After years of estrangement I found myself this week going back to Horace, who has at least this advantage that a single ode makes just the right length of reading for the odd five minutes before a pupil appears, or between the last pupil and dinner. I suppose the first lines would still wake in you as they do in me a flood of reminiscence—Solvitur acris hiems—O fons Bandusiae—Vides ut alta stet nive candidum: and even the first lines of odes one never read at school such as Cum tu Lydia Telphi [sic, read Telephi].
"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, May 04, 2026
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C.S. Lewis, letter to his brother Warren (Dec. 3, 1939):