Of verbal criticism

[David Mallet], Of Verbal Criticism: An Epistle to Mr. Pope. Occasioned by Theobald’s Shakespear, and Bentley’s Milton (London: Lawton Gilliver, 1733).

See, in the darkness of dull Authors bred,
With all their refuse lumber’d in his head,
Long years consum’d, large volumes daily turn’d,
And Servius read perhaps, while Maro burn’d,
In error obstinate, in wrangling loud,
Unbred, unsocial, positive, and proud;
Forth steps at last the self-applauding Wight,
Of points and letters, chaff and straws, to write;
Sagely resolv’d to swell each bulky piece
With venerable toys, from Rome and Greece;
How oft, in Homer, Paris curl’d his Hair;
If Aristotle’s Cap were round or square;
If in the Cave where Dido first was sped,
To Tyre she turn’d her Heels, to Troy her head.
Such the choice Anecdotes, profound and vain,
That store a Bentley’s and a Burman’s brain:
Hence Plato quoted, or the Stagyrite,
To prove that flame ascends, and snow is white:
Hence much hard study without sense or breeding,
And all the grave impertinence of reading.
If Shakespear says, the noon-day sun is bright,
His Scholiast will remark, it then was light;
Turn Caxton, Winkin, each old Goth and Hun,
To rectify the reading of a pun.
Thus, nicely trifling, accurately dull,
How one may toil, and toil---to be a fool! (4-5, ll.15-40)

Marginalia redux

Strange to say, thinking about marginalia last week for class turns out to have been much more closely related to one of my current scholarly obsessions than I had quite imagined. I'm speaking on Saturday in Dublin (here's more information about the event) on Swift and commentary; been reading rather maniacally and now trying to put thoughts in order, but here is a funny bit from one of my favorite essays in a really excellent new collection.

One delightful but painful side effect of working on this talk has been that I am now absolutely consumed with the desire to spend some months sitting in rare book libraries with amazing tomes before me: I do have a sabbatical coming up, not next year but the following one (i.e. 2016-17), with the only problem being that I have two competing projects that I am equally excited about, The ten-week Clarissa and the new one for which I have just now created a folder on the hard drive titled "Ancients and moderns"!

So, Paddy Bullard, “What Swift did in libraries,” in Jonathan Swift and the Eighteenth-Century Book, ed. Bullard and James McLaverty (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 65-84 (the quotation is on 72):

[I]t is clear that Swift was an unusually active reader. This activity often involved a kind of conversation with the text written upon the printed page. The tone of that conversation was often indignant or otherwise aggressive--the anti-Scottish invective of his notes on Clarendon ('Cursed hellish Scots!'--'Greedy Scotch rebellious dogs'--'Diabolical Scots forever', etc.) is not untypically virulent.

Also: "The regularity of Swift's anti-monarchical marginalia across several volumes gives it a ritual quality, as though he were leafing through his books looking for opportunities to perform it. . . . It seems that Swift found in the pages of his personal library a textual site just secure enough to bear anti-monarchical inscriptions that were too dangerous for him to make in any other kind of papers, either published or private" (74).

An amazing haul

at the library this morning - I am tackling ABCs of the novel initially via Roman Jakobson and Laurence Sterne, but got sidetracked onto Elias Canetti and also the three volumes of Ptolemaic Alexandria, a superb work of scholarship which no home should be without...