[‘Reeking of the dungheap’: Sir Claude Phillips, first Keeper of the Wallace Collection.] Anonymous original manuscript poem in Latin, with English translation in same hand, attacking him as a ‘lustful’ user of ‘language planted with dirty refuse'.

The circumstances surrounding this extraordinary original composition in Latin verse are obscure. See Phillips’s entry in the Oxford DNB, which notes that there was ‘an air of Proust’ about him, and quotes Oliver Brown’s description of him as ‘a stout man, immaculately dressed and heavily scented, who talked continuously while he looked at the pictures'. It may be that Phillips and the author of the poem had been educated together, or that they were members of the same club (the Athenaeum for example). Whatever their relationship, the author of the present work was clearly a capable classicist. Until the handwriting has been compared, the suggestion cannot be dismissed that he might be the Professor of the Classical Association and Corpus Christi Professor of Latin at Oxford Albert Curtis Clark, described in his own ODNB entry as a man who ‘could carry his learning lightly, was the best of company, full of humour and of wit, and a perfect raconteur’. 2pp, 12mo. Bifolium. In good condition, lightly aged and creased. Central horizontal crease. Written in black ink. Poem and translation face one another, with the Latin text, beneath the heading ‘IN CLAUDIUM PHILIPPSIUM. EQUITEM.’, on the recto of the second leaf, and the translation, headed ‘IN LIBIDINOSUM.’, on the verso of the first. The Latin poem is twelve lines long in three four-line stanzas. It begins: ‘Cur stercoratae verba licentiae / Libidinosus semper in auribus / Emittis, obscaenisque gaudes / Colloquiis, [...]’. The English translation reads in its entirety: ‘Why, dost thou, lustful, discharge ever in our / ears, words of licence, reeking of the dungheap: / why dost thou rejoice in obscene conversations, O / Veteran Claudius? / Old age presses on: thy [last word inserted] language planted with dirty [last word inserted] refuse / dishonours thy white hair: a forehead ploughed / with hardset wrinkles is out of keeping with / lascivious words. / Do thou at least case from foul gossip: [last word an emendation of ‘talk’] let thy / bawdy stories be silenced, remembering / thy industrious youth, O Old Man, worthy / of a better reputation.’