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The natural conservatism of growing years, it must be frankly admitted, led eventually in Lord John's case, as in that of the majority of mankind, to the slackening of interest in the new problems of a younger generation, but to the extreme verge of life he remained far too great a statesman and much too generous a man ever to lapse into the position of a mere laudator temporis acti.
The same writer lays herself fairly open to the charge of being laudator temporis acti in her description of the present as compared with the past social life of the colonies, though I am quite prepared to agree with her remark, that 'in proportion as the conditions of life become more complex, they should be met by more ingenuity, more culture, and a deeper sense of duty; and that 'the suddenness of our accumulation of wealth has scarcely prepared our little community for some necessary modifications of our social arrangements. Therein lies the whole source of both what is best and what is worst in the present social life of Australia.
The shouldering of a barrel of flour is a feat, by the way, which many an old inhabitant will tell you that he, or some friend of his, could accomplish in his eighteenth year. Why it should always be among the res gestæ temporis acti cannot be readily explained.
And what an orchestra was Costa's with Sainton leader, and Lindley and old Dragonetti, who together but alone, accompanied the RECITATIVE with their harmonious chords on 'cello and double-bass. Is singing a lost art? Or is that but a TEMPORIS ACTI question? We who heard those now silent voices fancy there are none to match them nowadays.
Many, many years ago, in those "good old times" so much bepraised by antiquaries and the laudatores temporis acti, the good old times, that is to say, of the holy office, of those magnificent autos when the smell of roasted heretics was as sweet a savor in the nostrils of the faithful, as that of Quakers done remarkably brown was to our godly Puritan ancestors, there dwelt in the royal city of Madrid a wealthy goldsmith by the name of Antonio Perez, whose family having lost his wife consisted of a lovely daughter, named Magdalena, and a less beautiful but still charming niece, Juanita.
There one must be a laudator temporis acti, for the present is wholly wretched and bad. The fact is, Arles had a glorious past, from which it has been falling throughout the Middle Ages till it reached a point approaching extinction, and it has not as yet realised that better days are shining before it, and that there is a future to which it may look up.
So will some unborn /laudator temporis acti/ speak in some dim century to be, when our sorrows have faded and are not. And yet, though we do not put a record of them in our Christmas numbers, troubles are as troubles have been and will continually be, for however apparently happy the lot of individuals, it is not altogether a cheerful world in which we have been called to live.
Here again we have one of those qualities to be found among mankind everywhere and always: the instinct opposed to change, even to those changes for the good we call progress, the disposition that made Horace deride the laudator temporis acti se puero of his day, the feeling of the man who laments the passing of the "good old times" and the military veteran who assures us that "the country, sir, is going to the dogs."
Nevertheless, the outlook may fairly be described as confused and the issue uncertain. And to come without further preface to the subject of this paper it is with this material that the modern novelist, so far as he is a modern and not a future novelist, or a novelist temporis acti, has to work.
He is "laudator temporis acti" a "prophesier of things past." The old world is to him a crowded map; the new one a dull, hateful blank. He dotes on all well- authenticated superstitions; he shudders at the shadow of innovation. His retentiveness of memory, his accumulated weight of interested prejudice or romantic association have overlaid his other faculties.