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I shall therefore conclude with a word of advice to those admirable English authors who call themselves Pindaric writers, that they would apply themselves to this kind of wit without loss of time, as being provided better than any other poets with verses of all sizes and dimensions. Second Paper. Operose nihil aguat. Busy about nothing.
The comic-opera subject, for such it really is, was not adapted to Schiller's vein. His 'Turandot' is distinctly stiff and operose. It had a short run at two or three theaters, where, as at Weimar, it excited a small interest on account of the riddles and the Chinese 'business', and then it was quietly consigned to the limbo of things that were.
By dint of keeping well asunder those who would not draw well together, Lady Cecilia did contrive to get through the remaining morning of this operose visit; some she sent out to drive with gallant military outriders to see places in the neighbourhood famed for this or that; others walked or boated, or went through the customary course of conservatories, pheasantry, flower-garden, pleasure-grounds, and best views of Clarendon Park and billiards always.
At any rate, let me not, on my return, have occasion to apply to you the motto, "Strenua me exercet inertia," nor that other of "Operose nihil agit." But so improve your time that you may with pleasure review and commit it to journal. "Hoc est, Vivere bis, vita priori frui." And let it, at no very distant period, be said of you, "Tot, tibi, sunt, ergo dotes, quot sidera coelo."
What is the end sought? Plainly to secure the ends of good sense and beauty, from the intrusion of deformity or vulgarity of any kind. But what an operose method! What a train of means to secure a little conversation!
It begins with a sonnet on the Royal Anagram 'James Stuart: A just Master; celebrates his Majesty in French and Italian, and then fills six pages with verse built in his Majesty's honour, in the form of bases and capitals of columns, inscribed each with the name of one of the Muses. No. 59. Tuesday, May 8, 1711. Addison. 'Operose Nihil agunt. Seneca.
At that time, on your part, you were not afraid to review what was done at the Revolution of 1688, and what had been continued during the subsequent flourishing period of the British empire. The change then made was a great and fundamental alteration. In the execution, it was an operose business on both sides of the water.
The common Scotch saying, on the sight of anything operose and finical, "he must have had little to do that made that!" might be put as epigraph on all the song books of old France. Making such sorts of verse belongs to the same class of pleasures as guessing acrostics or "burying proverbs." It is almost purely formal, almost purely verbal. It must be done gently and gingerly.
In 1646 he printed his second book, the largest and most operose of all his productions: the 'Pseudodoxia Epidemica, or Inquiries into Vulgar and Common Errors' the work evidently of the horæ subsecivæ of many years.
That it continued motionless, will be easily believed; and most men would have been content to believe it, without the labour of so hopeless an experiment. Browne might himself have obtained the same conviction by a method less operose, if he had thrust his needles through corks, and set them afloat in two basins of water.
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