At my private school ... I began to write both Latin and Greek verse with what aid I could get from the Laws of Prosody at the end of the grammar; and a Latin play, in a curious variety of metres, was inflicted on my family by instalments. When I began to write Latin verse officially, I took kindly to it from the first, and the tendency was so far unchecked that to-day I can scarcely see a piece of English poetry without wanting to Latinize it. Educationalists will frown upon the idea that such a worthless facility could have any influence in the determination of the mind; for myself, I unashamedly believe Latin verse to be the first process (except perhaps Euclid, which we have abolished) that stimulates the mind to logical effort, in demanding that you should go behind the form of a sentence to get at its meaning.
"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, November 03, 2023
Latin Verse Composition
R.A. Knox (1888-1957), A Spiritual Aeneid (London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1918), p. 16: