Page:Notes and Queries - Series 9 - Volume 2.djvu/78

 NOTES AND QUERIES. [9* s, n. JULY 23,

"STRENUA NOS EXERCET INERTIA." (9 th B. i. 381.)

I CANNOT tell KILLIGREW what critic or commentator rendered these words, " The im- mobility of our idiosyncrasies possesses us"; but I make bold to say that, whoever he may have been, he was wrong, and that his inter- pretation is little better Aan grotesque. In point of Latinity, is it to be thought that the adj. strenuus describes a dead weight of passive resistance ; that exercere means to repress, to hold a man down like a Jack-in- the-box, with no chance given to bob up ; or that the following clause, "Navibus atque quadrigis," &c., is in opposition to, not con- tinuous with and explanatory of, the fore- going? "Strenua" must mean, as always, vigorously energetic. " Exercet " can only mean " keeps us on the move, on the stretch," possibly, even, "on the rack"; and the structure of the sentence naturally leads us to take yachting and four-in-hand driving as samples of strenuous inaction, not, as the commentator must understand, mere futile attempts to overcome it.

KILLIGREW does not like to think that Horace spoke of travelling as working hard at doing nothing. I do not think he need be afraid that Horace held any such notion. The journey to Brundusium was matter of political business ; but if it had been nothing more than a pleasure trip, he would certainly not have been doing nothing, nor would he have affected to call it nothing, when laying up that store of pleasant and comic memories which he intended to be a possession for evermore. In later days, though he loved the quiet of his villa beyond Tivoli, yet he also enjoyed a run down to Baise for change of air ; and when Dr. Musa told him that Baise was "worse than useless" to him, he thought of going further south, to Salernum or Velia. On horseback or muleback, with his portmanteau carried behind, he could scarcely do the distance under a week. Beyond ques- tion he enjoyed the journey for its own sake, and found plenty to amuse him and occupy his mind on the road (even as this present writer recalls among his pleasantest memo- ries plodding through Greece in like fashion at the rate of twenty miles a day).

What he does stigmatize, or laugh at, or commiserate, is the craving for excitement felt by those who, having " plenty to get and nothing to do," a superabundance of money with utter want of outlet for their energies in definite healthy work, are for ever restless,

ever toiling and travailing and travelling in vain pursuit of pleasure ; by those also who, having a mind ill at ease, seek through move- ment and change of place an escape from their own thoughts (Lady Dedlock, for in- stance, as vividly described by Dickens). It will not do, he says ; if there be not the "well- balanced mind " within, it is useless to seek for solid enjoyment from without, in yachting and four-in-hand driving, in a London season, or a winter at Monte Carlo, or a voyage round the world ; and as for the troubled soul, "What man, self -exiled from his country ever yet escaped himself ? "

I have no doubt that the common inter- pretation of " strenua inertia " is correct. Except for the absence of religious sentiment, Horace says the very same that the prophet said, " Ye spend your money for that which is not bread, and your labour for that which satisfieth not." C. B. MOUNT.

This happy oxymoron of Horace ('Ep.' i. 12, 28), " busy idleness," finds an interesting parallel in the Book of Wisdom xiii. 13, where the idol-maker is said to carve a piece of wood "in the diligence of his idleness" (LXX., kv eTTijueAetp. apytas ; Vulgate, "dili- genter per vacuitatem suam "). Wordsworth speaks of

Worldlings revelling in the fields Of strenuous idleness.

'This Lawn, a Carpet all Alive.'

A.. SMYTHE PALMER. South Woodford.

When, in after years, I was expatiating to my old schoolmaster on my desire for fresh woods and pastures new, he pulled me up very short with the quiet remark, " You can't get away from yourself." THOMAS J. JEAKES.

" To SUE " : " HERONSEW " (9 th S. i. 206, 316, 354, 477). In answer to your correspondent W. H N B Y I supply him with the infor- mation he requires. Our word heron (vari- ously written in Middle English hairon, heiroun, heyrone, heroun, herne, heern, heryri) i.u taken directly from the French, heron being a later form of hairon, from *hagironem (aironem, says Brachet under 'Aigrette,' is actually met with in a tenth-century text), a Latinized form of O.H.G. heigir, heron. The guttural disappears from O.Fr. hairon, but is found in other O.Fr. forms, haigron and aigron (whence Fr. aigrette, Engl. egret), and still persists in Ital. aghirone.

O.H.G. heigir and M.H.G. heiger, says Kluge, are by-forms of O.H.G. *reiar or beginning with r lead back to older forms in
 * reijar and M.H.G. reiger. But the forms