It’s at least possible that Goldsmith was recalling some account of the 1709 fire at Wesley’s Epworth Rectory (either Wesley’s actual letter to Sheffield or something written or preached by one of his famous Methodist sons) when he was writing this scene in his 1766 novel.
1 The lurching ugliness of “communication channels” must be intentional, a wave of the toilet-brush to the abstract nouns that can suddenly start marching energetically in place in the middle of an otherwise fine passage in Wordsworth’s Prelude.
2 Ruskin uses “scoria” in the preface to his Crown of Wild Olive, in one of his eulogistic antipollution paragraphs, which I must quote: “And, in a little pool, behind some houses further in the village, where another spring rises, the shattered stones of the well, and of the little fretted channel which was long ago built and traced for it by gentler hands, lie scattered, each from each, under a ragged bank of mortar, and scoria; and bricklayers’ refuse, on one side, which the clean water nevertheless chastises to purity; but it cannot conquer the dead earth beyond; and there, circled and coiled under festering scum, the stagnant edge of the pool effaces itself into a slope of black slime, the accumulation of indolent years.” (This too has a hint of the Gibbon-Poggio lament over the ruins of the Forum.) A sentence earlier, Ruskin mentions “street and house foulness; heaps of dust and slime, and broken shreds of old metal, and rags of putrid clothes.” Scoria, refuse, scum, slime, foulness, dust, old metal, and rags: nearly an entire thesaurus list, lumber excepted, in a single paragraph — and all of them made beautiful, Edenized by one perfect phrase: “which the clean water nevertheless chastises to purity.”
3 One of Collins’s poems, “Tomorrow,” was chosen by Palgrave for his Olden Trashery (as Christopher Ricks permutes the book’s title on p. 450 of the Penguin edition) — the last two lines of the poem are: “As this old worn-out stuff, which is threadbare Today,/May become Everlasting Tomorrow.” Palgrave explains that “Everlasting” is used “with side-allusion to a cloth so named, at the time when Collins wrote.”
4 “Scrut” is from scruta, an uncommon (though Horatian) Latin word meaning, “discarded goods, junk” (Oxford Latin Dictionary). A scrutarius is a junk-merchant. For scruta, Cooper’s seventeenth-century Thesaurus Linguae Romanae has “Olde garments, horse shoes, and such other baggage solde for necessitie.” Close scrutiny, then, on the etymological evidence, is a kind of ragpicking. And until recently, if you looked up lumber in the English side of Traupman’s New College Latin & English Dictionary you were given scruta as the translation — as you still are with Cassell’s, and with Langenscheidt’s tiny Universal Latin Dictionary, bound in a yellow plastic cover that resists spills — but in the brand-new edition of Traupman (1995), materia (“timber”) is the equivalent offered.
5 In a preface, Henley called his collection, Views and Reviews (1890), “less a book than a mosaic of scraps and shreds recovered from the shot rubbish of some fourteen years of journalism.” While he was editor of the National Observer, Henley published a series of colorful essays on legal history by Francis Watt that were collected in 1895 as The Law’s Lumber Room.
6 Christopher Smart attempted to turn these two lines (from the Essay on Criticism again) into Latin:
Vis veri ingenii, natura est cultior, id quod
Senserunt multi, sed jam scite exprimit unus.
A. E. Housman claimed that Smart didn’t write any good poetry until after he became insane, somewhere around 1756. His Latin version of Pope’s poem was published in 1752. One wonders whether a growing sense of the utter futility of trying to Latinize an egg as ideally ovoid as Pope’s couplet was what caused the sad “estrangement” of Smart’s mind, and led to his confinement in St. Luke’s Hospital, where he versified Horace and first wrote poetry that the exacting Housman could admire. Smart translated “loads of learned lumber” as nugarum docta farrago—“a learned trail-mix of trivia,” more or less. Smart carefully preserved a faintly praising note that Pope wrote him in 1743 and even had it painted in his portrait. See Arthur Sherbo, Christopher Smart, Scholar of the University (1967), p. 33.
7“Pope and His Editors,” in Mark Pattison, Essays, vol. II, 1889.
8 Aristotle shoots Descartes with an arrow in the right eye; Homer’s horse tramples D’Avenant; then Homer gets John Denham with a long spear, and Samuel Wesley is slain by a kick of Homer’s horse’s heel.
9 Samuel Butler, Prose Observations, ed. Hugh de Quehen (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979), p. 131. Pope, it turns out, lunched on this very image in his Epilogue to the Satires, Dialogue II (1738):
Let Courtly Wits to Wits afford supply,
As Hog to Hog in Huts of
Westphaly;
In one, thro’ Nature’s bounty or his Lord’s,
Has what the frugal, dirty soil affords,
From him the next receives it, thick or thin,
As pure a Mess almost as it came in.
How Pope came to read Butler’s distinctive passage, when it wasn’t published until after Pope’s death, is a matter of conjecture. One wants Swift to have had something to do with it, but Robert Thyer, the first editor of Butler’s posthumous manuscripts (Genuine Remains, 1759), suspects (vol. II, p. 497) the agency of Bishop Atterbury, who earlier had helped Charles Boyle in his attack on Bentley’s Phalaris. See also John Butt’s note to l. 172 of the Twickenham edition of the Epilogue to the Satires, Dialogue II, p. 323.
10 And I am aware that I am overquoting — I know that there is an ideal rhythm of quotation and text, a museum-goer’s pace that you must offer the reader that isolates each labeled display-case of small print from the next — but I nonetheless haven’t been able to keep from close-packing the page: this piece of ham-scholarship is, I think, the one chance I will get to cite freely, without shame, without constraint: I’ll never let myself fall so utterly in lumber again.
11 Naturam intueamur, hanc sequamur: id facillimè accipiunt animi quod agnoscunt, Pope piously quotes, which is adapted from Quintilian’s Institutio Oratoria, Book VIII, ch. 3, paragraph 71: “We must look to nature, and follow her … the mind easily admits what it recognizes as true.…” I’m following the translation by John Selby Watson.