214 NOTES ON STYLE 



What Pattison has said here is that the English, after 

 Poggio's report in 1418, did not expect the discovery of any 

 fresh and inedited classics. What he meant to say was, that 

 no such classics were to be hoped for in England. 



The conflicting claims of his Muse and a fiery Turk which he had 

 bought at the Frankfort fair had once liked to have proved fatal to 

 him. 1 



This is awkward and of doubtful grammar, as is also the 

 following from the same paragraph : 



Perhaps we have to thank the road for a good deal more than we often 

 think of the ocean of mediocre Latin verse which the sixteenth century 

 bequeathed to us. 



To any one who is at all an artist in language, a sentence 

 so cacophonously crowded with four thats as the one which I 

 shall now quote, gives absolute pain : 2 



We are not quite sure that that Father is not giving us Tollius amplified 

 with that latitude of invention which local history at that period allowed 

 itself. 



The next specimen contains two of the commonest and 

 vulgarest faults of slipshod English : 3 



Of the period of thirty years, 1563-1594, not more than half was 

 actually spent by Scaliger under his patron's roof. But it was always 

 open to him, and his books and papers his only property- seem to have 

 been deposited in one of his Poitevin chateaux. 



The it and his which I have italicised, are the peccant 

 parts of this intolerable sentence. A roof ought never to be 

 open ; and it would have been no advantage to Scaliger 

 should he have been always able to reckon upon finding an 

 open roof in his patron's mansion. After the repeated him, 

 his, and his, the third his both logically and grammatically 

 refers to Scaliger. Yet the brain, tortured by reiteration, 

 eventually relegates it to the patron who kept a portion of 

 his roof always open for a scholar guest. 



1 Paulson's Essays, vol. i. p. 98. 2 Ibid. p. 110. 



3 Ibid. p. 139. 



