FRATERNISING AT THE FRONT.
Nervous Tommy (on outpost duty for the first time). "'OO GOES THERE?"
Bosch Scout. "FRIEND."
Tommy. "ADVANCE AN' BE RECONCILED."
A NEW USE FOR LATIN.
BY OUR CLASSICAL EXPERT.
"Greek is in the last ditch," writes Sir HENRY NEWBOLT in his New Study of English Poetry; "Latin is trembling at sight of the thin edge of the wedge." Still a hope of saving Latin—within limits—yet remains, if the appeal of "Kismet" in The Spectator meets with a sympathetic response. He asks the readers of that journal "to render into Latin in two or three words the old cricket adjuration, 'Play the game.'" He has already had some suggestions, including "Lude ludum," from "an eminent scholar," but, like the late Mr. TOOLE in one of his most famous songs, still he is not happy.
In rendering colloquial phrases into the lapidary style of ancient Rome, I confess it is often hard to improve on the brevity of the vernacular, though the admonition "to keep your end up" can be condensed from four words to two in "sursum cauda." Again the familiar eulogy, "Stout fellow," can be rendered in a single word by the Virgilian epithet "bellipotens." A distinguished Latinist recalls in this context the sentiment of the writer, Pomponius Caninus:—
Rebus in adversis comitem sors prospera pinguem