If a personal reminiscence is not out of place I may refer to an outburst of his that I never forgot. In my first tête-à-tête with him he diagnosed my knowledge of Greek Composition as only imperceptibly above zero and forthwith accorded to me the amazing privilege of a weekly private lesson by him in writing Greek! At one of these terrifying clinics he pointed out some blunder such as placing an acute accent on the compact expanse of γῆ! When I fatuously remarked: "That is a mistake!" he shot forth: "A mistake! There is no such thing as a mistake. It is a Crime!"
"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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Monday, January 23, 2023
A Crime
Francis G. Allinson, "Gildersleeve as a Teacher," The Johns Hopkins Alumni Magazine 13.2 (January, 1925) 132-136 (at 133):