for the particles ge, men, de. He even ventured to guess that these immortal particles, a sound knowledge of which was one road to an English bishopric, were occasionally used by Homer without much discrimination, merely to eke out his syllables, for the sake of rhythm.
"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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Saturday, June 29, 2013
Greek Particles
David Wilson, Mr. Froude and Carlyle (New York: Dodd, Mead & Company, 1898), p. 19 (footnote omitted):