1 year ago

Ye realms yet unrevealed to human sight,
Ye canes athwart the hapless hands that write,
Ye critic chiefs,-permit me to relate
The mystic wonders of your silent state!

VIRGIL, Æneid, book vi.

----

The construction of some of these overly long sentences is so clumsy, I have a hard time myself keeping track of what I'm reading. This chapter is particularly filled with them. Oy!

Hippocrene - a spring on Mount Helicon, sacred to the muses, and formed when Pegasus struck his hoof into the ground. It is supposed to provide inspiration to poets who drink from it.

"es humerosve" - this must surely be a typo, or else a very obsolete spelling from, I guess the Spanish? Fortunately, there is a footnote in text indicating the meaning of "face or shoulders".

"I would as lief you had talked to me of ratsbane!": a paraphrase from Henry IV, part 2, act 1, scene 2, where the actual line is "I had as lief they would put ratsbane in my mouth as offer to stop it with security."

festina lente: Latin for "make haste slowly".

"he would share his last shilling with his beloved pupil, but that he regretted at that moment he had only eleven-pence halfpenny in his pocket" - for those not familiar with the UK's pre-decimalisation coinage, there were 12 pennies to a shilling. HA!

The picture used is "Dickens's Dream" by Robert William Buss, painted in 1875. For our purposes here, fancy if you will it being Mr. MacGrawler in his apartment.

To follow along: https://www.gutenberg.org/files/7735/7735-h/7735-h.htm#link2HCH0005

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