  About the time Elvis Presley was called up by Uncle Sam and I lost all interest in pop music, for some reason I was exposed to De Senectute by Cicero. Those with even a nodding acquaintance with a liberal education will know that the work was about old age and that Marcus Tullius Cicero was a famous Roman whose Republican principles shortened his life. I can’t for a moment recall what he said about old age, but I understand that he once observed that those who know no history never develop adult understanding.I’ve a pretty good memory and a curiosity about history and if I haven’t a fully adult understanding am still working on it. I’ve no great theories nor the gift of prophecy. When I challenge assertions which I know to be false or believe to be mistaken I have only my memory of what I know or believe to be true to go on. I don’t claim infallibility and will accept correction, I hope with civility and grace.
Civility and grace I understand to be out of fashion with Begrudgers, but that’s their problem, not mine. I realise that one cannot make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear, and that casting pearls before swine is pointless. But I do hope that some of my offerings, if not grist to the mill for more skilful writers may be like grit in oysters and with time become pearls of wisdom.
The poet Padraic Colum in “The Poor Scholar of the ‘Forties” wrote of an impoverished Hedge School Master, teaching Classics to even more pauperised peasants, when Gradgrind Utilitarianism was the fashion of “progressives.” –
“But what avail my teaching slight?
Years hence, in rustic speech, a phrase
As in wild earth a Grecian vase!”
By Jove, I could yet get something into MT’s head yet!
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