Modesty

But I, bearing in mind my limitations, give my work off-hand, without premeditation, and indeed almost in rustic fashion, the caption of Attic Nights, derived merely from the time and place of my winter vigils; I thus fall short of all other writers in the dignity too even of my title, as I do in care an in elegance of style. I have been sampling the Attic Nights of Aulus Gellius, a second-century commonplace-book of grammar, assembled, so its author attests, through the long winters of Attica, and find it fascinating. Meanwhile I await James Falen’s Eugene Onegin, my appetite having been whetted by Nabokov’s Bollingen commentary, anticipation heightened by poem’s reputed digressiveness.