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Updated: May 13, 2025
He had wandered during the reign of Henry the Sixth in search of learning to Italy, had studied at her universities and become a teacher at Padua, where the elegance of his Latinity drew tears from the most learned of the Popes, Pius the Second, better known as Æneas Sylvius.
What he first wrote was: 'Andreas Ammonius Erasmo Roterodamo S.D., but afterwards he scratched out Ammonius' name and wrote in 'Guilhelmus Montioius'. In a sense, of course, he was correct; for the letter was written in Mountjoy's name. But he cannot have been unaware that in an age which valued elegant Latinity so highly, his patron would be gratified by the ascription.
The Latinity, therefore, is good; but though good, it can scarcely be said to be that of an ancient Roman; for an ancient Roman never resorted to such inflexions in prose, only when writing poetry to get over the difficulties of rhythm; hence a modern European would easily fall into the error, from taking the Latin of Virgil to be most perfect; and from deeming that what was done in verse could, with equal propriety, be done in prose.
Nor was Reanda's priestly education anything but an advantage to him, so far as his career was concerned, however much it had raised him above the class in which he had been born. So far as latinity and rhetoric were to be counted he was better educated than his father's master; for with the same advantages he had greater talents, greater originality, and greater industry.
There were days on which he seemed to yield to these arguments; days when he expanded and gave rein to his fancy, smiling in anticipation of that noble volume the golden Latinity of Monsignor Perrelli enriched with twenty-five years' patient labour on the part of himself; days when he would go so far as to discuss prospective contracts, and bindings and photogravures, and margins, and paper.
"Domsie," as we called the schoolmaster, behind his back in Drumtochty, because we loved him, was true to the tradition of his kind, and had an unerring scent for "pairts" in his laddies. He could detect a scholar in the egg, and prophesied Latinity from a boy that seemed fit only to be a cowherd.
I may be wrong, but I suspect that one of the later uses of "actus," as quoted in Ducange, affected Spinoza's Latinity. Thus several ecclesiastical writers are quoted as using the word in the sense of office, or function. Surely this would suit Spinoza's definition of the mind. For he treats it as a centre of phenomenal activity amidst the infinite modes of the divine attribute. Corollarium.
In them we find the eloquence of the heart, not of the rhetorical school. They are models of pure Latinity, elegant without stiffness, the natural outpourings of a mind which could not give birth to an ungraceful idea. In his letters to Atticus he lays bare the secret of his heart; he trusts his life in his hands; he is not only his friend but his confidant, his second self.
Samuel Johnson bulged on the side of Latinity. Daniel Webster is an example of the magnificent, illustrating gorgeousness, opulence, and tropic splendour. Lincoln's sentences are like the Bible and Bunyan, they are plate-glass windows through which you look to see the jewelled thought beyond. Lincoln tells us how he made his style. One day he heard a man use the word "demonstrate."
Latinity is not one of my predilections, and Regina, Reginae, Reginam, wearily remind me of the classic-slough of declensions and conjugations of my Livy, Sallust, Tacitus.
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