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I paid a visit to my old friend John Brown the other day, as I thought he would be able to tell me something about the harvest feasts of bygone days. He is a dear old man of some seventy-eight summers, though somewhat of the laudator temporis acti school; but what good-nature and sense of humour there is in the good, honest face!
But, in the midst of this, I remember we all grew silent on hearing the old cynical amateur, L. S , that laudator temporis acti, stumping along with his wooden leg; he entered the room with his usual scowl, and, as he advanced, he continued to growl and stutter the whole way "Not an original idea in the whole piece mere plagiarism, base plagiarism from hints that I threw out!
The finest performances of our own age he snarled at cynically; and at length this querulous humor grew upon him so much, and he became so notorious as a laudator tentporis acti, that few people cared to seek his society. This made him still more fierce and truculent.
the fond antiquarianism of Varro, "laudator temporis acti," unite, with the newly-kindled hope of future glories to be achieved under Caesar's rule, to make the Georgics the most complete embodiment of Roman industrial views, as the Aeneid is of Roman theology and religion.
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.
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.
These things are utterly different from the fanaticism of a laudator temporis acti." When Talma heard her declaim, at the time of her earliest celebrity in Paris, he said: "Here is a woman of whom I can still learn. One turn of her beautiful head, one glance of her eye, one light motion of her hand, is, with her, sufficient to express a passion.
A certain amount of self-deception is quite possible at threescore years and ten, but at three score years and twenty Nature has shown most of those who live to that age that she is earnest, and means to dismantle and have done with them in a very little while. As for boasting of our past, the laudator temporis acti makes but a poor figure in our time.
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.
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.
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