Laudator Temporis Acti

John Stuart Blackie, Notes of a Life (Edinburgh: William Blackwood and Sons, 1910), pp. 19-22:

Of Dr Mearns' learning, in the technical sense of the word, I can, however, say nothing, but so far as Greek and Latin were concerned, my other theological instructor, Dr Laurence Brown, was a man, most unquestionably, rigged out classically in a style of which our Scottish Divinity Halls have still too few examples. Dr Brown had been educated in Holland, and acquired there that familiar habit of thinking and speaking in elegant Latin which the perverse pedantic methods stereotyped in the great English schools render it so difficult even now for the best English scholars to attain. Dr Brown's example acted as a useful spur to me in carrying on that course of Greek and Latin reading, without which no thorough theological training is possible. Every student in those days, and I believe still, had to compose a theological discourse in the Latin language, and this is done by the Divinity student bonâ fide, not pro forma only through a grinder, as used to be the case with young advocates and medical men in Edinburgh. Being a born enemy of all hollow work, I, of course, worked up my Latin so high as to make a very respectable appearance in this exercise, and not only so, but I ventured on speaking Latin publicly, with some measure of success, which made me a sort of marked man in that department. As I have always maintained, and see more clearly every day, that the English and Scottish schoolmasters and professors make a great mistake in dropping the old element of conversation and free speaking out of their method of teaching the learned languages, I will mention here how it was that I acquired that habit myself. Dr Brown, as I said, could think and speak Latin quite as readily as English, and had the habit of always criticising in Latin the Latin discourses delivered by the students. He had the habit also of insisting that no criticism should be made on the Latin exercise of any student except in the Latin language. The consequence of this was that no criticism was ever given on Latin discourses at all, except by the Professor. To me this appeared rather a cowardly and inglorious procedure, so I determined, when a convenient opportunity should arise, to redeem the honour of the class from this blot. One day the usual appeal was made by the Professor, "Tam vero, si quis habet quae de hac oratione dicat, in medium proferat!" whereupon I rose up and began to make some observations in English, but the old Doctor, immediately striking his hand emphatically on the table, said, " At hoc non fas est, domine; quae Latine scripta, ea et Latine judicanda sunt," an observation for which I was perfectly prepared, and came out at once with a few sentences of well-worded Ciceronian Latin, which elicited the admiration of the venerable old divine, and made me a notable man, even among Aberdeen Latinists. This habit of thinking and speaking readily in Latin I have never since lost, and have also applied the same method of learning to all languages whatsoever; for I have not the slightest doubt of its being the only rational and philosophical method: a method at once the most natural, and, if properly managed, the most easy and the most accurate. I do not think I fell upon this method merely from the Doctor's example; it must have had its root in the plastic activity of my own mind, which always leads me to adopt a method of proceeding in everything, acting from within outwards. The mere receptive operation of reading I instinctively converted into a gymnastic of thinking and speaking: and I remember distinctly that, after reading several chapters of my favourite author Cicero, I used to spout his phrases, and form them on the spot into new sentences of my own, which, to fix them more vividly in my mind, I scrawled out upon the broad white wooden mantelpiece of the room where I studied. These things I have set down minutely for the benefit of those who may imagine that there is a peculiar organ or faculty by which languages are acquired. I believe there is no such thing. All that is necessary to acquire one, or two, or half a dozen languages, is only common-sense, favourable circumstances, a fair amount of mental activity, and a natural pleasure in utterance.

Hat tip: Ian Jackson.

Aesop, Fable 125 Chambry (tr. Laura Gibbs, with her note):

Zeus invited all the animals to his wedding. The tortoise alone was absent, and Zeus did not know why, so he asked the tortoise her reason for not having come to the feast. The tortoise said, 'Be it ever so humble, there's no place like home.' Zeus got angry at the tortoise and ordered her to carry her house with her wherever she went.

The fable shows that people often prefer to live simply at home than to live lavishly at someone else's house.

Note: The Greek maxim pronounced by the tortoise can be translated literally as 'home is dear, home is best,' oikos philos, oikos aristos.

Ζεὺς γαμῶν πάντα τὰ ζῷα εἱστία. Μόνης δὲ χελώνης ὑστερησάσης, διαπορῶν τὴν αἰτίαν, τῇ ὑστεραίᾳ ἐπυνθάνετο αὐτῆς διὰ τά μόνη ἐπὶ τὸ δεῖπνον οὐκ ἦλθε. Τῆς δὲ εἰπούσης· Οἶκος φίλος, οἶκος ἄριστος, ἀγανακτήσας κατ' αὐτῆς παρεσκεύασεν αὐτὴν τὸν οἶκον αὐτὸν βαστάζουσαν περιφέρειν. Οὕτω πολλοὶ τῶν ἀνθρώπων αἱροῦνται μᾶλλον λιτῶς οἰκεῖν ἢ παρ' ἄλλοις πολυτελῶς διαιτᾶσθαι.

A case could be made for translating φίλος here as "one's own" (Liddell & Scott, s.v., sense I.2.c), i.e. "one's own home is [the] best home." Note the medieval Latin version (Hans Walther, Proverbia Sententiaeque Latinitatis Medii Aevi #6259)—Domus propria, domus optima.

Eric Thomson sent me a photocopy of Renzo Tosi, Dicionário de Sentenças Latinas e Gregas, tr. Ivone Castilho Benedetti (São Paulo: Martins Fontes, 1996), pp. 487-488 (#1047 = Οἶκος φίλος, οἶκος ἄριστος), in which the Portuguese translation of the proverb is "Casa nossa, casa ótima."

On the other hand, another Latin version is Domus amica, domus optima, which is the translation adopted by Erasmus. See The Adages of Erasmus, selected by William Barker (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2001), pp. 268-270 (III iii 38, on Οἶκος φίλος οἶκος ἄριστος, tr. R.A.B. Mynors, footnotes omitted):

A loved home is always the best home. Nowhere can a lucky man live in more convenience, more freedom, and more comfort than at home. Some people with humorous distortion apply this to the tortoise, of which the following tale is told. Jupiter once invited animals of all kinds to attend his wedding, and all the others came, but not the tortoise. He was much surprised, and when she turned up (which was not until the feast was over), he asked her what the reason was for the delay. And she replied 'A loved home is the best home.' Jupiter was angry, and gave orders that wherever she went in future, she should carry her home about with her. Hence the tortoise is described in the second book of his On Divination, with deliberate and humorous obscurity, as 'Earth's tardigrade, home-carrying. bloodless creature.' (For we must, I take it, read terrae, earth's, for terrigenam, earth-born).

Besides which, the privacy of home has the support of the civil law. This Gaius in the Pandects, book 4, title De in jus vocando: 'It has been commonly held that no man may be summoned to court from his own home, because each man's home is his safest refuge and place of resort, and he therefore who should summon him to court from his home was thought to commit a violent assault.' Similarly Paulus in Book I, title De regulis juris. Cicero alludes to the fable in one of his letters, writing to Dolabella: 'This place is pretty, or at any rate remote, and if you have something to write, free from interruption. But somehow, "a loved home," you know.' This corresponds with one I have placed elsewhere: 'He for whom all goes well should stay at home,' for to him alone a loved home is the best home. Otherwise, to the man whose home contains a quarrelsome wife and nothing to eat, home is a prison. On the other hand, Plutarch has a word for this idle sort of man who is happy indoors and in the shade, and loves to be always sitting motionless at home. he calls them oikouroi, home-keepers. And in his essay 'On Tranquillity of Mind' he disapproves of this stay-at-home lack of activity. Again in his 'Advice to Bride and Groom' he records that Phidias made a stuatue of Venus for the people of Elis with her foot on a tortoise, as a tacit suggestion that wives should stay at home and hold their peace. Plutarch also tells of a custom in Egypt that newly wedded wives should not wear sandals, to prevent them of course from ever leaving the house. All the same, this ideal would have little chance of acceptance by our own countrywomen, as they flit busily round all the markets and all the wine-shops and everywhere on earth by land or sea.

This seems the place to add a remark recorded by Plutarch in his life of Titus Flaminius. When seeking to persuade the Achains that they should not lay claim to the island of Zacynthos, 'They would' he said 'run risks like tortoises, if they struck their heads out beyond the Peloponnese.' Livy has simething very like this in book six of his Macedonian War, where Quinctius speaks as follows: 'If I thought that the possession of that island was of any value to the Achaeans, I would recommend the Roman government to let you have it. But I have my eye on the tortoise: gathered into its shell, it is safe from all attacks, but when it puts out any part of itself, whatever it exposes is at risk and defenceless. It is much the same with you Achaeans: you are enclosed on all sides by the bounds of the sea, and what lies within the Peloponnese, you can add to your own, and easily defend what you have added; but if you exceed those limits in your greed for further acquisitions, all your overseas possessions are naked and exposed to all attacks.'

One of the earliest references to this proverb seems to be by the poet Philoxenus (died 380 B.C.), as preserved in Suda 291 (Εἰς λατομίας, cited by Tosi, tr. Tony Natoli):

To the quarries: Philoxenos the dithyrambic poet could not stand the poetry of the tyrant Dionysius because it was so bad. On one occasion Dionysius sent him to the quarries, but later decided to have him brought back up. However, upon enquiring the reason [sc. for the tyrant's change of heart] Philoxenus replied, 'How much better it is to stay there than to suffer his [i.e. Dionysius'] poetry'; and he added, 'Truly, home is dear, home is best', just as it is for the tortoise.

Εἰς λατομίας: Φιλόξενος ὁ διθυραμβοποιὸς οὐκ ἀνεχόμενος τῶν Διονυσίου τοῦ τυράννου ποιημάτων ὡς φαύλων, ποτὲ πέμψαντος αὐτὸν εἰς λατομίας τοῦ Διονυσίου, τὸ δὲ ὕστερον αὐτὸς ἑκὼν ἐξανέστη, τοῦ δὲ ἐπερωτωμένου τὴν αἰτίαν, τοῦτο εἰπεῖν, ὡς κρεῖττον εἶναι ἐκεῖ διατρίβειν ἢ τῶν αὐτοῦ ποιημάτων ἀνέχεσθαι, τοῦτο ἐπειπόντα: ἦ οἶκος φίλος, οἶκος ἄριστος: ἅπερ ἐστὶ τῆς χελώνης.

Greek Anthology 9.71 (Antiphilus of Byzantium, tr. W.R. Paton):

Overhanging branches of the spreading oak, that from on high shade well men seeking shelter from the untempered heat, leafy boughs roofing closer than tiles, the home of wood-pigeons, the home of cicadas, O noontide branches, guard me, too, who lie beneath your foliage, taking refuge from the rays of the sun.

κλῶνες ἀπῃόριοι ταναῆς δρυός, εὔσκιον ὕψος
  ἀνδράσιν ἄκρητον καῦμα φυλασσομένοις,
εὐπέταλοι, κεράμων στεγανώτεροι, οἰκία φαττῶν,
  οἰκία τεττίγων, ἔνδιοι ἀκρεμόνες,
κἠμὲ τὸν ὑμετέραισιν ὑποκλινθέντα κόμαισιν
  ῥύσασθ᾽, ἀκτίνων ἠελίου φυγάδα.

Asher Brown Durand,
In the Shade of the Old Oak Tree

Walter Savage Landor, Poems, Dialogues in Verse and Epigrams, ed. Charles G. Crump, vol. II (London: J.M. Dent & Co., 1892), p. 127:

Boastfully call we all the world our own:
What are we who would call it so? the form
Erect, the eye that pierces stars and suns,
Droop and decay; no beast so piteously.
More mutable than wind-worn leaves are we:
Yea, lower are we than the dust's estate;
The very dust is as it was before;
Dissever'd from ourselves, aliens and outcasts
From what our pride dared call inheritance,
We only live to feel our fall and die.

Eastman Johnson, Old Man Seated

John Leicester Warren, Philoctetes: A Metrical Drama after the Antique (London: Strahan & Co., 1871), pp. 27-33 (Chorus):

Throned are the gods, and in
Lordliest precinct
Eternally seated.
And under their dwellings
Of amber the beautiful
Clouds go for ever.

Who shall dethrone them,
Who bring them to weeping?
Tho' all earth cry to them
Shall they reply?
"Dust are the nations,
They wail for a little:
Why should we meddle
With these, whom to-morrow
Blinds into silence,
And where is their anguish?
But our immortal
Beatitudes always
Remain, and our spirits
Are nourished on ichor
Divinely eternal,
From pleasure to pleasure
Renewed. Like a mighty
Great music advancing
To climax of ardours,
Thro' vistas of ages
We know we must be:
And we ponder far-thoughted
Beyond them, beyond them,
On cloudy diminishing
Eons, half moulded
To time from the nebulous
Skirts of the darkness."

Can sorrow penetrate
Even the blest abodes
Where they have builded them
Halls without care,
Citadels azurine
Up in the fleecy sphere?
Can that immortal sleep
Own unfulfilled desire,
Aping imperfect
Unexcellent men?

Gently the daylight goes
Out in the pastures,
Spring comes like a bee
To brush open the flowers.
Care they up there, if
We perish or flourish?
Sucking the dregs of
An exquisite sleep,
How should they heed
The mere anguish of slaves?

Mighty our masters and
Very revengeful,
Throned in the eminent
Ambers of twilight,
Helming the seasons in
Pastime they sit;
Tossing a plague on some
Fortunate island,
Carelessly tossing it,
Watching it go
Strike and exterminate—
Sweet is the cry to them—
As when some hunter
Exultingly hears
The scream of the hare as
His arrow bites under
The fur to the vitals.

O, mightily seated and
Throned are our masters,
And steadily rooted;
Their heels they have set
On Titans in anguish
And trodden the faces
Of these at their mercy
Down into the marl-pits
Of fiery darkness,
As men into clay tread
A worm's throbbing rings.

They cry to the nations,
"We strike, if ye pray not.
We bend down our eyes along
Temple and grove,
Searching the incense-curl
And the live smell of blood;
Hating the worshipper,
Craving his prayer."

And the earth answers them
Moaning, and drowsily
Smile they with slow blue orbs,
But the smile reaches
Scarce down to their lip-line.
They care not what comes
To the creature below them.
To a god can it matter
What mortals endure?
We pity the ant-toil
And bless the bees gathering,
But these compassionate
Nothing of ours.

Throned are the gods and in
Lordly dominion
Eternally seated.
And under their dwellings
Of amber the beautiful
Clouds climb for ever.

Plato, Phaedrus 279b8-c3 (tr. R. Hackforth):

Dear Pan, and all ye other gods that dwell in this place, grant that I may become fair within, and that such outward things as I have may not war against the spirit within me. May I count him rich who is wise, and as for gold, may I possess so much of it as a temperate man might bear and carry with him.

ὦ φίλε Πάν τε καὶ ἄλλοι ὅσοι τῇδε θεοί, δοίητέ μοι καλῷ γενέσθαι τἄνδοθεν: ἔξωθεν δὲ ὅσα ἔχω, τοῖς ἐντὸς εἶναί μοι φίλια. πλούσιον δὲ νομίζοιμι τὸν σοφόν: τὸ δὲ χρυσοῦ πλῆθος εἴη μοι ὅσον μήτε φέρειν μήτε ἄγειν δύναιτο ἄλλος ἢ ὁ σώφρων.

Xenophon, Memorabilia 1.3.2 (tr. E.C. Marchant):

And again, when he prayed he asked simply for good gifts, "for the gods know best what things are good." To pray for gold or silver or sovereignty or any other such thing, was just like praying for a gamble or a fight or anything of which the result is obviously uncertain.

καὶ ηὔχετο δὲ πρὸς τοὺς θεοὺς ἁπλῶς τἀγαθὰ διδόναι, ὡς τοὺς θεοὺς κάλλιστα εἰδότας ὁποῖα ἀγαθά ἐστι: τοὺς δ᾽ εὐχομένους χρυσίον ἢ ἀργύριον ἢ τυραννίδα ἢ ἄλλο τι τῶν τοιούτων οὐδὲν διάφορον ἐνόμιζεν εὔχεσθαι ἢ εἰ κυβείαν ἢ μάχην ἢ ἄλλο τι εὔχοιντο τῶν φανερῶς ἀδήλων ὅπως ἀποβήσοιτο.

John Stuart Blackie, Messis Vitae: Gleanings of Song from a Happy Life (London: Macmillan and Co., 1886), p. 70, quotes part of the passage from Xenophon and paraphrases as follows, under the title The Prayer of Socrates:

Grant, O Olympian Jove supreme,
Not my wish, and not my dream;
Grant me neither gold that shines,
Nor ruddy copper in the mines,
Nor power to wield the tyrant's rod,
And be a fool, and seem a god,
Nor precious robe with jewelled fringe
Splendid with sea-born purple tinge,
Nor silken vest on downy pillow,
Nor hammock hard on heaving billow;
But give all goodly things that be
Good for the whole and best for me.
My thoughts are foolish, blind, and crude;
Thou only knowest what is good.

Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols: Skirmishes of an Untimely Man (Götzen-Dämmerung: Streifzüge eines Unzeitgemässen) 37 (tr. Walter Kaufmann):

We modern men, very tender, very easily hurt, and offering as well as receiving consideration a hundredfold, really have the conceit that this tender humanity which we represent, this attained unanimity in sympathetic regard, in readiness to help, in mutual trust, represents positive progress; and that in this respect we are far above the men of the Renaissance. But that is how every age thinks, how it must think. What is certain is that we may not place ourselves in Renaissance conditions, not even by an act of thought: our nerves would not endure that reality, not to speak of our muscles. But such incapacity does not prove progress, only another, later constitution, one which is weaker, frailer, more easily hurt, and which necessarily generates a morality rich in consideration. Were we to think away our frailty and lateness, our physiological senescence, then our morality of "humanization" would immediately lose its value too (in itself, no morality has any value)—it would even arouse disdain. On the other hand, let us not doubt that we moderns, with our thickly padded humanity, which at all costs wants to avoid bumping into a stone, would have provided Cesare Borgia's contemporaries with a comedy at which they could have laughed themselves to death. Indeed, we are unwittingly funny beyond all measure with our modern "virtues."

The decrease in instincts which are hostile and arouse mistrust—and that is all our "progress" amounts to —represents but one of the consequences attending the general decrease in vitality: it requires a hundred times more trouble and caution to make so conditional and late an existence prevail. Hence each helps the other; hence everyone is to a certain extent sick, and everyone is a nurse for the sick. And that is called "virtue." Among men who still knew life differently—fuller, more squandering, more overflowing—it would have been called by another name: "cowardice" perhaps, "wretchedness," "old ladies' morality."

...

Strong ages, noble cultures, all consider pity, "neighbor-love," and the lack of self and self-assurance as something contemptible. Ages must be measured by their positive strength—and then that lavishly squandering and fatal age of the Renaissance appears as the last great age; and we moderns, with our anxious self-solicitude and neighbor-love, with our virtues of work, modesty, legality, and scientism—accumulating, economic, machinelike—appear as a weak age.

---

Wir modernen Menschen, sehr zart, sehr verletzlich und hundert Rücksichten gebend und nehmend, bilden uns in der That ein, diese zärtliche Menschlichkeit, die wir darstellen, diese erreichte Einmüthigkeit in der Schonung, in der Hülfsbereitschaft, im gegenseitigen Vertrauen sei ein positiver Fortschritt, damit seien wir weit über die Menschen der Renaissance hinaus. Aber so denkt jede Zeit, so muss sie denken. Gewiss ist, dass wir uns nicht in Renaissance-Zustände hineinstellen dürften, nicht einmal hineindenken: unsre Nerven hielten jene Wirklichkeit nicht aus, nicht zu reden von unsern Muskeln. Mit diesem Unvermögen ist aber kein Fortschritt bewiesen, sondern nur eine andre, eine spätere Beschaffenheit, eine schwächere, zärtlichere, verletzlichere, aus der sich nothwendig eine rücksichtenreiche Moral erzeugt. Denken wir unsre Zartheit und Spätheit, unsre physiologische Alterung weg, so verlöre auch unsre Moral der "Vermenschlichung" sofort ihren Werth—an sich hat keine Moral Werth—: sie würde uns selbst Geringschätzung machen. Zweifeln wir andrerseits nicht daran, dass wir Modernen mit unsrer dick wattirten Humanität, die durchaus an keinen Stein sich stossen Will, den Zeitgenossen Cesare Borgia's eine Komödie zum Todtlachen abgeben würden. In der That, wir sind über die Maassen unfreiwillig spasshaft, mit unsren modernen "Tugenden."

Die Abnahme der feindseligen und misstrauenweckenden Instinkte—und das wäre ja unser "Fortschritt"—stellt nur eine der Folgen in der allgemeinen Abnahme der Vitalität dar: es kostet hundert Mal mehr Mühe, mehr Vorsicht, ein so bedingtes, so spätes Dasein durchzusetzen. Da hilft man sich gegenseitig, da ist Jeder bis zu einem gewissen Grade Kranker und Jeder Krankenwärter. Das heisst dann "Tugend"—: unter Menschen, die das Leben noch anders kannten, voller, verschwenderischer, überströmender, hätte man's anders genannt, "Feigheit" vielleicht, "Erbärmlichkeit," "Altweiber-Moral."

...

Die starken Zeiten, die vornehmen Culturen sehen im Mitleiden, in der "Nächstenliebe," im Mangel an Selbst und Selbstgefühl etwas Verächtliches.— Die Zeiten sind zu messen nach ihren positiven Kräften—und dabei ergiebt sich jene so verschwenderische und verhängnissreiche Zeit der Renaissance als die letzte grosse Zeit, und wir, wir Modernen mit unsrer ängstlichen Selbst-Fürsorge und Nächstenliebe, mit unsren Tugenden der Arbeit, der Anspruchslosigkeit, der Rechtlichkeit, der Wissenschaftlichkeit—sammelnd, ökonomisch, machinal—als eine schwache Zeit.

From Ian Jackson:

I was browsing through, not for the first time, but with a fresh attention to arboricide, The British Character (London, Collins, 1938), a collection of cartoons by "Pont" i.e. Graham Laidler (1908-40), the most brilliant British cartoonist of the generation before Ronald Searle. I attach the illustration on page 87, not however, from the book itself, but from a recent exhibition catalogue, Pont: observing the British at home and abroad, with a foreword by Richard Ingrams (London, The Cartoon Museum, 2008), p.38, as the reproduction is better. The date of the original appearance in Punch is given in the caption.

Click on the image for a better view.

Labels: arboricide

In Part XII of The Anatomy of Bibliomania (1931; rpt. New York: Avenel Books, 1981), Holbrook Jackson asks and answers the question How Bookmen Conquer Time and Place. Topics include Of Reading Places (section II, pp. 236-239) and The Association of Book and Place (section III, pp. 239-241).

D.B.Wyndham Lewis, On Straw and Other Conceits (1927; rpt. Hartford: Edwin Valentine Mitchell; New York, Coward-McCann Incorporated [1929]), pp. 30-32, has some thoughts on this question:

It is evident that to extract the essential soul and flavour of certain books one should endeavour to read them in the exact surroundings in which they were conceived, or in surroundings as nearly similar as may be; for the clear air, the sky, the water are, as it were, mixed with the writer's mind and woven into the very stuff of his imaginings. But whereas there are plenty of books pointing out What To Read and Why To Read, there is as yet, I think, no guide showing Where To Read. I have therefore drawn up from my own experience, haphazard, a modest and sketchy list which may serve as the foundation for such a Guide, though it clearly touches only the edge of the fringe of a vast and absorbing subject.

SHAKESPEARE. One would naturally read Shakespeare in a Warwickshire meadow in buttercup time; or else in the Fitzalan Chapel at Arundel.

RONSARD. To derive the greatest solace from the poetry of Ronsard one must read him lying on the banks of the Loire, at about sunset of a June evening, upon the grass, with a flask of the wine of Vouvray, or Chinon, or Bourgueil at hand; and with the soft air and the murmur of flowing water there should be mixed the gracious voices of girls.

Some demand, in addition, a lute, and a distant voice singing "Bonjour mon coeur, bonjour ma douce vie," the words by Ronsard, the music by Orlando de Lassus.This seems (as Samuel Butler said about dumb-bells — see above) academic.

KIPLING (MR.). The works of this famous author are most profitably read in the Crystal Palace on Empire Day, during a massed Brass Band Contest; if that can be arranged.

CONGREVE naturally demands to be read in the Sunken Garden at Hampton Court, on the William-and-Mary side of the palace — not the Cardinal's.

HERRICK should be read in a Devon lane in the time of violets.

TCHEHOV. To extract the best from this author and his English imitators, their work should be read in a dimly lighted dissecting-room; the corpse rather damp and the surgeon and his assistants rather sick of it, in a moody, gaga sort of way.

RABELAIS must be read among the rich lands of the Chionnais in Touraine, on the edge of a white road with cornfields and vineyards on either side. But let there be a farmyard near, with a ripe and aromatic muck-heap in it, the scent of which must be borne to you on the wind; and let there be also loud bursts of rustic laughter and a bottle of Chinon.

One could swell the list indefinitely, in many cases with two, three, or four alternatives each. There is one English man of letters, for example, who holds stoutly that the only place to read the Bucolics of Vergil is at a café-table opposite the Bourse in Paris, when the money-grubbers are howling their damnedest. My own theory is that the Bucolics are best read in the barber's parlour at the Cosmopole, with a menial squirting costly unguents on the hair and the Rich all round one being polished and trimmed. Again, most of the modern "analytical" novelists need nothing better than a room filled with stale tobacco-smoke: but what kind of room? And again, there may be a law against reading Mr. M******* M***'s prose in the Elephant House at the Zoo.

M.M. is probably John Middleton Murry.

Robert Collinson, Absorbed in Robinson Crusoe

Anthony Trollope, The Vicar of Bullhampton, Chapter IX:

She had an idea that the son of a gentleman, if he intended to maintain his rank as a gentleman, should earn his income as a clergyman, or as a barrister, or as a soldier, or as a sailor. Those were the professions intended for gentlemen. She would not absolutely say that a physician was not a gentleman, or even a surgeon; but she would never allow to physic the same absolute privileges which, in her eyes, belonged to law and the church. There might also possibly be a doubt about the Civil Service and Civil Engineering; but she had no doubt whatever that when a man touched trade or commerce in any way he was doing that which was not the work of a gentleman. He might be very respectable, and it might be very necessary that he should do it; but brewers, bankers, and merchants, were not gentlemen, and the world, according to Miss Marrable's theory, was going astray, because people were forgetting their landmarks.

James Gillray, The Inexpressible Air of Dignity

Gail Riplinger, Hazardous Materials: Greek and Hebrew Study Dangers (Ararat: A.V. Publications 2008), p. 83:

The Liddell-Scott Greek-English Lexicon is the whorish MOTHER of all harlot lexicons.

I owe the reference to Christopher Stray, "Liddell and Scott: Myths and Markets," in Christopher Stray, ed., Classical Dictionaries: Past, Present and Future (London: Duckworth, 2010), pp. 94-118 (at 101).

L.J.D. Richardson, "A Little Classics Is a Dangerous Thing," Greece & Rome 16 (1947) 41:

It is a strange fact that, despite the spread of education and the great number of cultural vade meca in the hands of the public nowadays, there should still be found so many ignorami among the hoi polloi. Too often you will hear people saying 'octopuses' when they should, of course, have said 'octopi': and we fear that to use the forms 'platypi' and 'rhinoceri' is only to incur the reproach of pedantry. The times are out of joint: we worship at the shrine of universal education, but this ideal is the very antipode of the actual fact. Slipshod and inaccurate utterance pervades every strata of society. In particular, exactness and precision in classical quotation, instead of being regarded as the desideratae and, we may almost say. the necessary sine quae non of polite intercourse, are only laughed at as ridiculous refinements. Cui bono?, 'for what good?', is the false standard applied to mere elegancies of style. If faults are noticed at all, they are dismissed as trivial lapsi linguae.

How is this lamentable situation to be improved? The classical teacher is, no doubt, partially responsible; he can plead no alibum in the matter. But he can effect little improvement by himself. He is no dictator, whose cujus is mightier than any quorum of democratic committeemen. We, the enlightened, must therefore band ourselves together and form a militant Society for Purer Latin. We must begin at Jerusalem and purge ourselves first. Let us pay our own final adieux to those errors and say, each and all of us, our several valia to inelegant solecisms. It is by such effort, in speech as in all else, that men attain perfection—sic euntur ad astra! Then, when we have won through to our own satisfaction and can express our mutual paces vobisca, we can turn our attention to others, our pupils. We shall now be in a strong position. We cannot be told that our arguments are vitiated by a fallacy, that our quod erat demonstranda involve too many non sequuntur: we cannot even be told that our campaign represents a policy of perfections, of unattainable ne plus ultrae. We, the primi mobilia, shall have proved the case in our own persons. Our next duty, then, will be to supply the hiati and lacunata in the cultural armoury of those whom we teach or influence. This is best done by directing their constant attention to the great writers of the past. Let them, ever bearing in mind the proverb de mortuis nil nisi bonum, 'nothing but good has come from us from the dead', model themselves on those great exemplars, and try, however imperfectly, to become their facsimilia.

Two familiar quotations from Ovid will express, with admirable succinctness, the moral of my brief homily:

in medio tutissimus ... Ibis

and

omnia suspendens ... Naso.

John Stuart Blackie, On Self-Culture, 4th ed. (Edinburgh: Edmonston and Douglas, 1874), pp. 32-36:

(1.) If possible always start with a good teacher. He will save you much time by clearing away difficulties that might otherwise discourage you, and preventing the formation of bad habits of enunciation, which must afterwards be unlearned.

(2.) The next step is to name aloud, in the language to be learned, every object which meets your eye, carefully excluding the intervention of the English: in other words, think and speak of the objects about you in the language you are learning from the very first hour of your teaching; and remember that the language belongs to the first place to your ear and to your tongue, not in your book merely and to your brain.

(3.) Commit to memory the simplest and most normal forms of the declension of nouns, such as the us and a declension in Latin, and the A declension in Sanscrit.

(4.) The moment you have learned the nominative and accusative cases of these nouns take the first person of the present indicative of any common verb, and pronounce aloud some short sentence according to the rules of syntax belonging to active verbs, as—ὁρῶ τὸν Ἥλιον, I see the sun.

(5.) Enlarge this practice by adding some epithet to the substantive, declined according to the same noun, as—ὁρῶ τὸν λαμπρὸν Ἥλιον, I see the bright sun.

(6.) Go on in this manner progressively, committing to memory the whole present indicative, past and future indicative, of simple verbs, always making short sentences with them, and some appropriate nouns, and always thinking directly in the foreign language, excluding the intrusion of the English. In this essential element of every rational system of linguistic training there is no real, but only an imaginary difficulty to contend with, and, in too many cases, the pertinacity of a perverse practice.

(7.) When the ear and tongue have acquired a fluent mastery of the simpler forms of nouns, verbs, and sentences, then, but not till then, should the scholar be led, by a graduated process, to the more difficult and complex forms.

(8.) Let nothing be learned from rules that is not immediately illustrated by practice; or rather, let the rules be educed from the practice of ear and tongue, and let them be as few and as comprehensive as possible.

(9.) Irregularities of various kinds are best learned by practice as they occur; but some anomalies, as in the conjugation of a few irregular verbs, are of such frequent occurrence, and are so necessary for progress, that they had better be learned specially by heart as soon as possible. Of this the verb to be, in almost all languages, is a familiar example.

(10.) Let some easy narrative be read, in the first place, or better, some familiar dialogue, as, in Greek, Xenophon's Anabasis and Memorabilia, Cebetis Tabula, and Lucian's Dialogues; but reading must never be allowed, as is so generally the case, to be practised as a substitute for thinking and speaking. To counteract this tendency, the best way is to take objects of natural history, or representations of interesting objects, and describe their parts aloud in simple sentences, without the intervention of the mother tongue.

(11.) Let all exercises of reading and describing be repeated again, and again, and again. No book fit to be read in the early stages of language-learning should be read only once.

(12.) Let your reading, if possible, be always in sympathy with your intellectual appetite. Let the matter of the work be interesting, and you will make double progress. To know some thing of the subject beforehand will be an immense help. For this reason, with Christians who know the Scriptures, as we do in Scotland, a translation of the Bible is always one of the best books to use in the acquisition of a foreign tongue.

(13.) As you read, note carefully the difference between the idioms of the strange language and those of the mother tongue; underscore these distinctly with pen or pencil, in some thoroughly idiomatic translation, and after a few days translate back into the original tongue what you have before you in the English form.

(14.) To methodise, and, if necessary, correct your observations, consult some systematic grammar so long as you may find it profitable. But the grammar should, as much as possible, follow the practice, not precede it.

(15.) Be not content with that mere methodical generalisation of the practice which you find in many grammars, but endeavour always to find the principle of the rule, whether belonging to universal or special grammar.

(16.) Study the theory of language, the organism of speech, and what is called comparative philology or Glossology. The principles there revealed will enable you to prosecute with a reasoning intelligence a study which would otherwise be in a great measure a laborious exercise of arbitrary memory.

(17.) Still, practice is the main thing; language must, in the first plaoe, be familiar; and this familiarity can be attained only by constant reading and constant conversation. Where a man has no person to speak to he may declaim to himself; but the ear and the tongue must be trained, not the eye merely and the understanding. In reading, a man must not confine himself to standard works. He must devour everything greedily that he can lay his hands on. He must not merely get up a book with accurate precision; that is all very well as a special task; but he must learn to live largely in the general element of the language; and minute accuracy in details is not to be sought before a fluent practical command of the general currency of the language has been attained. Shakspeare, for instance, ought to be read twenty times before a man begins to occupy himself with the various readings of the Shaksperian text, or the ingenious conjectures of his critics.

(18.) Composition, properly so called, is the culmination of the exercises of speaking and reading, translation and re-translation, which we have sketched. In this exercise the essential thing is to write from a model, not from dictionaries or phrase-books. Choose an author who is a pattern of a particular style—say Plato in philosophical dialogue, or Lucian in playful colloquy—steal his phrases, and do something of the same kind yourself, directly, without the intervention of the English. After you have acquired fluency in this way you may venture to put more of yourself into the style, and learn to write the foreign tongue as gracefully as Latin was written by Erasmus, Wyttenbach, or Ruhnken. Translation from English classics may also be practised, but not in the first place; the ear must be tuned by direct imitation of tbe foreign tongue, before the more difficult art of transference from the mother tongue can be attempted with success.

H.G. Wells, The History of Mr. Polly (1910), I.4:

There is no country-side like the English country-side for those who have learnt to love it; its firm yet gentle lines of hill and dale, its ordered confusion of features, its deer parks and downland, its castles and stately houses, its hamlets and old churches, its farms and ricks and great barns and ancient trees, its pools and ponds and shining threads of rivers; its flower-starred hedgerows, its orchards and woodland patches, its village greens and kindly inns. Other country-sides have their pleasant aspects, but none such variety, none that shine so steadfastly throughout the year. Picardy is pink and white and pleasant in the blossom time, Burgundy goes on with its sunshine and wide hillsides and cramped vineyards, a beautiful tune repeated and repeated, Italy gives salitas and wayside chapels and chestnuts and olive orchards, the Ardennes has its woods and gorges — Touraine and the Rhineland, the wide Campagna with its distant Apennines, and the neat prosperities and mountain backgrounds of South Germany, all clamour their especial merits at one's memory. And there are the hills and fields of Virginia, like an England grown very big and slovenly, the woods and big river sweeps of Pennsylvania, the trim New England landscape, a little bleak and rather fine like the New England mind, and the wide rough country roads and hills and woodland of New York State. But none of these change scene and character in three miles of walking, nor have so mellow a sunlight nor so diversified a cloudland, nor confess the perpetual refreshment of the strong soft winds that blow from off the sea as our Mother England does.

Theocritus 7.135-147 (tr. T.F. Higham):

Dangling above our heads hung canopies
Of whispering elms and rustling poplar-trees;
Near us the water of the sacred well
Dropped from the Nymphs' cave, tinkling as it fell;
On every twig in shadow sat with glee
The sunburnt crickets, chattering busily;
And murmuring afar off in solitude,
Bowered in the deep thorn-brake, the turtle cooed.
All rich delight and luxury was there:
Larks and bright finches singing in the air;
The brown bees flying around the well;
The ring-dove moaning; everywhere the smell
Of opulent summer and of ripening-tide:
Pears at our feet and apples at our side
Rolling in plenteousness; in piles around
Branches, with damsons burdening to the ground,
Strewn for our feast; and from the full wine-tun
Wax of a four-years-aged seal undone.

The same, tr. C.S. Calverley:

A wealth of elm and poplar shook o'erhead;
Hard by, a sacred spring flowed gurgling on
From the Nymphs' grot, and in the sombre boughs
The sweet cicada chirped laboriously.
Hid in the thick thorn-bushes far away
The treefrog's note was heard; the crested lark
Sang with the goldfinch; turtles made their moan,
And o'er the fountain hung the gilded bee.
All of rich summer smacked, of autumn all:
Pears at our feet, and apples at our side
Rolled in luxuriance; branches on the ground
Sprawled, overweighed with damsons; while we brushed
From the cask's head the crust of four long years.

The same, in Andrew Lang's prose version:

And high above our heads waved many a poplar, many an elm tree, while close at hand the sacred water from the nymphs' own cave welled forth with murmurs musical. On shadowy boughs the burnt cicalas kept their chattering toil, far off the little owl cried in the thick thorn brake, the larks and finches were singing, the ring-dove moaned, the yellow bees were flitting about the springs. All breathed the scent of the opulent summer, of the season of fruits; pears at our feet and apples by our sides were rolling plentiful, the tender branches, with wild plums laden, were earthward bowed, and the four-year-old pitch seal was loosened from the mouth of the wine-jars.

The Greek:

πολλαὶ δ᾽ ἄμμιν ὕπερθε κατὰ κρατὸς δονέοντο
αἴγειροι πτελέαι τε· τὸ δ᾽ ἐγγύθεν ἱερὸν ὕδωρ
Νυμφᾶν ἐξ ἄντροιο κατειβόμενον κελάρυζε.
τοὶ δὲ ποτὶ σκιαραῖς ὀροδαμνίσιν αἰθαλίωνες
τέττιγες λαλαγεῦντες ἔχον πόνον· ἁ δ᾽ ὀλολυγών
τηλόθεν ἐν πυκιναῖσι βάτων τρύζεσκεν ἀκάνθαις·
ἄειδον κόρυδοι καὶ ἀκανθίδες, ἔστενε τρυγών,
πωτῶντο ξουθαὶ περὶ πίδακας ἀμφὶ μέλισσαι.
πάντ᾽ ὦσδεν θέρεος μάλα πίονος, ὦσδε δ᾽ ὀπώρας.
ὄχναι μὲν πὰρ ποσσί, παρὰ πλευραῖσι δὲ μᾶλα
δαψιλέως ἁμῖν ἐκυλίνδετο· τοὶ δ᾽ ἐκέχυντο
ὄρπακες βραβίλοισι καταβρίθοντες ἔραζε.
τετράενες δὲ πίθων ἀπελύετο κρατὸς ἄλειφαρ.

Claude Monet, Déjeuner sur l'herbe

Charles Dickens, American Notes (1842), Chapter X:

The eye was pained to see the stumps of great trees thickly strewn in every field of wheat, and seldom to lose the eternal swamp and dull morass, with hundreds of rotten trunks and twisted branches steeped in its unwholesome water. It was quite sad and oppressive, to come upon great tracts where settlers had been burning down the trees, and where their wounded bodies lay about, like those of murdered creatures, while here and there some charred and blackened giant reared aloft two withered arms, and seemed to call down curses on his foes.

Chapter XI:

For miles, and miles, and miles, these solitudes are unbroken by any sign of human life or trace of human footstep; nor is anything seen to move about them but the blue jay, whose colour is so bright, and yet so delicate, that it looks like a flying flower. At lengthened intervals a log cabin, with its little space of cleared land about it, nestles under a rising ground, and sends its thread of blue smoke curling up into the sky. It stands in the corner of the poor field of wheat, which is full of great unsightly stumps, like earthy butchers'-blocks. Sometimes the ground is only just now cleared: the felled trees lying yet upon the soil: and the loghouse only this morning begun. As we pass this clearing, the settler leans upon his axe or hammer, and looks wistfully at the people from the world. The children creep out of the temporary hut, which is like a gipsy tent upon the ground, and clap their hands and shout. The dog only glances round at us; and then looks up into his master's face again, as if he were rendered uneasy by any suspension of the common business, and had nothing more to do with pleasurers. And still there is the same, eternal foreground. The river has washed away its banks, and stately trees have fallen down into the stream. Some have been there so long, that they are mere dry grizzly skeletons. Some have just toppled over, and having earth yet about their roots, are bathing their green heads in the river, and putting forth new shoots and branches. Some are almost sliding down, as you look at them. And some were drowned so long ago, that their bleached arms start out from the middle of the current, and seem to try to grasp the boat, and drag it under water.

Chapter XI:

The night is dark, and we proceed within the shadow of the wooded bank, which makes it darker. After gliding past the sombre maze of boughs for a long time, we come upon an open space where the tall trees are burning. The shape of every branch and twig is expressed in a deep red glow, and as the light wind stirs and ruffles it, they seem to vegetate in fire. It is such a sight as we read of in legends of enchanted forests: saving that it is sad to see these noble works wasting away so awfully, alone; and to think how many years must come and go before the magic that created them will rear their like upon this ground again. But the time will come: and when, in their changed ashes, the growth of centuries unborn has struck its roots, the restless men of distant ages will repair to these again unpeopled solitudes; and their fellows, in cities far away, that slumber now, perhaps, beneath the rolling sea, will read, in language strange to any ears in being now, but very old to them, of primeval forests where the axe was never heard, and where the jungled ground was never trodden by a human foot.

Chapter XIV:

These stumps of trees are a curious feature in American travelling. The varying illusions they present to the unaccustomed eye as it grows dark, are quite astonishing in their number and reality. Now, there is a Grecian urn erected in the centre of a lonely field; now there is a woman weeping at a tomb; now a very commonplace old gentleman in a white waistcoat, with a thumb thrust into each arm-hole of his coat; now a student poring on a book; now a crouching negro; now, a horse, a dog, a cannon, an armed man; a hunchback throwing off his cloak and stepping forth into the light. They were often as entertaining to me as so many glasses in a magic lantern, and never took their shapes at my bidding, but seemed to force themselves upon me, whether I would or no; and strange to say, I sometimes recognised in them counterparts of figures once familiar to me in pictures attached to childish books, forgotten long ago.

Labels: arboricide

William Wordsworth, The Prelude 12.29-34:

So neither were complacency, nor peace,
Nor tender yearnings, wanting for my good
Through these distracted times; in Nature still
Glorying, I found a counterpoise in her,
Which, when the spirit of evil reached its height,
Maintained for me a secret happiness.

John Constable, Wooded Landscape

Euripides, fragment 928a (tr. Christopher Collard and Martin Cropp):

The man who first established for us altars of the heavenly gods, and fashioned lifelike images of them in artfully carved sculptures, neglected one thing when he did so in my opinion: he established no garlanded altar for Wealth, the greatest and highest of gods.

ὁ πρῶτος ἡμῖν τῶν ἐν οὐρανῷ θεῶν
βωμοὺς ἱδρύσας εὐαγῆ τ' ἀγάλματα
γλ[υ]πτοῖσι τέχνης ζωοποιήσα[ς] τύποις
ἑνὸς κατημέλησεν ὡς οἶμαι τότε,
ὃς τοῦ μεγίστου καὶ θεῶν ὑπερτάτου
Πλούτου σ̣τ̣εφή̣ρη βωμὸν οὐχ ἱδρύσατο.

Journals of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Vol. VII: 1845-1848 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1912), pp. 288-289:

Channing proposed that there should be a magnified Dollar, say as big as a barrel-head, made of silver or gold, in each village, and Colonel Shattuck or other priest appointed to take care of it and not let it be stolen; then we should be provided with a local deity, and could bring it baked beans or other offerings and rites, as pleased us.

Cartoon by William Gropper

Han Yu (768-824), tr. by Kenneth Rexroth in One Hundred More Poems from the Chinese (New York: New Directions, 1970), pp. 69-70:

Amongst the Cliffs

The path up the mountain is hard
To follow through the tumbled rocks.
When I reach the monastery
The bats are already flying.
I go to the guest room and sit
On the steps. The rain is over.
The banana leaves are broad.
The gardenias are in bloom.
The old guest master tells me
There are ancient painting on the
Walls. He goes and gets a light.
I see they are incomparably
Beautiful. He spreads my bed
And sweeps the mat. He serves me
Soup and rice. It is simple
Food but nourishing. The night
Goes on as I lie and listen
To the great peace. Insects chirp
And click in the stillness. The
Pure moon rises over the ridge
And shines in my door. At daybreak
I get up alone. I saddle
My horse myself and go my way.
The trails are all washed out.
I go up and down, picking my
Way through storm clouds on the mountain.
Red cliffs, green waterfalls, all
Sparkle in the morning light.
I pass pines and oaks ten men
Could not reach around. I cross
Flooded streams. My bare feet stumble
On the cobbles. The water roars.
My clothes whip in the wind. This
Is the only life where a man
Can find happiness. Why do I
Spend my days bridled like a horse
With a cruel bit in his mouth?
If I only had a few friends
Who agreed with me we'd retire
To the mountains and stay till our lives end.

John Stuart Blackie, Saintship, from The Day-Book of John Stuart Blackie (London: Grant Richards, 1902), p. 148:

If to unmake the work so grandly made
By God, to turn self-torture to a trade,
Be saintship; to hate all things fair and fine,
And, with my back turned to the bright sunshine,
To mope in mouldy cell or grimy shrine;
To hear with horror when a tuneful fiddle
Calls nimble legs to trip it down the middle;
To count it sin to kiss a pretty maid
When eyes are blind, or neath a leafy shade;
To put peas in my shoes and drink no wine,
And teach my stomach to despise my dinner;
If to such saintship your chaste heart incline,
Be you the saint, and let me be the sinner.

John Stuart Blackie (1809-1895), Gaudeamus!, from his Musa Burschicosa: A Book of Songs for Students and University Men (Edinburgh: Edmonston and Douglas, 1869), pp. 100-103:

To be sung at the close of the Winter Session.

AIR—'Gaudeamus igitur!'

'The end of woman or of man, I think,
Is not a book.'—MRS. BROWNING.

Gaudeamus, Burschen brave,
Tune your throats and blithely sing!
Where the hedge is greenly sprouting,
Where the angler goes a-trouting,
Walk we forth and greet the Spring!

Man was never made for books;
Books may not give law to him:
Not Agamemnon, nor old Homer,
Nor Ulysses, that wise roamer,
Made their eyes with reading dim.

Happy birds, that to the sky
Rise, and sing in tuneful bands,
While we sit in dingy places,
Polishing the rusted graces
Of dead men in distant lands!

Why should I disturb the dead?
Let the slain lie where he fell!
Why revive forgotten squabbles?
Feuds of Greek and Roman rabbles
From the mouldy record spell?

Shake the dust out from your ears;
Hear the vernal chorus swell!
Thrush and blackbird, lark and swallow,
While you ponder o'er the tallow
That from last night's candle fell!

What's the fruit of learned pains?
Value stock, and you will find
Thorny problem, prosy lecture,
Subtle substanceless conjecture,
Swelling systems big with wind!

Men from thistles cull no grapes,
Reap no health from bookish toil;
Blinking eyes, and bad digestion,
Sleepless nights and brain-congestion,
That's the fruit of midnight oil!

Fare-ye-well, ye old grey walls,
Inky benches, dusty chairs,
Learnèd tutors, grave professors,
Chancellor, rector, and assessors,
You are named in all my prayers!

Fare-ye-well, old Attic plays,
Whose cross-readings tortured me,
Grindings, crammings, preparations,
Saturday examinations,
When the student should be free!

Vivat home, and home's dear haunts,
Wooded walk and flowery dell!
Welcome father, sister, mother,
Everything that makes no bother,
And the girl that loves me well!

Vivat Highland glen and ben,
Sweeping breeze and sunny sky,
Rapid torrent grandly swirling,
Deep broad current darkly curling,
Where the big trout gulps the fly!

Vivat all that frees the soul
From the cumbrous chains of art,
All the living founts of knowledge
Which no books at school or college
Ever gave to thirsting heart!

Pereat who sneaks to-day
In dull rooms and sunless nooks!
Who, devoid of rummelgumption,
Courts dyspepsy and consumption,
Poring over bloodless books!

You have heard my song, brave boys!
Let no pedants clip your wing;
While green life is all before us,
March we forth and swell the chorus
Of blithe birds that greet the Spring!

Henrik Nordenberg, Interior with Boy at Window

Remarks upon Remarques (1673), quoted in C.H. Wilkinson, More Diversions: An Anthology (London: Oxford University Press, 1944), p. 30:

Do not go to Cambridge, Sir, there are Alehouses, in which you will be drunk; and there are in those houses notable prinking Wenches, that will captivate you into Marriage, or somewhat like it. There are Tennis-Courts, and Bowling-Greens that will heat you to an excess, and then you will drink cold small Beer and die. There is a River too, in which you will be drowned; and you will study yourself into a Consumption, or break your Brain; and will you go to such a place?

H.G. Wells, The Autocracy of Mr. Parham (Garden City: Doubleday, Doran and Company, Inc., 1930), p. 35:

There was something in this experience that reminded Mr. Parham of Horace and the naughtier side of the Latin poets, and anything that reminded him of Horace and the naughtier side of the Latin poets could not, he felt, be altogether vulgar or bad.

John Stuart Blackie (1809-1895), A Song of Good Greeks, from his Musa Burschicosa: A Book of Songs for Students and University Men (Edinburgh: Edmonston and Douglas, 1869), pp. 5-11:

AIR—Seit Vater Noah in Becher goss.

Since Martin Luther the ink-horn threw,
Which worked the Devil much woe,
The power of Greek in Europe grew,
And groweth and ever shall grow;
For never was language at all,
So magical-swelling,
So spirit-compelling,
As Homer rolled,
In billows of gold,
And Plato, and Peter, and Paul.

Etruscan, Hebrew, and Sanscrit are dead,
And Latin will die with the Pope,
But Greek still blooms like a thymy bed,
On brown Hymettus' slope;
For never was language at all,
That billowed so grandly,
And flowed out so blandly,
And never will die
Till men deny
The faith both of Plato and Paul.

Who'll buy my wares, my old Greek wares!
Here's Homer, who sang of old Troy,
A sunny sprite all robed in light,
And crowned with beauty and joy;
For surely no minstrel at all
E'er poured such a river,
Of verses that never
Will cease to flow,
While men shall know
The Gospel of Peter and Paul.

Who'll buy my wares, my old Greek wares?
Here's Pindar, the eagle sublime,
Who soars where Jove's red lightning flares,
And his awful thunders chime;
For never was poet at all,
In boxing and racing,
And pedigree-tracing,
So learned as he,
And worthy to be
Canonized both with Peter and Paul.

Who'll buy my wares? here's Socrates,
Who first by logical spell
From Olympus' crown brought wisdom down,
With mortal men to dwell;
And sure never sage was at all,
Who mingled sound reason
With such pleasant season
Of mirth and fun,
And died like one
Well gospelled by Peter and Paul.

Who'll buy my wares, my old Greek wares?
Here's Plato will pass for a god,
Who for new worlds new men prepares,
On a plan both pleasant and odd;
For sure never sage was at all
So loftily soaring,
So lavishly pouring
Of nectar fine,
The draught divine,
Only second to Peter and Paul.

Who'll buy my wares, my old Greek wares?
Here's Aristotle, the wise,
Who sniffs about with learnèd snout,
And scans with critical eyes;
And sure never sage was at all
So crammed with all knowledge,
A walking college,
Who many things knew,
I tell you true,
Unknown both to Peter and Paul!

Who'll buy my wares, my old Greek wares?
Here's mighty Demosthenes, who,
When traitors sold fair Greece for gold,
Alone stood faithful and true;
For sure never man was at all
Who flung his oration
With such fulmination
Of scorching power
'Gainst the sins of the hour,
Like epistles of Peter and Paul.

Who'll buy my wares, my old Greek wares?
Here's Zeno, Cleanthes, and all,
Who set their face, with a manly grace,
To follow where duty might call;
For sure never men were at all
So steeled in all virtue
That flesh may be heir to,
And ready to die,
With never a sigh,
For the truth, just like Peter and Paul.

Who'll buy my wares, my old Greek wares?
Here's Proclus, Plotinus, and all,
Who clomb on Plato's golden stairs
To the super-celestial hall;
And sure never men were at all
Who lived so devoutly,
And grappled so stoutly
With flesh and blood,
And tramped in the mud
The Devil, like Peter and Paul.

Come, buy my wares, each learned elf,
Who culls Parnassian herbs,
And swears by Liddell and Scott, and Jelf,
And Veitch's irregular verbs!
For this I declare to you all,
Greek gives you a station
Sublime with the nation
Of gods above,
All hand and glove
With Plato, and Peter, and Paul.

Of all the thoughtful sons of Time,
The Greeks were wisest, that's clear;
The Germans preach a lore sublime,
But it smells of tobacco and beer;
And this I declare to you all,
Though Kant, and such fellows
Know something, they tell us,
They never will do
To tie the shoe
To Plato, or Peter, or Paul.

Some think that man from a monkey grew
By steps of long generation,
When, after many blunders, a few
Good hits were made in creation;
But I can't comprehend this at all;
Of blind-groping forces
Though Darwin discourses,
I rather incline
To believe in design,
With Plato, and Peter, and Paul.

There's one Thomas Buckle, a London youth,
Who taught that the world was blind
Till he was born to proclaim the truth,
That matter is moulder of mind;
But I really can't fancy at all
How wheat, rice, and barley,
Made Dick, Tom, and Charlie
So tidy and trim,
Without help from Him
Who was preached both by Plato and Paul.

There's one John Bright, a Manchester man,
Who taught the Tories to rule
By setting their stamp on his patent plan
For renewing the youth of John Bull;
But I say that it won't do at all.
To seek for salvation
By mere numeration
Of polls would surprise,
If they were to rise,
Not a little both Plato and Paul.

Then praise with me the old Greek times,
When men were lusty and strong,
And gods laughed merry in sunny climes,
And wisdom was wedded to song;
For this I declare to you all,
Bright may tickle your palate
With suffrage and ballot,
But you'll die a fool
If you don't go to school
With Plato, and Peter, and Paul.

Blackie was professor of Greek at the University of Edinburgh. The tune for the song can be found on p. 129 of Musa Burschicosa.

From Ian Jackson:

Your latest reminds me of one of the most familiar Italian nursery rhymes, which exists in various readings. I'll give the two I remember. (For lazy people, the wonderful thing about quoting nursery rhymes is that one need not go and look them up somewhere: I am — we are all — the authority!)

Casa mia, casa mia,
Benchè piccola tu sia,
Tu mi sembri una badia!

My house, my house,
tiny though you may be,
you seem like an abbey to me!

Casa mia, casetta mia,
per piccina che tu sia,
per il brutto o per il bello
mi sei più cara del più gran castello!

My house, my little house,
small as you are,
beauty spots and warts and all,
you are dearer to me than the most magnificent castle.

The former is much the more common. And I suppose in English idiom, we'd say "palace" rather than "castle" in the second.

Eric Thomson also sent much more material on this theme, including the following from Mathias Holtzwart's Emblematum Tyrocinia (1581):

Here are my transcription and translation of the Latin verses:

Natura exemplo nobis ipsa indicat, esse
  Nil melius, propria quam latitare domo.
Cernimus ut terris serpat testudo, suamque
  Conseruet tergo sustineatque domum.
Deserit hanc nunquam, coeli dum uescitur aura,
  Dulceque subiecto corpore gestat onus,
Sic felix, partis qui nouit parcere rebus,
  Nilque alios curat, uiuat ut ipse sibi.

Nature itself by example shows us, there is
Nothing better than to hide in one's own house.
We see how the tortoise creeps on the earth and
Maintains and upholds its own house on its back.
It never leaves this house, while it feeds on heaven's air,
And it carries the sweet burden on top of its body.
Thus is that man happy, who knows how to use sparingly what he has acquired,
And who cares nothing for others, so that he may live for himself.

Eric Thomson, in an email, writes about an inscription at Lope de Vega's house (now a museum) in Madrid:

D.O.M. PARVA PROPIA MAGNA: MAGNA ALIENA PARVA. Given its position on the lintel over the entrance to a house, there is a temptation to read D.O.M. (actually Deo Optimo Maximo) as DOM[VS] PARVA, the full stops notwithstanding, but that would stymie the chiasmus and in any case if 'parva' is a neuter plural nothing more is required...

Even if D.O.M. doesn't stand for domus, parva and the other adjectives could still be feminine singular with domus understood. Also, note propia by dissimilation for propria (cf. Spanish propio versus French propre). We could paraphrase the inscription as follows:

Small, but mine own—large enough; large, but another's—too small.

In a letter Lope de Vega also refers to "mi casilla, mi quietud, mi güertecillo, y estudio" ("my little house, my quiet, my garden and study").

The sentiment is similar to that of Ariosto's Latin inscription for his house (tr. W. Francis H. King):

Small, but it suits: 'tis mortgaged not to any:
Clean, and (what's more) bought out of my own money.

Parva sed apta mihi, sed nulli obnoxia, sed non
Sordida, parta meo sed tamen aere domus.

The popularity of the house inscription Parva domus, magna quies (small house, great peace) seems to date only from the nineteenth century. The earliest attestation I can find is Philippe Chasles, "Les Espions, les Valets, et la Musique à Rome en 1834," Revue de Paris 12 (1834) 29-35 (at 32):

L'inscription: Parva domus, magna quies, qui est placée au-dessus de la porte de la villa Albani dans Castelgandolfo est partout une grande vérité, mais ici plus qu'ailleurs.

My mother-in-law once gave me a little wooden plaque inscribed Parva domus, magna quies, which hangs on a wall in my house.

Related posts:

• Staying Put
  
• My Native Hills
  
• More on Aglaus of Psophis
  
• Staying at Home
  
• Lottites
  
• To Be Happy At Home
  
• Aglaus of Psophis
  
• Here

Ian Jackson sent me a photocopy of Elizabeth Jones, née Proksch, Memoir of Miss Mary Arnold (1906-1944), issued in 2002 "as part of the celebration of the centenary year of The Classical Association of Scotland." Miss Arnold was Miss Proksch's tutor. Excerpts follow.

p. 2:

One evening a week then I walked up through the Meadows, past the huge pile of the Royal Infirmary and the stately presence of George Heriot's school for boys to Miss Arnold's flat. The cold raw air would be heavy with smog which blurred the light from the lampposts making it mysterious, even sinister. I scrunched dry leaves underfoot and later slithered along wet snow chanting to myself the various conjugations and declensions as they presented themselves in my grammar book: "Amo, amas, amat, amamus, amatis, amant," and exhilarated by these chants that took me back through the centuries, felt that I was in love with the universe.

p. 4:

Lessons with her continued for three years: two years to achieve the Lower then the Higher Prelims and then one year of free tuition in Greek, for, she explained, "If there's anything I love more than Latin, it's Greek."

p. 4:

She had a great sense of ritual. One memorable occasion was the evening on which I was to graduate from prose to poetry. At my place was a small blue volume: Book I of Virgil's Aeneid in the Macmillan Elementary Classics edited by T.E. Page. First she explained the hexameter, the six feet of dactyls and spondees, the caesura, and then launched into "Arma virumque cano, Troiae qui primus ab oris ... " She read well, her clear voice rising and falling expressively but quite unaffectedly, confidently riding that "ocean-roll of rhythm" and I felt a huge surge of exhilaration. Then she guided me through deciphering and translating. Poetry read in a foreign language, it is said, is often experienced more intensely than poetry in one's mother tongue, because it is doubly strange and mysterious.

p. 11:

To some people her interests seemed decidedly antiquarian, and I remember one of my friends scoffing when, at Mary's suggestion, I proposed going in search of some Roman remains. But there was something infectious about her unaffected enthusiasm for history and books. She may have seemed a redoubtable schoolmarm stuck in the past and dismissive of the modern world but to me she opened portals.

p. 17:

Then she in turn told me about her reading. "They bring books around on a trolley for us to choose from. Well, I can't be bothered with those modern novels, everyone leaping in and out of bed with everyone else. But, look what I've found here, an anthology of bird poems with woodcuts by Bewick. Aren't they fine?"

Related posts:

• Dorothy Sayers on Education
  
• Kenneth Rexroth, Mrs. Manley, and Sappho

Samuel Johnson, The Rambler No. 5 (Tuesday, April 3, 1750):

The Spring affords to a Mind, so free from the Disturbance of Cares or Passions as to be vacant to calm Amusements, almost every Thing that our present State makes us capable of enjoying. The variegated Verdure of the Fields and Woods, the Succession of grateful Odours, the Voice of Pleasure pouring out its Notes on every Side, with the Observation of the Gladness apparently conceived by every Animal, from the Growth of his Food, and the Clemency of the Weather, throw over the whole Earth an Air of Gayety, which is very significantly expressed by the Smile of Nature.

There are Men to whom these Scenes are able to give no Delight, and who hurry away from all the Varieties of rural Beauty, to lose their Hours, and divert their Thoughts by Cards, or publick Assemblies, a Tavern Dinner, or the Prattle of the Day.

It may be laid down as a Position which will seldom deceive, that when a Man cannot bear his own Company there is something wrong. He must fly from himself, either because he feels a Tediousness in Life from the Equipoise of an empty Mind, which, having no Tendency to one Motion more than another but as it is impelled by some external Power, must always have recourse to foreign Objects; or he must be afraid of the Intrusion of some unpleasing Ideas, and, perhaps, is always struggling to escape from the Remembrance of a Loss, the Fear of a Calamity, or some other Thought of greater Horror.

Those, who are incapacitated to enjoy the Pleasures of Contemplation, by their Griefs, may, very properly, apply to such Diversions, provided they are innocent, as lay strong hold on the Attention; and those, whom Fear of any future Calamity chains down to Misery, must endeavour to obviate the Danger.

My Considerations shall, on this Occasion, be turned on such as are burthensome to themselves merely because they want Subjects for Reflection, and to whom the Volume of Nature is thrown open without affording them Pleasure or Instruction, because they never learned to read the Characters.

A French Author has advanced this seeming Paradox, that very few Men know how to take a Walk; and, indeed, it is very true, that few Men know how to take a Walk with a Prospect of any other Pleasure, than the same Company would have afforded them in any other Circumstances.

There are Animals that borrow their Colour from the neighbouring Body, and, consequently, vary their Hue as they happen to change their Place. In like manner it ought to be the Endeavour of every Man to derive his Reflexions from the Objects about him; for it is to no purpose that he alters his Position, if his Attention continues fixt to the same Point. The Mind should be kept open to the Access of every new Idea, and so far disengaged from the Predominance of particular Thoughts, as to be able to accommodate itself to emergent Occasions, and remark every Thing that offers itself to present Examination.

A Man that has formed this Habit of turning every new Object to his Entertainment, finds in the Productions of Nature an inexhaustible Stock of Materials, upon which he can employ himself, without any Temptations to Envy or Malevolence; Faults, perhaps, seldom totally avoided by those, whose Judgment is much exercised upon the Works of Art. He has always a certain Prospect of discovering new Reasons for adoring the Sovereign Author of the Universe, and probable Hopes of making some Discovery of Benefit to others, or of Profit to himself. There is no doubt but many Vegetables and Animals have Qualities that might be of great Use; to the Knowledge of which there is required no great Sagacity of Penetration, or Fatigue of Study, but only frequent Experiments, and close Attention. What is said by the Chymists of their darling Mercury, is, perhaps, true of every Body through the whole Creation, that, if a thousand Lives should be spent upon it, all its Properties would not be found out.

Mankind must necessarily be diversified by various Tastes, since Life affords and requires such multiplicity of Employments; and a Nation of Naturalists is neither to be hoped, or desired, but it is surely not improper to point out a fresh Amusement to those who langush in Health, and repine in Plenty, for want of some Source of Diversion that may be less easily exhausted, and to inform the Multitudes of both Sexes, who are burthened with every new Day, that there are many Shews which they have not seen.

He that enlarges his Curiosity after the Works of Nature, demonstrably multiplies the Inlets to Happiness, and, therefore, the younger Part of my Readers, to whom I dedicate this vernal Speculation, must excuse me for calling upon them to make use at once of the Spring of the Year, and the Spring of Life; to acquire, while their Minds may be yet impressed with new Images, a Love of innocent Pleasures, and an ardour for useful Knowledge; and to remember, that a blighted Spring makes a barren Year, and that the vernal Flowers, however beautiful and gay, are only intended by Nature as Preparatives to Autumnal Fruits.

Joseph Farquharson, Evening: The Wild Woods Among

Goethe, Faust 566-569 (tr. Walter Kaufman):

Parchment—is that the sacred fount
From which you drink to still your thirst forever?
If your refreshment does not mount
From your own soul, you gain it never.

Das Pergament, ist das der heil'ge Bronnen,
Woraus ein Trunk den Durst auf ewig stillt?
Erquickung hast du nicht gewonnen,
Wenn sie dir nicht aus eigner Seele quillt.

Montaigne, Essays III.13 (tr. Donald M. Frame):

What shall we do with this people that admits none but printed evidence, that does not believe men unless they are in a book, or truth unless it is of competent age? We dignify our stupidities when we put them in print. It carries very different weight with this people if you say "I have read it" than if you say "I have heard it." But I, who do not disbelieve men's mouths any more than their hands, and who know that people write just as injudiciously as they speak, and who esteem this age just as if it were another that is past, I quote a friend of mine as readily as Aulus Gellius or Macrobius, and what I have seen as what they have written. And, as they hold that virtue is no greater for being of longer standing, so I consider that truth is no wiser for being older. I often say that it is pure stupidity that makes us run after foreign and scholarly examples. There is as great an abundance of them in this age as in that of Homer and Plato. But is it not true that we seek rather the honor of quoting than the truth of the statement? As if it were greater to borrow our proofs from the shop of Vascosan or Plantin than from what may be seen in our own village. Or rather, indeed, that we have not the wit to pick out and put to use what happens before our eyes, and to judge it keenly enough to make it an example? For if we say we lack authority to gain credence for our testimony, we say so without reason.

Que ferons nous à ce peuple qui ne fait recepte que de tesmoignages imprimez, qui ne croit les hommes s'ils ne sont en livre, ny la verité si elle n'est d'aage competant? Nous mettons en dignité nos bestises quand nous les mettons en moule. Il y a bien pour luy autre poix de dire: je l'ai leu, que si vous dictes: je l'ay ouy dire. Mais moy, qui ne mescrois non plus la bouche que la main des hommes, et qui sçay qu'on escript autant indiscretement qu'on parle, et qui estime ce siecle comme un autre passé, j'allegue aussi volontiers un mien amy que Aulugele et que Macrobe, et ce que j'ay veu que ce qu'ils ont escrit. Et, comme ils tiennent de la vertu qu'elle n'est pas plus grande pour estre plus longue, j'estime de mesme de la verité que, pour estre plus vieille, elle n'est pas plus sage. Je dis souvent que c'est pure sottise qui nous fait courir apres les exemples estrangers et scholastiques. Leur fertilité est pareille à cette heure à celle du temps d'Homere et de Platon. Mais n'est-ce pas que nous cherchons plus l'honneur de l'allegation que la verité du discours? comme si c'estoit plus d'emprunter de la boutique de Vascosan ou de Plantin nos preuves, que de ce qui se voit en nostre village. Ou bien certes, que nous n'avons pas l'esprit d'esplucher et faire valoir ce qui se passe devant nous, et le juger assez vifvement pour le tirer en exemple? Car, si nous disons que l'authorité nous manque pour donner foy à nostre tesmoignage, nous le disons hors de propos.

Velasquez, Don Diego de Acedo, "El Primo"

Among compounds of knuckle, the Oxford English Dictionary includes knuckle-head, which it defines as "a slow-witted or stupid person." The OED's earliest citation is dated 1944, relying on Harold Wentworth and Stuart Berg Flexner, Dictionary of American Slang (New York: Thomas B. Crowell, 1960), p. 310, col. 2: "You knuckle-heads." The quotation in Wentworth and Flexner comes from a 1944 movie, Marine Raiders. Wentworth and Flexner remark, "Common, but most popular in Marine Corps and USN."

My memory might be playing tricks on me, but I seem to remember my father, a United States Navy veteran, calling someone a knuckle-head. Come to think of it, maybe he called me a knuckle-head. I certainly gave him reason enough.

There is a knuckle-head entry in the Dictionary of American Regional English, but that book is unavailable to me. Thanks to Google Books, however, it is possible to find an example of knuckle-head that antedates the Marine Raiders quotation by more than fifty years, viz. Charles Howard Shinn, "The Quicksands of Toro," Belford's Magazine Vol. V, No. 29 (October 1890) 735-739 (at 736):

"That infernal knuckle-head at the camp ought to have reported before now," he thought as he smoked.

Charles Howard Shinn (1852-1924) was a forest ranger and writer.

Knuckle-head also appears in another sense, as a mechanical or engineering term, meaning a metal part shaped like the rounded portion of a bent knuckle, perhaps for the first time in United States patent 75,282, granted on March 10, 1868 to James B. Lobdell of Centre Lisle, New York, for an "Improvement in Horse Hay-Forks." Here is part of the description:

B is the slide-bar, having the slots e e and knuckle-head f, which operates the cutters d d....The hooks or cutters d d are pivoted to the blade a so as to fit the knucle-head [sic] f, and are so formed as to serve as knives or shears to cut the hay....The lower edge of the knuckle-head f is also bevelled on the outside.

Here is an illustration of part of Lobdell's hay-fork, showing the knuckle-head, labelled f and located between the cutters d d:

Labels: lexicography

In an email, Eric Thomson agreed with my interpretation of Carl Tilden Keller's bookplate as a portrayal of Don Quixote reading: "Sword, helm, shrivelled shanks and candlelight are all there." Jorge Luis Borges (1899–1986) wrote the following sonnet about Don Quixote reading (tr. Alastair Reid):

Readers

Of that gentleman with the sallow, dry complexion
and knightly disposition, they conjecture
that, always on the edge of an adventure,
he never actually left his library.
The precise chronicle of his campaigning
and all its tragicomical reversals
was dreamed by him and not by Cervantes
and is no more than a record of his dreaming.
Such is also my luck. I know there is something
essential and immortal that I have buried
somewhere in that library of the past
in which I read the story of that knight.
The slow leaves now recall a solemn child
who dreams vague things he does not understand.

Lectores

De aquel hidalgo de cetrina y seca
Tez y de heroico afán se conjetura
Que, en víspera perpetua de aventura,
No salió nunca de su biblioteca.
La crónica puntual que sus empeños
Narra y sus tragicómicos desplantes
Fue soñada por él, no por Cervantes,
Y no es más que una crónica de sueños.
Tal es también mi suerte. Sé que hay algo
Inmortal y esencial que he sepultado
En esa biblioteca del pasado
En que leí la historia del hidalgo.
Las lentas hojas vuelve un niño y grave
Sueña con vagas cosas que no sabe.

Gustave Doré (1832–1883),
Don Quixote Reading

André Gide, Journals (1914, after a visit to Turkey), tr. Justin O'Brien (ellipsis in original):

What a relaxation it is to have enlarged on the map the space one no longer wants to go and see! For too long I believed (out of love of exoticism, out of fear of chauvinistic self-satisfaction, and perhaps out of modesty), for too long I thought that there was more than one civilization, more than one culture that could rightfully claim our love and deserve our enthusiasm... Now I know that our Occidental (I was about to say French) civilization is not only the most beautiful; I believe, I know that it is the only one—yes, the very civilization of Greece, of which we are the only heirs.

Quel repos d'avoir élargi sur la carte les espaces où l'on n'a plus souci d'aller voir! Trop longtemps j'ai pensé, par amour de l'exotisme, par méfiance de l'infatuation chauvine et peut-être par modestie, trop longtemps j'ai cru qu'il y avait plus d'une civilisation, plus d'une culture qui pût prétendre à notre amour et méritât qu'on s'en éprît... A présent je sais que notre civilisation occidentale (j'allais dire: française) est non point seulement la plus belle; je crois, je sais qu'elle est la seule — oui, celle-même de la Grèce, dont nous sommes les seuls héritiers.

Grace Norton, Studies in Montaigne (New York: Macmillan, 1904), pp. 165-166:

The same year in which he edited La Boëtie's works (1571) Montaigne withdrew from life in the world, and established himself permanently in his château of Montaigne, placing in a room adjoining his Library a Latin inscription which, translated, runs thus:

"In the year of Christ 1571 Michael Montaigne, aged 38, on his birthday, the day preceding the Kalends of March, already long wearied of the servitude of the law-courts, and of public offices, has retired, with faculties still entire, to the arms of the learned virgins, there to pass in all quiet and security, such length of days as remain to him, of his already more than half-spent years, if so the fates permit him to finish this abode and these sweet ancestral retreats consecrated to his freedom and tranquillity and leisure."

J.S. Phillimore said, "quot editores, tot Propertii." This saying came to mind when I looked at the slightly different versions of Montaigne's Latin inscription published in various books. Here is the text from Donald Frame's biography of Montaigne (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1965), p. 353, except that I removed periods before some of the brackets enclosing editorial insertions:

An[no] Christi [1571] aet[ate] 38, pridie cal[endas] Mart[ias], die suo natali, Mich[aelis] Montanus, servitii aulici et munerum publicorum jamdudum pertaesus, dum se integer in doctarum Virginum recessit sinus, ubi quietus et omnium securus [quant]illum id tandem superabit decursi multa jam plus parte spatii, si modo fata duint, exigat istas sedes et dulces latebras avitasque libertati suae tranquillitatique et otio consecravit.

The "learned virgins" are the Muses, of course.

Valerio Mezzanotti, photograph of Alberto Manguel's library,
accompanying Manguel's essay
"A 30,000-Volume Window on the World,"
New York Times (May 15, 2008)
Related posts:

• Montaigne's Tower
  
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André Gide, Journals (July 12, 1922), tr. Justin O'Brien:

This pine grove would be charming, which stretches out along the beach, which is broken up by dunes, and where cistus, lentiscuses, briers, and sallow-thorns form the underbrush. I never meet anyone here, but no god inhabits it either, since the trace of man has so profaned, disenchanted, soiled it. Everywhere old tin cans, rags, eggshells, nameless rubbish, greasy papers, turds, toilet-paper, broken bottles. Everywhere the image of selfishness, of overfamiliarity, and of gluttony.

Thomas de Quincey (1785–1859), Murder as a Fine Art:

For, if once a man indulges himself in murder, very soon he comes to think little of robbing; and from robbing he comes next to drinking and Sabbath-breaking, and from that to incivility and procrastination. Once begin upon this downward path, you never know where you are to stop.

Excerpts from Conversations with Elizabeth Bishop, edited by George Monteiro (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1996).

p. 80 (from an interview with Beatriz Schiller, 1977):

"How did you prepare for a life of poetry?"

"I studied music, afterwards changing over to English literature. Literature, Latin, Greek, Zoology. I don't know which subject helped me the most. I never took courses on how to write. Actually, in my time they did not exist. They are a new thing. I tell my students that instead of learning to write poetry, they would do better to study Latin and Greek. Hardly any of them have studied Latin. In the past Latin was mandatory. I find that while it is not essential, having Latin sharpens one's control over other languages. The universities should teach things that can be taught. I find it nonsensical to go to the university to learn to be creative."

p. 91 (from an interview with George Starbuck, 1977):

GS: Do you approve of all the creative writing classes...

EB: No. I try to discourage them! I tell students they'd be better off studying Latin. Latin or Greek. They are useful for verse writing. I have a feeling that if there is a great poet at Boston University or Harvard now, he or she may be hiding somewhere, writing poetry and not going to writing classes at all. However, I have had some students who have done very well (two or three "geniuses" I think and several very talented). I think the best one hopes for is that after students graduate they'll continue to read poetry for the rest of their lives. What can you teach, really teach?

pp. 108-109 (from an interview with Eileen McMahon, 1978):

Q. Do you think that the Latin and Greek you studied in college affected your poetry?

A. Latin probably. I had an excellent teacher while I was at Vassar. I remember sitting for a couple of years on Monday mornings and writing Latin prose from English prose. I was not a very good student in college. I was always distracted, but I do think that Latin is probably the best writing exercise I can think of.

Evelyn Waugh has a very good passage in his first autobiography about the value of translation both ways—from a dead language to live ones. Through translation you learn that certain words mean things and they have to be in certain places in a sentence to be effective.

Hat tip: Ian Jackson.