My father who attended Adams Academy, Quincy, when Dr. Everett was headmaster, used to tell of one of these tantrums. A stupid boy in the Virgil class, reciting Latin, insisted, despite frequent correction, on pronouncing the name of the hero of the Aeneid as "Eé-ne-as." Finally Piggy could stand it no longer. He jumped up and down, banging the desk with his fists, exclaiming, "You goddam little fool, do you suppose that Dido would have fallen in love with a man who accented his name on the antepenult when the penult was long?"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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Tuesday, March 25, 2014
A Tantrum in Latin Class
Samuel Eliot Morison (1887-1976), One Boy's Boston, 1887-1901 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1962), p. 73 (on Dr. William Everett, nicknamed "Piggy"):