They brought discipline to cap the spouting of youthful convictions. They taught us to postpone judgments, to acknowledge mistakes, to mistrust your own work and give cordial credit to others, to assume nothing general from particular instance, to search for contrary evidence as if it were pearls, to walk all around a question, to define a problem, to finish what you began. These are some of their Commandments, and if we did not keep them any better than God's, mercy shown to the ignorant could no longer be ours.
"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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Thursday, February 13, 2014
Lessons
Donald Culross Peattie (1898-1964), Flowering Earth (New York: G.P. Putnam's Sons, 1939; rpt. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991), pp. 13-14 (on his teachers at Harvard):