asinal

Updated: May 1, 2025

It was this redemption by roses, and the initiation into virtue's path, that caused Adlington in his introduction to call the book "a figure of man's life, egging mortal men forward from their asinal form to their human and perfect shape, that so they might take a pattern to regenerate their lives from brutish and beastly custom," And, indeed, the book is, in a wider sense, the figure of man's life, for almost alone among the writings of antiquity it reveals to us every phase of that dim underworld which persists, as we have supposed, almost unnoticed and unchanged from one generation of man to another, and takes little account either of government, the arts, or the other interests of intellectual classes.

Henry Woodd Nevinson - Essays in Rebellion