The commentary ought to be studied by editors as a pattern. Clear, compact, sensible, free from wearisome grammatical notes, and illustrations that do not illustrate, marked by rare command of the literature, and an equally rare generosity in acknowledging obligation, modelled, in short, by the hand of a master who does not need to call the attention of the reader from the text to admire the commentator.
"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, January 05, 2016
Merits of a Commentary
B.L. Gildersleeve (1831-1924), "Brief Mention," American Journal of Philology 4.4 (1883) 529-531 (at 529; on Henri Weil's Plaidoyers Politiques de Demosthène):