Take someone, even someone poorly equipped with the best aids, who gives us a writer restored to a more correct form, either by conjecture or by the use of a few manuscripts; even if he removes just thirty warts, and leaves a hundred, no one will deny that he has rendered service to literature.
Nam qui optimis subsidiis vel minime instructus, scriptorem nobis emendatiorem reddit, sive ingenio suo, sive paucorum librorum usu; quamvis vix triginta naevos sustulerit, centum relinquat, eum tamen nemo de bonis litteris bene mereri neget.
"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, May 28, 2021
Wart Removal
Friedrich August Wolf (1759-1824), Prolegomena to Homer, Chapter I (tr. Anthony Grafton):