John Trumbull, The Progress of Dulness:

“Come ye, who finer arts despise,

And scoff at verse as heathen lies;

In all the pride of dulness rage

At Pope, or Milton’s deathless page;

Or stung by truth’s deep-searching line.

Rave ev’n at rhymes as low as mine;

Say ye, who boast the name of wise,

Wherein substantial learning lies.

Is it, superb in classic lore,

To speak what Homer spoke before,

To write the language Tully wrote,

The style, the cadence and the note?

Is there a charm in sounds of Greek,

No language else can learn to speak;

That cures distemper’d brains at once,

Like Pliny’s rhymes for broken bones?

Is there a spirit found in Latin,

That must evap’rate in translating ?

And say are sense and genius bound

To any vehicles of sound?

Can knowledge never reach the brains.

Unless convey’d in ancient strains?

While Homer sets before your eyes

Achilles’ rage, Ulysses’ lies,

Th’ amours of Jove in masquerade,

And Mars entrapp’d by Phoebus’ aid;

While Virgil sings, in verses grave,

His lovers meeting in a cave,

His ships turn’d nymphs, in pagan fables,

And how the Trojans eat their tables;

While half this learning but displays

The follies of the former days;

And for our linguists, fairly try them,

A tutor’d parrot might defy them.

Go to the vulgar ’tis decreed,

There you must preach and write or plead:

Broach every curious Latin phrase

From Tully down to Lily’s days:

All this your hearers have no share in,

Bate but their laughing and their staring.

Interpreters must pass between,

To let them know a word you mean.

Yet could you reach that lofty tongue

Which Plato wrote and Homer sung;

Or ape the Latin verse and scanning,

Like Vida, Cowley or Buchanan;

Or bear ten phrase-books in your head;

Yet know, these languages are dead,

And nothing, e’er, by death, was seen

Improved in beauty, strength or mien,

Whether the sexton use his spade,

Or sorcerer wake the parted shade.

Think how would Tully stare or smile

At these wan spectres of his style,

Or Horace in his jovial way

Ask what these babblers mean to say.”

Henry Adams, The Education of Henry Adams:

“With the Lodges, education always began afresh. Forty years had left little of the Palermo that Garibaldi had shown to the boy of 1860, but Sicily in all ages seems to have taught only catastrophe and violence, running riot on that theme ever since Ulysses began its study on the eye of Cyclops. For a lesson in anarchy, without a shade of sequence, Sicily stands alone and defies evolution. Syracuse teaches more than Rome. Yet even Rome was not mute, and the church of Ara Cœli seemed more and more to draw all the threads of thought to a centre, for every new journey led back to its steps–Karnak, Ephesus, Delphi, Mycenæ, Constantinople, Syracuse–all lying on the road to the Capitol. What they had to bring by way of intellectual riches could not yet be discerned, but they carried camel-loads of moral; and New York sent most of all, for, in forty years, America had made so vast a stride to empire that the world of 1860 stood already on a distant horizon somewhere on the same plane with the republic of Brutus and Cato, while schoolboys read of Abraham Lincoln as they did of Julius Caesar. Vast swarms of Americans knew the Civil War only by school history, as they knew the story of Cromwell or Cicero, and were as familiar with political assassination as though they had lived under Nero. The climax of empire could be seen approaching, year after year, as though Sulla were a President or McKinley a Consul.

Nothing annoyed Americans more than to be told this simple and obvious–in no way unpleasant–truth; therefore one sat silent as ever on the Capitol; but, by way of completing the lesson, the Lodges added a pilgrimage to Assisi and an interview with St. Francis, whose solution of historical riddles seemed the most satisfactory–or sufficient–ever offered; worth fully forty years’ more study, and better worth it than Gibbon himself, or even St. Augustine, St. Ambrose, or St. Jerome. The most bewildering effect of all these fresh cross-lights on the old Assistant Professor of 1874 was due to the astonishing contrast between what he had taught then and what he found himself confusedly trying to learn five-and-twenty years afterwards–between the twelfth century of his thirtieth and that of his sixtieth years. At Harvard College, weary of spirit in the wastes of Anglo-Saxon law, he had occasionally given way to outbursts of derision at shedding his life-blood for the sublime truths of Sac and Soc:–

HIC JACET
HOMUNCULUS SCRIPTOR
DOCTOR BARBARICUS
HENRICUS ADAMS
ADAE FILIUS ET EVAE
PRIMO EXPLICUIT
SOCNAM

The Latin was as twelfth-century as the law, and he meant as satire the claim that he had been first to explain the legal meaning of Sac and Soc, although any German professor would have scorned it as a shameless and presumptuous bid for immortality; but the whole point of view had vanished in 1900. Not he, but Sir Henry Maine and Rudolph Sohm, were the parents or creators of Sac and Soc. Convinced that the clue of religion led to nothing, and that politics led to chaos, one had turned to the law, as one’s scholars turned to the Law School, because one could see no other path to a profession.”

Mark Twain, The Innocents Abroad:

“At two in the morning we swept through the Straits of Messina, and so bright was the moonlight that Italy on the one hand and Sicily on the other seemed almost as distinctly visible as though we looked at them from the middle of a street we were traversing. The city of Messina, milk-white, and starred and spangled all over with gaslights, was a fairy spectacle. A great party of us were on deck smoking and making a noise, and waiting to see famous Scylla and Charybdis. And presently the Oracle stepped out with his eternal spy-glass and squared himself on the deck like another Colossus of Rhodes. It was a surprise to see him abroad at such an hour. Nobody supposed he cared anything about an old fable like that of Scylla and Charybdis. One of the boys said:

‘Hello, doctor, what are you doing up here at this time of night?—What do you want to see this place for?’

‘What do I want to see this place for? Young man, little do you know me, or you wouldn’t ask such a question. I wish to see all the places that’s mentioned in the Bible.’

‘Stuff—this place isn’t mentioned in the Bible.’

‘It ain’t mentioned in the Bible!—this place ain’t—well now, what place is this, since you know so much about it?’

‘Why it’s Scylla and Charybdis.’

‘Scylla and Cha—confound it, I thought it was Sodom and Gomorrah!’

And he closed up his glass and went below. The above is the ship story. Its plausibility is marred a little by the fact that the Oracle was not a biblical student, and did not spend much of his time instructing himself about Scriptural localities.—They say the Oracle complains, in this hot weather, lately, that the only beverage in the ship that is passable, is the butter. He did not mean butter, of course, but inasmuch as that article remains in a melted state now since we are out of ice, it is fair to give him the credit of getting one long word in the right place, anyhow, for once in his life. He said, in Rome, that the Pope was a noble-looking old man, but he never did think much of his Iliad.”