A Pickwick among Poets, Exiled in the Fatherland of Pickled Fish

Colin Burrow

  • The English Horace: Anthony Alsop and the Traditions of British Latin Verse by D.K. Money
    Oxford, 406 pp, £38.00, December 1998, ISBN 0 19 726184 1

On 16 June 1783, Samuel Johnson was rendered speechless by a stroke. His first action was not to try croaking for a doctor, but to compose a prayer in Latin: ‘The lines were not very good, but I knew them not to be very good: I made them easily, and concluded myself to be unimpaired in my faculties.’ Johnson was relieved that he could still pray in Latin, but the greater part of his relief was that he was still enough of a critic to know that his verses were not much good.

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