Someone in our List asked me about the meaning
of "apud" I often add when referring to an author's
quotes. To my surprise I couldn't find entries
for it in the dictionaries I consulted and neither Wikipedia and
other on-line tools in English were of help.Finally I tracked an example for its use ( as the one I
had in mind) by Thomas Carlyle.
While perusing his other quotations ( Cf.
John Bartlett (1820–1905) - Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. 1919,
On-Line) I selected two that come very close to VN's own
elaborations on the "two eternities of darkness" and IPH, in SO
and in Pale Fire:
1. One life,—a little gleam of time
between two Eternities. (Heroes and Hero-Worship. The Hero as
a Man of Letters.)
2. His religion at best is an
anxious wish,—like that of Rabelais, a great Perhaps.( Burns.
Edinburgh Review, 1828.) It was followed by a note:Browning: Bishop Bloughram’s
Apology, “The grand perhaps.”
3. We have oftener than once
endeavoured to attach some meaning to that aphorism, vulgarly imputed to
Shaftesbury, which however we can find nowhere in his works, that “ridicule is
the test of truth.” ( Voltaire. Foreign Review, 1829.)
In the note here appended comes the
example I was originally after:
..."Truth, ’t is supposed, may bear all
lights; and one of those principal lights or natural mediums by which things are
to be viewed in order to a thorough recognition is ridicule itself.—Shaftesbury:
Essay on the Freedom of Wit and Humour, sect. 1.
’T was the saying of
an ancient sage (Gorgias Leontinus, apud Aristotle’s “Rhetoric,” lib.
iii. c. 18), that humour was the only test of gravity, and gravity of
humour. For a subject which would not bear raillery was suspicious; and a jest
which would not bear a serious examination was certainly false wit.—Ibid. sect.
5.
I always thought that "apud", in English
texts, was regularly used. "Sorry, my latinism is
showing"...
Jansy
.