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September 26, 2004

Advantages Of Reading Dull Prose

I don't recall whether I read this in the primary or a secondary source, but I jotted it down on a piece of paper years ago:

But it is not in verse alone that a pupil will stumble over artificial collocations. They abound in prose, wherever a writer is affecting the grand style, or is talking fine; whenever Livy begins scene-painting; or Cicero to roll in flood; or Tacitus to ‘glower into a puddle;’ or Juvenal to pour the vials of his carefully-bottled wrath upon excesses with which he betrays a suspicious familiarity. A pupil, by being brought into too early an acquaintance with the tricks of rhetoric, fails later on to appreciate their force. With a sober-tinted background of natural Latin, these artificial figures would be brought out in full relief: as it is, they blend with the surrounding landscape, and the whole picture, to the art-student, has a dim and hazy look.

— D'Arcy Thomson, Day Dreams of a Schoolmaster (1864), page 87.

Posted by Michael Hendry at September 26, 2004 11:47 AM
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