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And posterity repudiating the verse which makes the body of the book, yet grants permanent value to the book itself, because, forsooth, its copious explanatory foot-notes furnish an outline of the status of almost every department of science of the time.
First there was the Voltaire text, Authorized Edition, 'end of September, 1740; then came, in few weeks, the Van Duren one; then, probably, a third, combining the two, the variations given as foot-notes: in short, I know not how many editions, translations, printings and reprintings; all the world being much taken up with such a message from the upper regions, and eager to read it in any form.
The Sonnets are all more or less harsh and unintelligible, a criticism which applies to many of the other poems. Miss Whitney evidently despises foot-notes as utterly as Tennyson, and leaves much unexplained in her titles and in the poems themselves, which might help us to understand them, if we knew it.
Next, however, comes a fiction so maniacally gross, so incoherent, and so rife with internal contradictions, as to involve its own exposure, literally shrinking from its own intelligible enunciation, burrowing in sentences kept aloof from the text, and calling upon foot-notes to cover it. The case will speak for itself.
Bare walls and floorings, a print or two, a few trunks and packing cases utilized as seats, a bookshelf, a plain table littered with manuscripts; somewhere, in that further room, a camp bedstead whereon this man of single aim and purpose, this monk of literature, was even then at rest like all sensible folks, and dreaming dreaming, presumably, of foot-notes. Happy mortal!
The arrangement of the book is admirable. At the commencement of each chapter we have the titles of the various sections, and each successive section is introduced by a statement of the contents of each clause. This facilitates search, though it necessitates the cumbrous mode of reference adopted in the foot-notes to chapter, section, and placitum.
The ages in which they flourished, attached no value to pedantic displays of labor, or evidences of learning paraded in foot-notes. Thus the great historians whom I have alluded to, both Greek and Latin, have few equals and no superiors, in our own times, in those things which are most to be admired.
I saw that I should require foot-notes. All this was new stuff to me. I had stayed at Brinkley Court quite a lot in my time, but I had no idea the larder was such a social vortex. More like a snack bar on a race-course than anything else, it seemed to have become.
William of Scotland was made a prisoner in 1174, and the confederacy against the king broken up. Thus, in 1175, the castle at Edinburgh came into the hands of the English, and roast beef was substituted for oats. Irish and Scotch whiskey were now introduced into the national policy, and bits of bright English humor, with foot-notes for the use of the Scots, were shipped to Edinburgh.
He who would realize how men have differed in their moral outlook on life might read the lives of Aristippus, Epicurus and Zeno, in Diogenes Laertius; or follow the account, in Sidgwick's History of Ethics, of Aristotle's teaching, as compared with the ethics of the Church. Several foot-notes are given which might be followed up.
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