Articles From The Classical Teacher

Sayers Omission 1

Having received from your socienty an invitation no less courteous than pressing, I accepted with alacrity the opportunity of coming to speak to  you.  I stand here prepared, not, I fear, to increase your information or improve your minds, nor yet to offer you any very lively entertainment; but only to pour into your sympathetic ears the story of my life. It is not a sensational story, nor one calculated to appeal to the headline writers of the Local Gossip and the Daily Ghoul, eager though they always are for the personal angle on every subject from the habits of the liver-fluke to the higher mathematics.  Yet you may agree with me that it has, after all, its tragic aspects: Infandum regina, jubes renovare dolorem, as the old Latin poet puts it: Sed si tantus amor casus cognoscere nostros ... incipiam or, as a later poet puts it in a younger Italian tongue: Dizú come colui che piange e dice.
     It is not without deliberate purpose that I have begun with those two notorious tags; for
it is part of the contemporary tragedy that one can no longer call them notorious...