Page 221 - a-portrait-of-the-artist-as-a-young-man

Did anyone ever hear such drivel? Lord Almighty! Who
ever heard of ivy whining on a wall? Yellow ivy; that was all
right. Yellow ivory also. And what about ivory ivy?
The word now shone in his brain, clearer and brighter
than any ivory sawn from the mottled tusks of elephants.
IVORY, IVOIRE, AVORIO, EBUR. One of the first exam-
ples that he had learnt in Latin had run: INDIA MITTIT
EBUR; and he recalled the shrewd northern face of the rec-
tor who had taught him to construe the Metamorphoses of
Ovid in a courtly English, made whimsical by the mention
of porkers and potsherds and chines of bacon. He had learnt
what little he knew of the laws of Latin verse from a ragged
book written by a Portuguese priest.

Contrahit orator, variant in carmine vates.

The crises and victories and secessions in Roman histo-
ry were handed on to him in the trite words IN TANTO
DISCRIMINE and he had tried to peer into the social life
of the city of cities through the words IMPLERE OLLAM
DENARIORUM which the rector had rendered sonorously
as the filling of a pot with denaries. The pages of his time-
worn Horace never felt cold to the touch even when his own
fingers were cold; they were human pages and fifty years
before they had been turned by the human fingers of John
Duncan Inverarity and by his brother, William Malcolm
Inverarity. Yes, those were noble names on the dusky fly-
leaf and, even for so poor a Latinist as he, the dusky verses
were as fragrant as though they had lain all those years in

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