Laudator Temporis Acti

He refused to be called 'master'.

But all their works they do for to be seen of men: they make broad their phylacteries, and enlarge the borders of their garments, And love the uppermost rooms at feasts, and the chief seats in the synagogues, And greetings in the markets, and to be called of men, Rabbi, Rabbi. But be not ye called Rabbi [῾Ραββί]: for one is your Master [διδάσκαλος, literally teacher], even Christ; and all ye are brethren. And call no man your father upon the earth: for one is your Father [πατήρ], which is in heaven. Neither be ye called masters: for one is your Master [καθηγητής], even Christ.

1. Clayton Cramer on the history of Thanksgiving.
   
2. Jeff at Quid Nomen Illius? on magazine cover art commemorating the holiday.
   
3. Bill Keezer on reasons to be thankful.
   
4. Dennis Mangan on the gratitude he feels for friendships with fellow bloggers.

No doubt laws have always been on the books whose purpose is more to promote discretion among those who break their precepts than to enforce strict adherence; but widespread, open, and profitable lawbreaking will before long exert a corrupting effect upon the whole of society.

It need hardly be pointed out that rap music—full of inchoate rage, hatred, and intemperance—does not instill a balanced or subtle understanding of the world in its listeners. It fills and empties the mind at the same time: fills it with debased notions and empties it of critical faculties.

One of the merits of this passage—and it is characteristic of Shakespeare that the merits of his writing should be so multiform, combining in equal measure truth, humanity, tolerance, wisdom, understanding, love, irony, and poetry—is its beautiful and accurate description of delirium.

I tried to point out some of the cultural meanings of the vogue for tattooing. First, it was aesthetically worse than worthless. Tattoos were always kitsch, implying not only the absence of taste but the presence of dishonest emotion.

Second, the vogue represented a desperate (and rather sad) attempt on a mass scale to achieve individuality and character by means of mere adornment, which implied both intellectual vacuity and unhealthy self-absorption.

And third, it represented mass downward cultural and social aspiration, since everyone understood that tattooing had a traditional association with low social class and, above all, with aggression and criminality. It was, in effect, a visible symbol of the greatest, though totally ersatz, virtue of our time: an inclusive unwillingness to make judgments of morality or value.

Oh that I had wings like a dove! for then would I fly away, and be at rest. Lo, then would I wander far off, and remain in the wilderness. Selah. I would hasten my escape from the windy storm and tempest.

O to be nestling 'neath some pathless cavern, there by god's creating hand to grow into a bird amid the wingèd tribes! Away would I soar to Adria's wave-beat shore and to the waters of Eridanus; where a father's hapless daughters in their grief for Phaethon distil into the glooming flood the amber brilliance of their tears.

And to the apple-bearing strand of those minstrels in the west I then would come, where ocean's lord no more to sailors grants a passage o'er the deep dark main, finding there the heaven's holy bound, upheld by Atlas, where water from ambrosial founts wells up beside the couch of Zeus within his halls, and holy earth, the bounteous mother, causes joy to spring in heavenly breasts.

Would I could speed away from Phthia's land on bird's dark pinion!

O, through the liquid air that I could fly, far from the land of Greece, ev'n to the stars fix'd in the western sky!

Oh! for wings to cleave the air in the track of Libyan cranes, whose serried ranks leave far behind the wintry storm at the shrill summons of some veteran leader, who raises his exultant cry as he wings his way o'er plains that know no rain and yet bear fruitful increase. Ye feathered birds with necks outstretched, comrades of the racing clouds, on! on! till ye reach the Pleiads in their central station and Orion, lord of the night; and as ye settle on Eurotas' banks proclaim the glad tidings that Menelaus has sacked the city of Dardanus, and will soon be home.

Why dost thou not for very shame hide beneath the dark places of the earth, or change thy human life and soar on wings to escape this tribulation?

What flight shall save me from this death, borne on swift pinions through the air, sunk to the darksome cave beneath, or mounted on the rapid car?

For she must hide beneath the earth or soar on wings towards heaven's vault, if she would avoid the vengeance of the royal house.

Where can I find release from my sorrow? Shall I take wings or plunge beneath the earth?

Whither can I turn or go? Shall I take wings and soar aloft to the mansions of the sky, where Orion and Sirius dart from their eyes a flash as of fire, or shall I, in my misery, plunge to Hades' murky flood?

Martial, the things that do attain
  The happy life be these, I find:
The richesse left, not got with pain;
  The fruitful ground, the quiet mind;
The equal friend; no grudge, no strife;
  No charge of rule, nor governance;
Without disease, the healthful life;
  The household of continuance;
The mean diet, no delicate fare;
  True wisdom join'd with simpleness;
The night dischargèd of all care,
  Where wine the wit may not oppress.
The faithful wife, without debate;
  Such sleeps as may beguile the night:
Contented with thine own estate
  Ne wish for death, ne fear his might.

Vitam quae faciant beatiorem,
iucundissime Martialis, haec sunt:
res non parta labore sed relicta;
non ingratus ager, focus perennis;
lis numquam, toga rara, mens quieta;
vires ingenuae, salubre corpus;
prudens simplicitas, pares amici;
convictus facilis, sine arte mensa;
nox non ebria sed soluta curis;
non tristis torus et tamen pudicus;
somnus qui faciat breves tenebras:
quod sis esse velis nihilque malis;
summum nec metuas diem nec optes.

Shortly after the newlyweds' arrival, Emerson and Thoreau together paid a formal call of welcome. It was not a success. Each sat in his chair bolt upright and completely ill at ease. Much of the time they sat in embarrassed silence. Hawthorne occasionally propounded a question which Thoreau would answer in a monosyllable. Emerson tried to start a conversation only to have each sentence sound like a royal pronouncement. Finally, in desperation the guests departed.

Emerson, delighted to have so many stimulating young men gathered around him, decided in the fall of 1844 to organize a weekly discussion group, which was to meet Monday evenings in his library. Alcott, Hawthorne, Thoreau, George Bradford, the Curtis brothers, and Channing were all invited to attend. The first Monday evening there was an uneasy silence as though, as George Curtis recalls, each were asking, "Who will now proceed to say the finest thing that has ever been said?" Finally Alcott made one of his most orphic sayings. Silence. Thoreau made a brief observation. More silence. Emerson beamed and said nothing. Hawthorne shrunk further into the shadowed corner of the room. Finally a bowl of apples was brought in and each munched in silence. When the end of the long evening came, each disappeared his own way into the darkness. Two more Monday evenings they assembled but with no more success.

Human nature surrenders more easily to the avoidable than to the unavoidable.

La humanidad se resigna más fácilmente a lo evitable que a lo inevitable.

Modern political ideologies are false in what they affirm and true in what they deny.

Las ideologias políticas contemporáneas son falsas en lo que afirman y ciertas en lo que niegan.

"I deem of neither reproach nor stain.
I have seen the Saracen host of Spain,
Over plain and valley and mountain spread,
And the regions hidden beneath their tread.
Countless the swarm of the foe, and we
A marvellous little company."
Roland answered him, "All the more
My spirit within me burns therefore.
God and his angels of heaven defend
That France through me from her glory bend.
Death were better than fame laid low.
Our Emperor loveth a downright blow."

Says Oliver: "In this I see no blame;
I have beheld the Sarrazins of Spain;
Covered with them, the mountains and the vales,
The wastes I saw, and all the farthest plains.
A muster great they've made, this people strange;
We have of men a very little tale."
Answers Rollanz: "My anger is inflamed.
Never, please God His Angels and His Saints,
Never by me shall Frankish valour fail!
Rather I'll die than shame shall me attain.
Therefore strike on, the Emperour's love to gain."

Dist Oliver: "D'iço ne sai jo blasme?
Jo ai veüt les Sarrazins d'Espaigne,
Cuverz en sunt li val e les muntaignes
E li lariz e trestutes les plaignes.
Granz sunt les oz de cele gent estrange;
Nus i avum mult petite cumpaigne."
Respunt Rollant: "Mis talenz en est graigne.
Ne placet Damnedeu ne ses angles
Que ja pur mei perdet sa valur France!
Melz voeill murir que huntage me venget.
Pur ben ferir l'emperere plus nos aimet."

I will proceed with my history, telling the story as I go along of small cities no less than of great. Most of those which were great once are small today; and those which in my lifetime have grown to greatness, were small enough in the old days. It makes no odds whether the cities I write of are big or little -- for in this world nobody remains prosperous for long.

My Sorrow, when she's here with me,
Thinks these dark days of autumn rain
Are beautiful as days can be;
She loves the bare, the withered tree;
She walks the sodden pasture lane.

Her pleasure will not let me stay.
She talks and I am fain to list:
She's glad the birds are gone away,
She's glad her simple worsted gray
Is silver now with clinging mist.

The desolate, deserted trees,
The faded earth, the heavy sky,
The beauties she so truly sees,
She thinks I have no eye for these,
And vexes me for reason why.

Not yesterday I learned to know
The love of bare November days
Before the coming of the snow,
But it were vain to tell her so,
And they are better for her praise.

Theirs was a greatness
Got from their grand-sires--
Theirs that so often in
Strife with their enemies
Struck for their hoards and their hearths
and their homes.

It was my intention to extend my study of Pausanias to other aspects of religion than those treated in the present work, but the construction of a huge underground library, called a 'Teaching Library', with collapsible shelves, attended by the demolition of the stacks of the old library, once restricted to graduate students and faculty, the early retirement of almost all the old staff, who had some understanding of the needs of scholarship, due to financial difficulties in the budget, and the removal of all card files and their replacement by a computer system called Gladis, have proved to be a strong deterrent....For the circulation and shelving of books, the operation is entrusted to the inexperienced. The stacks are in disarray. One rarely visits them without finding misplaced books. When books are returned, relocating them presents a problem. Books by Sokolowski, Dodds, Guthrie, Dietrich, and others have been removed presumably for repair, bar-codes, reclassification, or some other reason without any indication on the computer.

I am an unabashed reader of books: all kinds of books -- good books and bad books, well-written and ill-written; books with a purpose, and books whose existence only the nicest sophistry could justify; books created by genius, and books built by talent standing on its head to attract attention; I even read books made to sell. I can and do read at all times and in all places -- standing up, and sitting or lying down; in chair or bed; on trains and 'buses or boats; in houses, gardens, theatres (when the play is dull); at concerts (reading to music is a discovery and not nearly so offensive to the musicians as talking to music); at meals (this is a delight which deserves an essay to itself) -- in short it would not be easy to name time or place inappropriate to the indulgence of this habit; and yet with all its catholicity and its complete indifference to the feelings of others, I can say with that self-satisfaction which comes only to those who admit being addicted to at least one habit which is no use to anyone but themselves that I could never bring myself to anything approaching enjoyment of an intentionally cheerful book. Cheerful books, or shall I say "cheery" books, make me sad: professional optimism reduces me to ashes.

She touched his organ, and from that bright epoch even it, the old companion of his happiest hours, incapable as he had thought of elevation, began a new and deified existence.

It is a weakness of mine--not a sinful one, I hope--that whenever I see any one reading a book in public I am agog to find out what it is. Crossing over to Camden this morning a young woman on the ferry was absorbed in a volume, and I couldn't resist peeping over her shoulder. It was "Hans Brinker." On the same boat were several schoolboys carrying copies of Myers' "History of Greece." Quaint, isn't it, how our schools keep up the same old bunk! What earthly use will a smattering of Greek history be to those boys? Surely to our citizens of the coming generation the battles of the Marne will be more important than the scuffle at Salamis.

A certain young man never knew
Just when to say whom and when who;
  "The question of choosing,"
  He said, "is confusing;
I wonder if which wouldn't do?"

Nothing is so illegitimate
As a noun when his verbs do not fit him; it
  Makes him disturbed
  If not properly verbed--
If he asks for the plural, why git him it!

Lie and lay offer slips to the pen
That have bothered most excellent men:
  You can say that you lay
  In bed--yesterday;
If you do it to-day, you're a hen!

A person we met at a play
Was cruel to pronouns all day:
  She would frequently cry
  "Between you and I,
If only us girls had our way--!"

But unto him that blasphemeth against the Holy Ghost it shall not be forgiven.

1577, from M.Fr. solécisme, from L. soloecismus "mistake in speaking or writing," from Gk. soloikismos "to speak (Greek) incorrectly," from soloikos "ungrammatical utterance," prop. "a speaking like the people of Soloi," from Soloi, Athenian colony in Cilicia, whose dialect the Athenians considered barbarous.

The prospect of my becoming, in such halting fashion as I can, the spokesman of Old Western Culture, alarms me. It may alarm you. I will close with one reassurance and one claim.

First, for the reassurance. I do not think you need fear that the study of a dead period, however prolonged and however sympathetic, need prove an indulgence in nostalgia or an enslavement to the past. In the individual life, as the psychologists have taught us, it is not the remembered but the forgotten past that enslaves us. I think the same is true of society. To study the past does indeed liberate us from the present, from the idols of our own market-place. But I think it liberates us from the past too. I think no class of men are less enslaved to the past than historians. The unhistorical are usually, without knowing it, enslaved to a fairly recent past. Dante read Virgil. Certain other medieval authors evolved the legend of Virgil as a great magician. It was the more recent past, the whole quality of mind evolved during a few preceding centuries, which impelled them to do so. Dante was freer; he also knew more of the past. And you will be no freer by coming to misinterpret Old Western Culture as quickly and deeply as those medievals misinterpreted Classical Antiquity; or even as the Romantics misinterpreted the Middle Ages. Such misinterpretation has already begun. To arrest its growth while arrest is still possible is surely a proper task for a university.

And now for the claim: which sounds arrogant but, I hope, is not really so. I have said that the vast change which separates you from Old Western has been gradual and is not even now complete. Wide as the chasm is, those who are native to different sides of it can still meet; are meeting in this room. This is quite normal at times of great change. The correspondence of Henry More and Descartes is an amusing example; one would think the two men were writing in different centuries. And here comes the rub. I myself belong far more to that Old Western order than to yours. I am going to claim that this, which in one way is a disqualification for my task, is yet in another a qualification. The disqualification is obvious. You don't want to be lectured on Neanderthal Man by a Neanderthaler, still less on dinosaurs by a dinosaur. And yet, is that the whole story? If a live dinosaur dragged its slow length into the laboratory, would we not all look back as we fled? What a chance to know at last how it really moved and looked and smelled and what noises it made! And if the Neanderthaler could talk, then, though his lecturing technique might leave much to be desired, should we not almost certainly learn from him some things about him which the best modem anthropologist could never have told us? He would tell us without knowing he was telling. One thing I know: I would give a great deal to hear any ancient Athenian, even a stupid one, talking about Greek tragedy. He would know in his bones so much that we seek in vain. At any moment some chance phrase might, unknown to him, show us where modem scholarship had been on the wrong track for years. Ladies and gentlemen, I stand before you somewhat as that Athenian might stand. I read as a native texts that you must read as foreigners. You see why I said that the claim was not really arrogant; who can be proud of speaking fluently his mother tongue or knowing his way about his father's house? It is my settled conviction that in order to read Old Western literature aright you must suspend most of the responses and unlearn most of the habits you have acquired in reading modem literature. And because this is the judgement of a native, I claim that, even if the defence of my conviction is weak, the fact of my conviction is a historical datum to which you should give full weight. That way, where I fail as a critic, I may yet be useful as a specimen. I would even dare to go further. Speaking not only for myself but for all other Old Western men whom you may meet, I would say, use your specimens while you can. There are not going to be many more dinosaurs.

Latin was gone entirely, replaced by dull, oppressive, anchorman English, slavishly translated from its sonorous source to be as plain and "direct" as possible. It didn't seem to have occurred to the well-meaning vandals who'd thrown out baby, bath, and bathwater that all ritual is a reaching out to the unknowable and can be accomplished only by the noncognitive: evocation, allusion, metaphor, incantation -- the tools of the poet.

Mass was now said in the language of the region where it was celebrated. Like politics, all Masses were now local -- and had about as much dignity. Before "reform," the individual quirks of the priest -- whether he was a saint or a thug or merely a potato like old Father Bleary -- were submerged beneath the timeless rhythms of a universal script. Now priests had huge discretion in deciding the details of the "modern" Mass, and all those egos were on parade.

At one church I made the mistake of trying, the priest gave a rambling hour-long sermon whose main function, he seemed to feel, was to keep the faithful rolling in the aisles. Several of the utterly irrelevant observations he worked in were lines stolen verbatim from a Letterman monologue earlier in the week. The music was from one of the new Catholic hymnals, which had replaced the august millennial music of the Church with tuneless drivel penned during the seventies and eighties by clerical nonentities whose musical gods were John Denver and Andrew Lloyd Weber. These were accompanied by a sprightly cacophony of guitar, fiddle, and saxophone.

De profundis L.A., clamavo ad te Domine.

[A] book is to a PDF file as sex to pornography. The book is something to hold, not just something to look at.

Fullness of life and power of feeling, ye
Are for the happy, for the souls at ease,
Who dwell on a firm basis of content!—
But he, who has outliv'd his prosperous days,
But he, whose youth fell on a different world
From that on which his exiled age is thrown,
Whose mind was fed on other food, was train'd
By other rules than are in vogue to-day,
Whose habit of thought is fix'd, who will not change,
But in a world he loves not must subsist
In ceaseless opposition, be the guard
Of his own breast, fetter'd to what he guards,
That the world win no mastery over him;
Who has no friend, no fellow left, not one;
Who has no minute's breathing space allow'd
To nurse his dwindling faculty of joy—
Joy and the outward world must die to him,
As they are dead to me!

After the fall of the Roman Empire, manic-depressive patients were thought to be possessed by the devil and had to be restrained and chained. Treatments also included euthanasia, exotic potions, bloodletting, and electric eels applied to the skull.

Scoff if you will at the ancient Romans who made patients with brain disorders swim with electric eels.

A, not true. B, I’m not going to comment on the kind of, I think, low, guttural politics that's going on over and over in this state, and I think the ad that was talked about was just symptomatic of that.

1280, Anglo-Norman gotere, from O.Fr. guitere, from goute "a drop," from L. gutta. Originally "a watercourse," later "furrow made by running water" (1586). Meaning "trough under the eaves of a roof to carry off rainwater" is from 1354. Figurative sense of "low, profane" is from 1818.

1594, from M.Fr. guttural, from L. guttur "throat."

Every person with "ideals" is a potential assassin.

Todo individuo con "ideales" es un asesino potencial.

Progress has difficulty breathing on Parnassus.

El Progreso respira mal en el Parnaso.

The unbeliever imagines that religion pretends to offer answers, while the believer knows that the only promise it makes is to multiply questions.

El incrédulo se imagina que la religión pretende dar soluciones, mientras que el creyente sabe que sólo promete multiplicar enigmas.

• Århus, Denmark
  
• Paris, France

n. [AS. wan, won, deficient, wanting + hopa hope: cf. D. wanhoop. See Wane, and Hope.] Want of hope; despair; also, faint or delusive hope; delusion. [Obs.] Piers Plowman. "Wanhope and distress." Chaucer.

La literatura contemporánea parece una algarabía de eunucos en celo.

And to Adam the church service was the best channel he could have found for his mingled regret, yearning, and resignation; its interchange of beseeching cries for help with outbursts of faith and praise -- its recurrent responses and the familiar rhythm of its collects, seemed to speak for him as no other form of worship could have done.

1. Quot homines, tot sententiae. (Terence, Phormio 454)
   
2. Quot capita, tot sententiae.
   
3. Tot capita, tot sententiae.

Whoever three hundred years ago wished to acquaint himself with philosophic, poetic, or eloquent expression of the best that was known, was compelled to seek for it in the Greek and Latin authors; but now Greek and Latin are accomplishments chiefly, and a classical scholar, if unacquainted with modern science and literature, is hopelessly ignorant. "If any one," said Hegius, the teacher of Erasmus, "wishes to learn grammar, rhetoric, mathematics, history, or holy scripture, let him read Greek;" and in his day this was as true as it is false and absurd in our own. ln the Middle Ages, Latin was made the groundwork of the educational system, not on account of any special value it may have been supposed to possess as a mental discipline, but because it was the language of the learned, of all who spoke or wrote on questions of religion, philosophy, literature, and science; but now, who that is able to think dreams of burying his thought in a Greek or Roman urn?

• The Expense of Spirit
  
• Wrapping Islam in Europe's Mantle
  
• Tell the Truth about the Lozells Riots
  
• Holmes & His Commentators

According to reports, only one synod participant spoke Latin every time he took the microphone: Latvian Cardinal Janis Pujats, the Archbishop of Riga. He did the same at the previous synod in 2001, when a disconsolate Pope John Paul II commented: "Paupera lingua latina, ultimum refugium habet in Riga" (Poor Latin, it has its last refuge in Riga).

fem. paupera, Plaut. Fragm. ap. Serv. Verg. A. 12, 519, called obsolete by Varr. L.L. 8, § 77 Müll.

praeterea si dicerentur similiter, cum similia essent macer tener et macerrimus tenerrimus, non discreparet in his macrior tenerior, neque alia trisyllaba alia quadrisyllaba fierent; et si in his dominaretur similitudo, diceremus ut candidissimus candidissima, pauperrumus pauperrima, sic candidus candida, pauper paupera; et ut dicimus doctus docta, doctissimus doctissima, sic diceremus frugalissumus frugalissima, frugalus et frugala.

'hic' et 'haec pauper' dicimus: nam 'paupera' usurpatum est. sic Plautus paupera est haec mulier. sed hoc hodie non utimur.

Wherefore I have scorned to observe all art of style, in which pupils are drilled in schools of the outer [i.e., lower] training. For, as the tenor of the present letter makes evident, I shun not the collision of m's; I avoid not the disorder of barbarisms; I despise a conformity to constructions and moods and cases of prepositions. For I deem it exceedingly inept to fetter the words of the Heavenly Oracle to the rules of Donatus.

Unde et ipsam loquendi artem, quam magisteria disciplinae exterioris insinuant, servare despexi. Nam sicut hujus quoque epistolae tenor enuntiat, non metacismi collisionem fugio, non barbarismi confusionem devito, situs motusque et praepositionum casus servare contemno, quia indignum vehementer existimo, ut verba coelestis oraculi restringam sub regulis Donati.

It is well known that great scholars who have shown the most pitiless acerbity in their criticism of other men's scholarship have yet been of a relenting and indulgent temper in private life; and I have heard of a learned man meekly rocking the twins in the cradle with his left hand, while with his right he inflicted the most lacerating sarcasms on an opponent who had betrayed a brutal ignorance of Hebrew. Weaknesses and errors must be forgiven--alas! they are not alien to us--but the man who takes the wrong side on the momentous subject of the Hebrew points must be treated as the enemy of his race.

I have seen her drawing stars from the sky. Her spells turn the course of the hurrying stream. Her chaunting cleaves the ground, lures the spirit from its tomb, and down from the warm pyre summons the bony frame. Now with magic shrillings she keeps the troops of the grave before her; now she sprinkles them with milk and commands them to retreat. At will she chases the clouds from the frowning heavens; at will she musters the snow in the summer skies. Only she, men say, holds the secret of Medea's deadly herbs, only she has tamed the wild hounds of Hecate.

hanc ego de caelo ducentem sidera vidi,
  fluminis haec rapidi carmine vertit iter,
haec cantu finditque solum Manesque sepulcris
  elicit et tepido devocat ossa rogo;
iam tenet infernas magico stridore catervas,
  iam iubet adspersas lacte referre pedem.
cum libet, haec tristi depellit nubila caelo,
  cum libet, aestivo convocat orbe nives.
sola tenere malas Medeae dicitur herbas,
  sola feros Hecates perdomuisse canes.

1. Homer, Odyssey 11
   
2. Aeschylus, Persae (the ghost of Darius)
   
3. Laberius, Necyomantia (lost)
   
4. Lucan 6.419-830 (the ghost of Pompey)
   
5. 1 Samuel 28.7 (the witch of Endor)
   
6. Shakespeare, Macbeth 4.1

1. Cicero, Against Vatinius 6.14
   
2. Tacitus, Annals 2.28
   
3. Suetonius, Life of Nero 34.4
   
4. Herodian 4.12.3
   
5. Ammianus Marcellinus 29.2.17

And since the beginnings of all great things are derived from the gods, I wish you to answer me,--you, who are accustomed to call yourself a Pythagorean, and to put forth the name of a most learned man as a screen to bide your own savage and barbarian habits,--what depravity of intellect possessed you, what excessive frenzy seized on you, and made you, when you had begun your unheard-of and impious sacrifices, accustomed as you are to seek to evoke the spirits of the shades below, and to appease the Dî Manes with the entrails of murdered boys, despise the auspices under which this city was founded, by which the whole of this republic and empire is kept together, and, at the very beginning of your tribuneship, give notice to the senate that the responses of the augurs and the arrogance of that college should be no obstacle to your proceedings?

et quoniam omnium rerum magnarum ab dis immortalibus principia ducuntur, volo ut mihi respondeas tu, qui te Pythagoreum soles dicere et hominis doctissimi nomen tuis immanibus et barbaris moribus praetendere, quae te tanta pravitas mentis tenuerit, qui tantus furor ut, cum inaudita ac nefaria sacra susceperis, cum inferorum animas elicere, cum puerorum extis deos manis mactare soleas, auspicia quibus haec urbs condita est, quibus omnis res publica atque imperium tenetur, contempseris, initioque tribunatus tui senatui denuntiaris tuis actionibus augurum responsa atque eius conlegi adrogantiam impedimento non futura?

He walked on awhile in silence before he recommenced his attack, during which Mr Harding, who had still the bow in his hand, played rapidly on an imaginary violoncello.

The warden still looked mutely in his face, making the slightest possible passes with an imaginary fiddle bow, and stopping, as he did so, sundry imaginary strings with the fingers of his other hand. 'Twas his constant consolation in conversational troubles. While these vexed him sorely, the passes would be short and slow, and the upper hand would not be seen to work; nay, the strings on which it operated would sometimes lie concealed in the musician's pocket, and the instrument on which he played would be beneath his chair;--but as his spirit warmed to the subject,--as his trusting heart looking to the bottom of that which vexed him, would see its clear way out,--he would rise to a higher melody, sweep the unseen strings with a bolder hand, and swiftly fingering the cords from his neck, down along his waistcoat, and up again to his very ear, create an ecstatic strain of perfect music, audible to himself and to St Cecilia, and not without effect.

Mr Harding, seated in his chair, began to play a slow tune on an imaginary violoncello.

"Nay, my dear sir," continued the attorney-general, "there is no further ground for any question; I don't see that you have the power of raising it."

"I can resign," said Mr Harding, slowly playing away with his right hand, as though the bow were beneath the chair in which he was sitting.

"What! throw it up altogether?" said the attorney-general, gazing with utter astonishment at his client.

....

And, as he finished what he had to say, he played up such a tune as never before had graced the chambers of any attorney-general. He was standing up, gallantly fronting Sir Abraham, and his right arm passed with bold and rapid sweeps before him, as though he were embracing some huge instrument, which allowed him to stand thus erect; and with the fingers of his left hand he stopped, with preternatural velocity, a multitude of strings, which ranged from the top of his collar to the bottom of the lappet of his coat. Sir Abraham listened and looked in wonder. As he had never before seen Mr Harding, the meaning of these wild gesticulations was lost upon him; but he perceived that the gentleman who had a few minutes since been so subdued as to be unable to speak without hesitation, was now impassioned,--nay, almost violent.

There are many people who reach their conclusions about life like schoolboys; they cheat their master by copying the answer out of a book without having worked out the sum for themselves.

I learnt from him the meaning of fatherly love and so was given some idea of divine fatherly love, the one unshakable thing in life, the true archimedean point.

And so went off the warden's party, and men and women arranging shawls and shoes declared how pleasant it had been; and Mrs Goodenough, the red-faced rector's wife, pressing the warden's hand, declared she had never enjoyed herself better; which showed how little pleasure she allowed herself in this world, as she had sat the whole evening through in the same chair without occupation, not speaking, and unspoken to.

Shittard,
Squittard,
Crackard,
Turdous,
Thy bung
Hath flung
Some dung
On us.
Filthard,
Cackard,
Stinkard,
May you burn with St Anthony's fire
If all
Your foul
Arseholes
Are not well wiped ere you retire.

Chiart,
Foirart,
Petart,
Brenous,
Ton lard
Chappart
S'espart
Sus nous.
Hordous,
Merdous,
Esgous,
Le feu de sainct Antoine te ard!
Sy tous
Tes trous
Esclous
Tu ne torche avant ton depart!

"Now, you see, you don't do this thing a bit better than you did a fortnight ago, and I'll tell you what's the reason. You want to learn accounts--that's well and good. But you think all you need do to learn accounts is to come to me and do sums for an hour or so, two or three times a-week; and no sooner do you get your caps on and turn out of doors again than you sweep the whole thing clean out of your mind. You go whistling about, and take no more care what you're thinking of than if your heads were gutters for any rubbish to swill through that happened to be in the way; and if you get a good notion in 'em, it's pretty soon washed out again.

You think knowledge is to be got cheap--you'll come and pay Bartle Massey sixpence a-week, and he'll make you clever at figures without your taking any trouble. But knowledge isn't to be got with paying sixpence, let me tell you. If you're to know figures, you must turn 'em over in your heads and keep your thoughts fixed on 'em. There's nothing you can't turn into a sum, for there's nothing but what's got number in it--even a fool. You may say to yourselves, 'I'm one fool, and Jack's another; if my fool's head weighed four pound, and Jack's three pound three ounces and three quarters, how many pennyweights heavier would my head be than Jack's?' A man that had got his heart in learning figures would make sums for himself and work 'em in his head. When he sat at his shoemaking, he'd count his stitches by fives, and then put a price on his stitches, say half a farthing, and then see how much money he could get in an hour; and then ask himself how much money he'd get in a day at that rate; and then how much ten workmen would get working three, or twenty, or a hundred years at that rate--and all the while his needle would be going just as fast as if he left his head empty for the devil to dance in.

But the long and the short of it is--I'll have nobody in my night-school that doesn't strive to learn what he comes to learn, as hard as if he was striving to get out of a dark hole into broad daylight. I'll send no man away because he's stupid: if Billy Taft, the idiot, wanted to learn anything, I'd not refuse to teach him. But I'll not throw away good knowledge on people who think they can get it by the sixpenn'orth, and carry it away with 'em as they would an ounce of snuff. So never come to me again, if you can't show that you've been working with your own heads, instead of thinking that you can pay for mine to work for you. That's the last word I've got to say to you."

I knew that "venison" and "veneration" come from a common root, but this is still an awful lot of baggage to lay on one deer.

8. Suffixed form *wen-es- in: a. Latin venus, love: VENERATE, VENEREAL, VENERY¹, VENUS.

11. Lengthened-grade form *wēn-ā- in Latin vēnārī, to hunt: VENATIC, VENERY², VENISON.

The hubris of it is staggering, but they hardly seem serious enough souls to deserve such a weighty word, guilty at worst of a dopey arrogance we might call boobris.

It is a fine thing to partake of philosophy just for the sake of education, and it is no disgrace for a lad to follow it: but when a man already advancing in years continues in its pursuit, the affair, Socrates, becomes ridiculous; and for my part I have much the same feeling towards students of philosophy as towards those who lisp or play tricks. For when I see a little child, to whom it is still natural to talk in that way, lisping or playing some trick, I enjoy it, and it strikes me as pretty and ingenuous and suitable to the infant's age; whereas if I hear a small child talk distinctly, I find it a disagreeable thing, and it offends my ears and seems to me more befitting a slave. But when one hears a grown man lisp, or sees him play tricks, it strikes one as something ridiculous and unmanly, that deserves a whipping. Just the same, then, is my feeling towards the followers of philosophy. For when I see philosophy in a young lad I approve of it; I consider it suitable, and I regard him as a person of liberal mind: whereas one who does not follow it I account illiberal and never likely to expect of himself any fine or generous action. But when I see an elderly man still going on with philosophy and not getting rid of it, that is the gentleman, Socrates, whom I think in need of a whipping.

It is not easy for people to define to each other the matters which they take in hand to discuss, and to make such exchange of instruction as will fairly bring their debate to an end: no, if they find that some point is in dispute between them, and one of them says that the other is speaking incorrectly or obscurely, they are annoyed and think the remark comes from jealousy of themselves, and in a spirit of contention rather than of inquiry into the matter proposed for discussion. In some cases, indeed, they end by making a most disgraceful scene, with such abusive expressions on each side that the rest of the company are vexed on their own account that they allowed themselves to listen to such fellows.

Of what sort am I? One of those who would be glad to be refuted if I say anything untrue, and glad to refute anyone else who might speak untruly; but just as glad, mind you, to be refuted as to refute, since I regard the former as the greater benefit, in proportion as it is a greater benefit for oneself to be delivered from the greatest evil than to deliver some one else. For I consider that a man cannot suffer any evil so great as a false opinion on the subjects of our actual argument.

• The Meaning of Beheading
  
• So That's the Reason
  
• Why the Baroque is Superior to Rock
  

A humpbacked camel was crossing a swiftly flowing river when he defecated. Seeing that the dung was floating ahead of him, he said: "Truly, I'm in a bad way; what ought to be behind me is now going in front." [A state in which the worst citizens are in power, instead of the best, might tell this story of Aesop's.]

Διέβαινε ποταμὸν ὀξὺν ὄντα τῷ ῥείθρῳ
κυρτὴ κάμηλος, εἶτ' ἔχεζε. τοῦ δ' ὄνθου
φθάνοντος αὐτὴν εἶπεν "ἦ κακῶς πράσσω·
ἔμπροσθεν ἤδη τἀξόπισθέ μου βαίνει."
[Πόλις ἄν τις εἴποι τὸν λόγον τὸν Αἰσώπου,
ἧς ἔσχατοι κρατοῦσιν ἀντὶ τῶν πρώτων.]

Learning that flowered in days of yore
In these our times is thought a bore.
Once knowledge was a well to drink of;
Now having fun is all men think of.
Today mere striplings grow astute
Before their beards begin to shoot --
Striplings whose truant dispositions
Are deaf to wisdom's admonitions.
Yet it was true in ages past
No scholar paused from toil at last
Nor shrunk from studies the most weighty
Till his years numbered more than eighty.

Florebat olim studium,
nunc vertitur in tedium;
iam scire diu viguit,
sed ludere prevaluit.
iam pueris astutia
contingit ante tempora,
qui per malivolentiam
excludunt sapientiam.
sed retro actis seculis
vix licuit discipulis
tandem nonagenarium
quiescere post studium.

'But why don't you explain? What's your object?'

'To destroy everything. No more nations, no more government, no more property, no more God or religion.'

'Yes, I gather that. Only where is it going to lead you?'

'To the primitive and formless community, to a new world, a fresh start.'

'And how are you going to carry it out? How do you propose to set about it?'

'By fire, poison, and the dagger. The real hero is the murderer, for he is the avenger of the people, the revolutionary in action, not someone just trotting out phrases out of books. We must have a series of appalling cataclysms to horrify the rulers and awaken the people.'

....

'Tell me what your programme is? We want to know where we are going.'

Then Souvarine, gazing with misty eyes into space, peacefully concluded:

'Any reasoning about the future is criminal, for it prevents pure destruction and holds up the march of the revolution.'

(a) Frozen concentrate for lemonade is the frozen food prepared from one or both of the lemon juice ingredients specified in paragraph (b) of this section together with one or any mixture of safe and suitable nutritive carbohydrate sweeteners. The product contains not less than 48.0 percent by weight of soluble solids taken as the sucrose value determined by refractometer and corrected for acidity prescribed in "Official Methods of Analysis of the Association of Official Analytical Chemists," 13th Ed. (1980), section 22.025, "Frozen Concentrate for Lemonade (12)," under the heading "Soluble Solids by Refractometer--Official First Action," which is incorporated by reference. Copies may be obtained from the Association of Official Analytical Chemists International, 481 North Frederick Ave., suite 500, Gaithersburg, MD 20877-2504, or may be examined at the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA). For information on the availability of this material at NARA, call 202-741-6030, or go to: http://www.archives.gov/federal--register/code--of--federal--regulations/ibr--locations.html When the product is diluted according to directions for making lemonade which shall appear on the label, the acidity of the lemonade, calculated as anhydrous citric acid, shall be not less than 0.70 gram per 100 milliliters, and the soluble solids, measured as described for the concentrate, shall be not less than 10.5 percent by weight.

(b) The lemon juice ingredients referred to in paragraph (a) of this section are:

(1) Lemon juice or frozen lemon juice or a mixture of these.
(2) Concentrated lemon juice or frozen concentrated lemon juice or a mixture of these.

For the purposes of this section, lemon juice is the undiluted juice expressed from mature lemons of an acid variety; and concentrated lemon juice is lemon juice from which part of the water has been removed. In the preparation of the lemon juice ingredients, the lemon oil content may be adjusted by the addition of lemon oil or concentrated lemon oil in accordance with good manufacturing practice, and the lemon pulp in the juice as expressed may be left in the juice or may be separated. Lemon pulp that has been separated, which may have been preserved by freezing, may be added in preparing frozen concentrate for lemonade, provided that the amount of pulp added does not raise the proportion of pulp in the finished food to a level in excess of that which would be present by using lemon juice ingredients from which pulp has not been separated. The lemon juice ingredients may be treated by heat, either before or after the other ingredients are added, to reduce the enzymatic activity and the number of viable microorganisms.

(c) Label declaration. Each of the ingredients used in the food shall be declared on the label as required by the applicable sections of parts 101 and 130 of this chapter.

I hate this age of scribblers, when I can pick up my Plutarch and read of great men.

Mir ekelt vor diesem Tinten klecksendem Säculum, wenn ich in meinem Plutarch lese von großen Menschen.

This ink-stained generation makes me sick, whenever I read about great men in my Plutarch.

"What signifies," says some one, "giving halfpence to common beggars? they only lay it out in gin or tobacco." "And why should they be denied such sweeteners of their existence?" says Johnson; "it is surely very savage to refuse them every possible avenue to pleasure, reckoned too coarse for our own acceptance. Life is a pill which none of us can bear to swallow without gilding; yet for the poor we delight in stripping it still barer, and are not ashamed to show even visible displeasure if ever the bitter taste is taken from their mouths."

The sometimes introductory and sometimes parenthetical "sir" Boswell no doubt consciously established as the Johnsonian trademark by seeing to it that it occurred somewhere in most of the reported remarks, especially those of the knock-down-and-drag-out variety. But the vocable is not a mere meaningless syllable. It served Johnson only somewhat more conspicuously than it served eighteenth-century conversation in general by enabling him to speak freely without degenerating into insult. "Sir" used as an introduction to a vigorous attack means: "I acknowledge that this is a civilized gathering and that we are all ladies and gentlemen. In general, you have a claim to be treated with respect and the claim I hereby acknowledge. But you will grant me the privilege, which one gentleman grants another, of speaking frankly." To have lost, as we have, the use of such formulae is to make conversation that is at once full-blooded and civilized more difficult. It makes it harder to escape from merely vapid amiability without falling into what looks like mere rudeness.

Whoever desires to found a state and give it laws, must start by assuming that all men are bad and ever ready to display their vicious nature, whenever they may find occasion for it. If their evil disposition remains concealed for a time, it must be attributed to some unknown reason; and we must assume that it lacked occasion to show itself; but time, which has been said to be the father of all truth, does not fail to bring it to light .... Men act right only upon compulsion; but from the moment that they have the option and liberty to commit wrong with impunity, then they never fail to carry confusion and disorder everywhere.

• Vergil, Eclogue 4
  
• Propertius 3.10
  
• Horace, Odes 4.11
  
• Tibullan Corpus 2.2, 3.11, 3.12
  
• Ovid, Tristia 3.13, 5.5
  
• Persius 2
  
• Statius, Silvae 2.7
  
• Martial 7.21, 7.22, 7.23, 7.86, 8.64, 9.52, 9.53, 10.24, 10.27, 11.65, 12.60, 12.67
  
• Ausonius, Idylls 5

Though he was an academic the greatest part of his life, yet he contracted no sourness of temper, no spice of pedantry, no itch of disputation, or obstinate contention for the old or new philosophy, no assuming way of dictating to others, which are faults (though excusable) which some are insensibly led into who are constrained to dwell long within the walls of a private college.

Keep out, che vore ye, or Ise try whether your costard or my ballow be the harder.

Keep out, I warn you, or I'll test which is harder, your head or my baseball bat.

Found first after 1660. According to Skinner 1671 'vox academica', i.e. a term of university or college slang. No connexion with crone has been traced.

Jack Cole, my old school-fellow..who was a great chrony of mine.

In the sense 'old ewe' the word appears to be related to early mod.Du. kronje, karonje, 'adasia, ouis vetula, rejecula' (Kilian), believed to be the same word as karonje, kronje, MDu. caroonje, croonje carcass, a. NFr. carogne carcass: see CARRION. As applied to a woman, it may be an Eng. transferred application of 'old ewe' (though the evidence for the latter does not yet carry it back so early); but it was more probably taken directly from ONF. carogne (Picard carone, Walloon coronie) 'a cantankerous or mischievous woman’, cited by Littré from 14th c. App. rare in the 18th c., till revived by Southey, Scott, and their contemporaries.

It was Plutarch, you know, and nothing intrinsically American that prevented George Washington being a King.

---

And I found Langhorne's "Plutarch" too, I remember, on those shelves. It seems queer to me now to think that I acquired pride and self-respect, the idea of a state and the germ of public spirit, in such a furtive fashion; queer, too, that it should rest with an old Greek, dead these eighteen hundred years to teach that.

On Friday, May 7, I breakfasted with him at Mr. Thrale's in the Borough. While we were alone, I endeavoured as well as I could to apologise for a lady who had been divorced from her husband by act of Parliament. I said, that he had used her very ill, had behaved brutally to her, and that she could not continue to live with him without having her delicacy contaminated; that all affection for him was thus destroyed; that the essence of conjugal union being gone, there remained only a cold form, a mere civil obligation; that she was in the prime of life, with qualities to produce happiness; that these ought not to be lost; and, that the gentleman on whose account she was divorced had gained her heart while thus unhappily situated. Seduced, perhaps, by the charms of the lady in question, I thus attempted to palliate what I was sensible could not be justified; for when I had finished my harangue, my venerable friend gave me a proper check: 'My dear Sir, never accustom your mind to mingle virtue and vice. The woman's a whore, and there's an end on't.'

Poor Tom, that eats the swimming frog, the toad, the todpole, the wall-newt and the water; that in the fury of his heart, when the foul fiend rages, eats cow-dung for sallets, swallows the old rat and the ditch-dog, drinks the green mantle of the standing pool; who is whipp'd from tithing to tithing, and stock-punish'd and imprison'd; who hath had three suits to his back, six shirts to his body,
            Horse to ride, and weapons to wear;
            But mice and rats, and such small deer,
            Have been Tom's food for seven long year.

Some persons were driven to that terrible distress as to search the common sewers and old dunghills of cattle, and to eat the dung which they got there; and what they of old could not endure so much as to see they now used for food.

The humor of the young bourgeoisie males of Baltimore, in those days, was predominantly skatological, and there was no sign of the revolting sexual obsession that Freudians talk of. The favorite jocosities had to do with horse apples, O.E.A. wagons and small boys who lost control of their sphincters at parties or in Sunday school; when we began to spend our summers in the country my brother and I also learned the comic possibilities of cow flops. Even in the city a popular ginger-and-cocoanut cake, round in contour and selling for a cent, was called a cow flop, and little girls were supposed to avoid it, at least in the presence of boys.

And there was a great famine in Samaria: and, behold, they besieged it, until an ass's head was sold for fourscore pieces of silver, and the fourth part of a cab of dove's dung for five pieces of silver.

1. A crone. [Obs.]
2. An intimate companion; a familiar friend. [Colloq.]

c.1386, from Anglo-Fr. carogne, from O.N.Fr., term of abuse for a cantankerous or withered woman, lit. "carrion," from V.L. *caronia.

This country least, but every inhabited country
Is clotted with human anguish.
Remember that at your feasts.

And this is no new thing but from time out of mind,
No transient thing, but exactly
Conterminous with human life.

Praise life, it deserves praise, but the praise of life
That forgets the pain is a pebble
Rattled in a dry gourd.

Johnson's melancholy nature supplied him with sick fancies which, it is not unreasonable to suppose, might have appeared, in print, as novel as those of Rousseau or even Baudelaire. But like most of his contemporaries, it would never have occurred to him to regard them as suitable subjects for poetry. Of some he relieved himself through the prayers and meditations which it became his habit to write, but he would no more have published verses about them than he would have exhibited his physical peculiarities on a platform at Smithfield Fair.

Odi et amo. quare id faciam, fortasse requiris.
  nescio, sed fieri sentio et excrucior.

I hate and love. Why I do so, perhaps you ask. I know not, but I feel it, and I am in torment.

Cultivate the habit of early rising. It is unwise to keep the head long on a level with the feet.

Cold and hunger seem more friendly to my nature than those methods which men have adopted and advise to ward them off. If it were not that I desire to do something here, -- accomplish some work, -- I should certainly prefer to suffer and die rather than be at the pains to get a living by the modes men propose.

Aeternum stagno, dixit, vivatis in isto--

There was Cassandra, whom Apollo loved,
To whom, for promised love, he made a gift,--
Always to prophesy truly:
And for her promise broken, another token--
Never to be believed,

And then there are those men
Who never loved Apollo, nor he them,
Descended from the Lycian ancestors
Who made the water muddy for Latona,
And for their churlishness were turned to frogs
Forever in that marsh.

                            Brek-ek-ek-ex,
Co-ax, Co-ax! Oho, Batrachians,
Isn't it fun to bubble in the puddles?

Always to prophesy falsely;
Always to seem, at least, to be believed.

CA. It was the seer Apollo who appointed me to this office.
CH. Can it be that he, a god, was smitten with desire?
CA. Ere now I was ashamed to speak of this.
CH. Aye, in prosperity we all grow over nice.
CA. Oh, but he struggled to win me, breathing ardent love for me.
CH. Came ye in due course to wedlock's rite?
CA. I promised consent to Loxias but broke my word.
CH. Wert thou already possessed by the art inspired of the god?
CA. Already I prophesied to my countrymen all their disasters.
CH. How came it then that thou wert unscathed by Loxias' wrath?
CA. Ever since that fault I could persuade no one of aught.

As he spoke he began stripping the spoils from the son of Paeon, but Alexandrus husband of lovely Helen aimed an arrow at him, leaning against a pillar of the monument which men had raised to Ilus son of Dardanus, a ruler in days of old. Diomed had taken the cuirass from off the breast of Agastrophus, his heavy helmet also, and the shield from off his shoulders, when Paris drew his bow and let fly an arrow that sped not from his hand in vain, but pierced the flat of Diomed's right foot, going right through it and fixing itself in the ground. Thereon Paris with a hearty laugh sprang forward from his hiding-place, and taunted him saying, "You are wounded - my arrow has not been shot in vain; would that it had hit you in the belly and killed you, for thus the Trojans, who fear you as goats fear a lion, would have had a truce from evil."

Diomed all undaunted answered, "Archer, you who without your bow are nothing, slanderer and seducer, if you were to be tried in single combat fighting in full armour, your bow and your arrows would serve you in little stead. Vain is your boast in that you have scratched the sole of my foot. I care no more than if a girl or some silly boy had hit me. A worthless coward can inflict but a light wound; when I wound a man though I but graze his skin it is another matter, for my weapon will lay him low. His wife will tear her cheeks for grief and his children will be fatherless: there will he rot, reddening the earth with his blood, and vultures, not women, will gather round him."

MENELAUS. The bowman seems to feel no little grandeur.
TEUCER. I do, since it is no lowly skill that I possess.
MENELAUS. How you would boast, if you had a shield!
TEUCER. Even without a shield I would be a match for you fully armed.

Is it for this then that Heracles' children should be spared? a man who has won a reputation for valour in his contests with beasts, in all else a weakling; who ne'er buckled shield to arm nor faced the spear, but with a bow, that coward's weapon, was ever ready to run away. Archery is no test of manly bravery; no! he is a man who keeps his post in the ranks and steadily faces the swift wound the spear may plough.