We used to translate the psalm Beati immaculati in via at Heythrop as 'Blessed are they that are not spotted on the way out.' I was spotted too often, and for this among other middle-aged delinquencies I was summoned to the Rector's office and told, quite kindly I might say, that my ordination as a priest, which ought to have been that summer, was postponed until I amended my irregularities.
"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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Friday, October 24, 2014
Psalm 118(119):1
Peter Levi (1931-2000), The Hill of Kronos (New York: E.P. Dutton, 1981), pp. 15-16: