The Garland of Meleager

Extract

Perhaps it is a little late to deprecate the decline of ‘Verses’. Nevertheless such of us as put our trust in a classical renaissance after the war cannot but hope that that branch of scholarship in which Britain was and still is pre-eminent will survive and flourish again in happier times.

In Lorna Doone John Ridd describes his second in his fight at Blundell's: ‘A rare ripe scholar he was, and now he hath routed up the Germans in the matter of criticism.’ It would be interesting to know who that contemporary of Bentley might have been, because we British do not appear to be cut out for ‘scholars’ in the formal sense. We have yet to produce a Madvig or a Cobet, and it is doubtful whether we ever shall. Constitutionally we are apt to be not so interested in externals as in internals; and once having learned Greek and Latin we wanted to write them and express great thoughts in them. So we invented ‘Verses’.

Wilamowitz, it is recorded, once attempted to compose a Greek iambic in order to illustrate a point of metre. The result was ludicrous. It is extraordinary how so great a scholar could have been so poor at manipulating the language. It is doubtful whether the author of the Prolegomena Xenophontea could have composed a set of verses in any wise comparable to those produced by Thomas Saunders Evans as a boy at Shrewsbury, and although the latter never exhibited the extreme form of precociousness which enabled the Dutch scholar to acquire an international reputation in the early twenties, the praise he once earned from his headmaster when announcing the winning copy of hexameters could hardly have been higher: ‘Gentlemen, the copy of verses which has been awarded the prize this year is worthy of Vergil!’ No wonder another copy of verses written by a Shrewsbury boy at that time and secreted among some Oxford papers won a University prize!