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Updated: May 13, 2025
So that I fell instead upon the expedient of absenting myself so much as I was able; taking out classes and sitting there regularly, often with small attention, the test of which I found the other day in a notebook of that period, where I had left off to follow an edifying lecture, and actually scribbled in my book some very ill verses, though the Latinity is rather better than I thought I could ever have compassed.
But in truth he might have been more concise, less eloquence would have sufficed had not the idle hours of a sea voyage thrown open a wider door for its display. Lempriere was ready to promise anything on the joy of the long-wished for moment. "Quod optanti Divum promittere nemo Auderet." As he himself expressed the matter with wonted Latinity.
A leathern official style, in the impurest of Latin, was very common. In the Milanese documents preserved by Corio there is a remarkable contrast between this sort of composition and the few letters written by members of the princely house, which must have been written, too, in moments of critical importance. They are models of pure Latinity.
"Son Adam," said the holy man, "I crave your company an instant, oro vestrem aurem;" and with this abominable piece of Latinity the friar vanished. With a resigned and mournful shrug of the shoulders, Adam walked across the room, when Hilyard, arresting his progress, said, crossing himself, and in a subdued and fearful whisper, "Is not that Friar Bungey, the notable magician?"
Cornelius Nepos was a historical writer of whose life almost no particulars have come down to us, except that he was a friend of Cicero, Catullus, and probably of other men of letters who lived at the end of the republic. The lives are, however, valuable for their pure Latinity, and interesting for the lofty tone in which the greatness of the Roman people is celebrated.
The cavalcade stops at various intervals during its progress, and on these occasions the priests burn incense before the perambulating temple; and thereupon an ecclesiastical choir chants, in succession, the stanzas of the famous hymn, Tantum ergo Sacramentum,—a poetical composition, attributed to Thomas de Aquinas, and which, although written in rhyme, according to the practice adopted on the degeneration of the pure Latinity, and although the verses have a species of jingling which never met the approbation of the literati of the Augustan age, nevertheless they contain lofty sentiments, and explain in an ingenious manner the dogma of transubstantiation.
Tribulation, Immortality, the Multitude: what remedy of composure do these words bring for their own great disquiet! Without the remoteness of the Latinity the thought would come too close and shake too cruelly. In order to the sane endurance of the intimate trouble of the soul an aloofness of language is needful. Johnson feared death. Did his noble English control and postpone the terror?
Did not Pontanus, poet and philosopher of unrivalled Latinity, make the finest possible oration at Naples to welcome the French king, who had come to dethrone the learned orator's royal friend and patron? and still Pontanus held up his head and prospered. Men did not really care about these things, except when their personal spleen was touched.
Gregory the Great, whose era, not to say whose influence, is often considered especially unfavourable to the old literature, was himself well versed in it, encouraged purity of Latinity in his court, and is said figuratively by the contemporary historian of his life to have supported the hall of the Apostolic See upon the columns of the Seven Liberal Arts.
I was able to discover mistakes even in the classical quotations of the deeply lettered Sumner, and I remember, in the earliest years of my service on the Atlantic, waiting in this statesman's study amidst the prints and engravings that attested his personal resemblance to Edmund Burke, with his proofs in my hand and my heart in my mouth, to submit my doubts of his Latinity.
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