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Updated: June 16, 2025
He notes the stages and points to which his plans have reached; he indicates, with a favourite quotation or apophthegm "Plus ultra" "ausus vana contemnere" "aditus non nisi sub persona infantis" soon to be familiar to the world in his published writings the lines of argument, sometimes alternative ones, which were before him; he draws out schemes of inquiry, specimen tables, distinctions and classifications about the subject of Motion, in English interlarded with Latin, or in Latin interlarded with English, of his characteristic and practical sort; he notes the various sources from which he might look for help and co-operation "of learned men beyond the seas" "to begin first in France to print it" "laying for a place to command wits and pens;" he has his eye on rich and childless bishops, on the enforced idleness of State prisoners in the Tower, like Northumberland and Raleigh, on the great schools and universities, where he might perhaps get hold of some college for "Inventors" as we should say, for the endowment of research.
The great field of education, after the break up of the ancient system, was mainly in Greek hands; while her literature and language were so familiar to the educated Roman that in his moments of intensest feeling it was generally in some Greek apophthegm that he expressed the passion which moved him. There are, of course, individual exceptions.
Collier did so, and found that the moral of the Old Bachelor, the grave apophthegm which is to be a set-off against all the libertinism of the piece, is contained in the following triplet: "What rugged ways attend the noon of life! Our sun declines, and with what anxious strife, What pain, we tug that galling load a wife."
Passive obedience, blind submission to authority, was never one of my virtues, and once my faith was shattered, I knew not where to stop what to doubt, what to believe. If the injunction to 'prove all things' was anything more than an empty apophthegm, inquiry, in St. Paul's eyes at any rate, could not be sacrilege.
Later he delivered himself of the unstatesmanlike and unworthy apophthegm: "Better be united in support of a short-sighted and foolish policy than divided in support of a far-sighted and wise one." This was the fatuous attitude which led him down the steep declivity that ended so tragically for him and his reputation.
And here comes in the peculiarly paralysing effect of these baser emotions. As Victor Hugo once said, in a fine apophthegm, "Despair yawns." Fear and anxiety bring with them a particular kind of physical fatigue which makes us listless and inert. They lie on the spirit with a leaden dullness, which takes from us all possibility of energy and motion.
One apophthegm only stands upon record. When an objection, raised against his inscription for Shakespeare, was defended by the authority of Patrick, he replied, horresco referens, that he "would allow the publisher of a dictionary to know the meaning of a single word, but not of two words put together." He was fretful and easily displeased, and allowed himself to be capriciously resentful.
Presently, envisaging his duties towards the State, he restrained these natural but unworthy emotions, smiled his well-known smile, and gave utterance to an apophthegm which had since found its way into a good many copy-books: "In the purity of childhood," he said, "lie the seeds of national prosperity."
He shook his silvery head at his own image in the looking-glass, as if to impress the apophthegm on that shadowy representative of himself; and for his part, he determined to pluck up a spirit and live as long as he possibly could, if it were only for the sake of little Pansie, who stood as close to one extremity of human life as her great-grandfather to the other.
"'Tis conscience that makes cowards of us all," said Shakespeare, with that wonderful wisdom which enlightens his glorious pages; and, in fact, Sir Robert Whitecraft, in his own person, fully corroborated the truth of the poet's apophthegm.
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