from The Invention of Love, Act Two (Tom Stoppard)

AEH  Oxford in the Golden Age! - the hairshirts versus the Aesthetes: the neo-Christians versus the neo-pagans: the study of classics for advancement in the fair of the world versus the study of classics for the advancement of classical studies - what emotional storms, and oh what a tiny teacup.  

from A Practical Introduction to Greek Accentuation, preface to the second edition (Henry W. Chandler)

Among the lesser evils of existence must surely be numbered the necessity of turning once again to an insipid subject long since thrown aside and forgotten.  This I have been obliged to do, and to perform the dismal duty of revision under some considerable disadvantages.  All my original notes and collections were consigned to the flames years ago, in the firm belief that they would never more be wanted; and the loss of such materials it is now impossible to repair.  In circumstances so embarrassing real help is hard to get.  The indefatigable Lobeck is the only man who collected words of like form on a large scale, and his works were pretty freely used in the first edition.  A few more references to them are now added.  Beyond consulting Lobeck and the Paris Thesaurus, I could do little more than read the grammarians and scholiasts over again and glean a few fresh facts.  In this way, however, considerable additions have been made to the book, though, by enlarging the pages and practising the arts of typographical compression, the original number of pages has barely been exceeded.  Some parts have been rewritten, and scarcely a single paragraph reappears without some change and, it is hoped, improvement.  That all defects have been made good it would be unreasonable to expect, for in the first place, he who deals with Greek accentuation independently, as I have done, has to contend with hosts of petty details which distract his attention, and not unfrequently exhaust his patience.  Every alteration has to be made with the greatest circumspection, and it would be wonderful indeed, where the chances of error are so great, if I have not sometimes gone astray.  In the next place, it is proverbially difficult to detect one's own mistakes, and here let it be remembered that, though I invited criticism and correction, I have received no assistance of any sort or kind.  Let those who noticed faults in the first edition know that they alone are answerable if those faults are repeated in the second.  They had but to speak, and whatever was false or misleading would have been corrected.  All censure now comes too late to be of any use to me.

[...]

In bidding a last farewell to a subject in which I never took more than a languid interest, I may be permitted to say that in England, at all events, every man will accent his Greek properly who wishes to stand well with the world.  He whose accents are irreproachable may indeed be no better than a heathen, but concerning that man who misplaces them, or, worse still, altogether omits them, damaging inferences will certainly be drawn, and in most instances with justice.

from How to be Topp, chapter 5, How to be Topp in English (Geoffrey Willans and Ronald Searle)

i have said there only one peom on the english language e.g. The Brook which chater chater as it flo my dear it is obviously a girlie just like fotherington-tomas.  However there are other peoms which creep in from time to time there is one which go

Har fleag har fleag har fleag onward

Into the er rode the 600.

There are as well lars porsena of clusium elegy in country churchyard loss of the royal george and chevy chase.  Anything to do with dafodils is also grate favourite of english masters but then nothing is beyond them they will even set burns (rabbie) who is uterly weedy.

It is farely easy to be topp in english and sometimes you may find yourself even getting interested.  If that happens of course you can always draw junctions and railway lines on your desk viz

The Charge of the Light Brigade (Alfred, Lord Tennyson)

I

Half a league, half a league,
Half a league onward,
All in the valley of Death
  Rode the six hundred.
“Forward, the Light Brigade!
Charge for the guns!” he said.
Into the valley of Death
  Rode the six hundred.

II

“Forward, the Light Brigade!”
Was there a man dismayed?
Not though the soldier knew
  Someone had blundered.
Theirs not to make reply,
Theirs not to reason why,
Theirs but to do and die.
Into the valley of Death

  Rode the six hundred.

III

Cannon to right of them,
Cannon to left of them,
Cannon in front of them
  Volleyed and thundered;
Stormed at with shot and shell,
Boldly they rode and well,
Into the jaws of Death,
Into the mouth of hell
  Rode the six hundred.

IV

Flashed all their sabres bare,

Flashed as they turned in air
Sabring the gunners there,
Charging an army, while
  All the world wondered.
Plunged in the battery-smoke
Right through the line they broke;
Cossack and Russian
Reeled from the sabre stroke
Shattered and sundered.
Then they rode back, but not
  Not the six hundred.

V

Cannon to right of them,
Cannon to left of them,
Cannon behind them
  Volleyed and thundered;
Stormed at with shot and shell,
While horse and hero fell.
They that had fought so well
Came through the jaws of Death,
Back from the mouth of hell,
All that was left of them,
  Left of six hundred.

VI

When can their glory fade?
O the wild charge they made!
  All the world wondered.
Honour the charge they made!
Honour the Light Brigade,
  Noble six hundred!

Foreword to The Lord of the Rings (J.R.R. Tolkien)

This tale grew in the telling, until it became a history of the Great War of the Ring and included many glimpses of the yet more ancient history that preceded it.  It was begun soon after The Hobbit was written and before its publication in 1937; but I did not go on with this sequel, for I wished first to complete and set in order the mythology and legends of the Elder Days, which had then been taking shape for some years.  I desired to do this for my own satisfaction, and I had little hope that other people would be interested in this work, especially since it was primarily linguistic in inspiration and was begun in order to provide the necessary background of 'history' for Elvish tongues.

When those whose advice and opinion I sought corrected little hope to no hope, I went back to the sequel, encouraged by requests from readers for more information concerning hobbits and their adventures.  But the story was drawn irresistibly towards the older world, and became an account, as it were, of its end and passing away before its beginning and middle had been told.  The process had begun in the writing of The Hobbit, in which there were already some references to the older matter: Elrond, Gondolin, the High-elves, and the orcs, as well as glimpses that had arisen unbidden of things higher or deeper or darker than its surface: Durin, Moria, Gandalf, the Necromancer, the Ring.  The discovery of the significance of these glimpses and of their relation to the ancient histories revealed the Third Age and its culmination in the War of the Ring.

Those who had asked for more information about hobbits eventually got it, but they had to wait a long time; for the composition of The Lord of the Rings went on at intervals during the years 1936 to 1949, a period in which I had many duties that I did not neglect, and many other interests as a learner and teacher that often absorbed me.  The delay was, of course, also increased by the outbreak of war in 1939, by the end of which year the tale had not yet reached the end of Book I.  In spite of the darkness of the next five years I found that the story could not now be wholly abandoned, and I plodded on, mostly by night, till I stood by Balin's tomb in Moria.  There I halted for a long while.  It was almost a year later when I went on and so came to Lothlórien and the Great River late in 1941.  In the next year I wrote the first drafts of the matter that now stands as Book III, and the beginnings of Chapters 1 and 3 of Book V; and there as the beacons flared in Anórien and Théoden came to Harrowdale I stopped.  Foresight had failed and there was no time for thought.

It was during 1944 that, leaving the loose ends and perplexities of a war which it was my task to conduct, or at least to report, I forced myself to tackle the journey of Frodo to Mordor.  These chapters, eventually to bcome Book IV, were written and sent out as a serial to my son, Christopher, then in South Africa with the R.A.F.  Nonetheless it took another five years before the tale was brought to its present end; in that time I changed my house, my chair, and my college, and the days though less dark were no less laborious.  Then when the 'end' had at last been reached the whole story had to be revised, and indeed largely re-written backwards.  And it had to be typed, and re-typed: by me; the cost of professional typing by the ten-fingered was beyond my means.

The Lord of the Rings has been read by many people since it finally appeared in print; and I should like to say something here with reference to the many opinions or guesses that I have received or have read concerning the motives and meaning of the tale.  The prime motive was the desire of a tale-teller to try his hand at a really long story that would hold the attention of readers, amaze them, delight them, and at times maybe excite them or deeply move them.  As a guide I had only my own feeling for what is appealing or moving, and for many the guide was inevitably often at fault.  Some who have read the book, or at any rate have reviewed it, have found it boring, absurd, or contemptible; and I have no cause to complain, since I have similiar opinions of their works, or of the kind of writing that they evidently prefer.  But even from the points of view of many who have enjoyed my story there is much that fails to please.  It is perhaps not possible in a long tale to please everybody at all points, nor to displease everybody at the same points; for I find from the letters that I have received that the passages or chapters that are to some a blemish are all by others specially approved.  The most critical reader of all, myself, now finds many defects, minor and major, but being fortunately under no obligation either to review the book or to write it again, he will pass over these in silence, except one that has been noted by others: the book is too short.

As for any inner meaning or 'message', it has in the intention of the author none.  It is neither allegorical nor topica.  As the story grew it put down roots (into the past) and threw out unexpected branches; but its main theme was settled from the outset by the inevitable choice of the Ring as the link between it and The Hobbit.  The crucial chapter, 'The Shadow of the Past', is one of the oldest parts of the tale.  It was written long before the foreshadow of 1939 had yet become a threat of inevitable disaster, and from that point the story would have developed along essentially the same lines, if that disaster had been averted.  Its sources are things long before in mind, or in some cases already written, and little or nothing in it was modified by the war that begain in 1939 or its sequels.

The real war does not resemble the legendary war in its process or its conclusion.  If it had inspired or directed the development of the legend, then certainly the Ring would have been seized and used against Sauron; he would not have been annihilated but enslaved, and Barad-dûr would not have been destroyed but occupied.  Saruman, failing to get possession of the Ring, would in the confusion and treacheries of the time have found in Mordor the missing links in his own researches into Ring-lore, and before long he would have made a Great Ring of his own with which to challenge the self-styled Ruler of Middle-earth.  In that conflict both sides would have held hobbits in hatred and contempt: they would not long have survived even as slaves.

Other arrangements could be devised according to the tastes or views of those who like allegory or topical reference.  But I cordially dislike allegory in all its manifestations, and always have done so since I grew old and wary enough to detect its presence.  I much prefer history, real or feigned, with its varied applicability to the thought and experience of readers.  I think that many confuse 'applicability' with 'allegory'; but the one resides in the freedom of the reader, and the other in the purposed domination of the author.

An author cannot of course reamin wholly unaffected by his experience, but the ways in which a story-germ uses the soil of experience are extremely complex, and attempts to define the process are at best guesses from evidence that is inadequate and ambiguous.  It is also false, though naturally attractive, when the lives of an author and critic have overlapped, to suppose that the movements of thought or the events of times common to both were necessarilty the most powerful influences.  One has indeed personally to come under the shadow of war to feel fully its oppression; but as the years go by it seems now often forgotten that to be caught in youth by 1914 was no less hideous an experience than to be involved in 1939 and the following years.  By 1918 all but one of my close friends were dead.  Or to take a less grievous matter: it has been supposed by some that 'The Scouring of the Shire' reflects the situation in Englad at the time when I was finishing my tale.  It does not.  It is an essential part of the plot, foreseen from the outset, though in the event modified by the character of Saruman as developed in the story without, need I say, any allegorical significance or contemporary political reference whatsoever.  It has indeed some basis in experience, though slender (for the economic situation was entirely different), and much further back.  The country in which I lived in childhood was being shabbily destroyed before I was ten, in days when motor-cars were rare objects (I had never seen one) and men were still building suburban railways.  Recently I saw in a paper a picture of the last decrepitude of the once thriving corn-mill beside its pool that long ago seemed to me so important.  I never liked the looks of the Young miller, but his father, the Old miller, had a black beard, and he was not named Sandyman.