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"The dismal change is ordained, and then thin meagre Latin with small shreds and patches of Greek, is thrown like a pauper's pall over all your early lore; instead of sweet knowledge, vile, monkish, doggerel grammars and graduses, dictionaries and lexicons, and horrible odds and ends of dead languages are given you for your portion, and down you fall, from Roman story to a three-inch scrap of 'Scriptores Romani, from Greek poetry, down, down to the cold rations of 'Poetae Graeci, cut up by commentators, and served out by school- masters!"
We perceive here and there indeed the "torn members of the poet" disjecta membra poetae; but the whole is so constrained, disfigured, and, from the simple fulness of the original, tortured and twisted into such miserable intricacy, that even when the language is retained word for word, it ceases to convey its genuine meaning.
But his fellow intruder seemed agitated by the sound of the Latin; he lifted up his head suddenly, and showed lips glistening with white even teeth, and curved into an approving smile, while he said: "Bene, me fili! bene, lepidissime, poetae verba, in militis ore, non indecora sonant."
Olivarii Goldsmith, Poetae, Physici, Historici Qui nullum fere scribendi genus Non tetigit, Nullum quod tetigit non ornavit: Seu risus essent movendi, Sive lacrymae, Affectuum potens at lenis dominator: Ingenio sublimis, vividus, versatilis, Oratione grandis, nitidus, venustus: Hoc monumento memoriam coluit Sodalium amor, Amicorum fides, Lectorum veneratio.
Disjecta membra poetae, the artificial poesy, so much admired by those for whom it is conceived and elaborated, the fragments of a pretty woman, litter every corner of the room.
"Tempora certa modosque, et, quod prius ordine verbum est, Posterius facias, praeponens ultima primis Invenias etiam disjecti membra poetae." he will never the more lose himself for that; the very pieces will be fine by themselves.
Raymond's hair was greyer, and Taffy might have observed but did not how readily towards the close of a day's laborious carpentry he would drop work and turn to Dindorf's Poetae Scenici Graeci, through which they were reading their way. On Sundays the congregation rarely numbered a dozen.
Applying to Goldsmith equally the epithets of 'Poetae, Historici, Physici, is surely not right; for as to his claim to the last of those epithets, I have heard Johnson himself say, 'Goldsmith, Sir, will give us a very fine book upon the subject; but if he can distinguish a cow from a horse, that, I believe, may be the extent of his knowledge of natural history. His book is indeed an excellent performance, though in some instances he appears to have trusted too much to Buffon, who, with all his theoretical ingenuity and extraordinary eloquence, I suspect had little actual information in the science on which he wrote so admirably.
As for the epithet probabili, he 'never reflected upon it without almost a triumphant feeling in its felicity. Nevertheless he would change it into 'poetae sententiarum et verborum ponderibus admirabili. Yet these words, 'energetic and sonorous' though they were, 'fill one with a secret and invincible loathing, because they tend to introduce into the epitaph a character of magnificence. With every fresh objection he rose in importance.
It is easy to imagine "what problems Shakespeare would present if he were printed like the Poetae Scenici Graeci," and not more difficult to realize how many things there would be to puzzle us in Ghosts and The Wild Duck if we possessed nothing but the bare text.
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