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Updated: May 14, 2025
Septimus, during the brief interval of an over, allows his eyes to stray round the huge circle. Upon the ground are the youth, the beauty, the rank and fashion of the kingdom, and, best of all, his old friends. The Rev. Septimus has a weakness, being, of course, human to the finger-tips. He calls himself a laudator temporis acti. In his day, the match was less of a function.
Here again we have one of those qualities to be found among mankind everywhere and always: the instinct opposed to change, even to those changes for the good we call progress, the disposition that made Horace deride the laudator temporis acti se puero of his day, the feeling of the man who laments the passing of the "good old times" and the military veteran who assures us that "the country, sir, is going to the dogs."
And this frank admission ought to show that I am not your mere twaddling laudator temporis acti your old fogey who can see no good except in his own time. They say that claret is better nowadays, and cookery much improved since the days of my monarch of George IV. Pastry Cookery is certainly not so good. I passed by the pastrycook's shop lately, having occasion to visit my old school.
True, later it had called him an "overbearing and insane procrastinator" "an apostle of absolutism" and, plum of all literary gleanings, since it left so much to the imagination of the native reader, "laudator temporis acti."
Others there are yet more open and artless, who, instead of suborning a flatterer, are content to supply his place, and as some animals impregnate themselves, swell with the praises which they hear from their own tongues. Recte is dicitur laudare sese, cui nemo alius contigit laudator. "It is right," says Erasmus, "that he, whom no one else will commend, should bestow commendations on himself."
Years hence the Court we will call Sapps will still dwell in some old mind that knew its every brick, and be portrayed to credulous hearers yet unborn as an unpretentious Eden, by some laudator of its tempus actum some forgotten soul waiting for emancipation in an infirmary or almshouse. Anyhow, I can remember this Court, and can tell a tale it plays a part in, only not very quick.
Now, at the risk of being thought "a laudator" of time present, I would say, here is the element of greatness we have made progress in. We are more open in mind and soul. We have learned to pity each other more. There is a greatness in modern toleration which our ancestors knew not. Then comes the other element of greatness, courage. Have we made progress in that?
And this frank admission ought to show that I am not your mere twaddling laudator temporis acti your old fogy who can see no good except in his own time. They say that claret is better now-a-days, and cookery much improved since the days of MY monarch of George IV. Pastry Cookery is certainly not so good. I passed by the pastry-cook's shop lately, having occasion to visit my old school.
I don't think anybody who does me the honour to cognise my humble individuality at all will ever be likely to mistake me for a laudator temporis acti. On the contrary, so far as I can see, the past seems generally to have been such a distinct failure all along the line that the one lesson we have to learn from it is, to go and do otherwise. I am one on that point with Shelley and Rousseau.
The natives, who, for the most part, are frank Vandals, also admire efforts of which they are aware that they are themselves incapable, and even the laudator temporis acti has his mouth stopped by the cheap and often tawdry luxury, which the coming of the Europeans has placed within his reach.
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