MARGINAL COMMENTS
By E. L. WOODWARD
T AGREE with Ovid about the New Year. His 1 arguments convinced me at sight when they were presented to me, years ago, in my first Latin reader. Of course the New Year should begin in the spring, and not in January. It is absurd that one should calculate one's income tax by the daffodils, and allow the talc of one's happiness to begin with ukase.
. This case which Ovid made out for the spring was my first introduction to the study of public questions. It left me with a good impression of Ovid himself ; a business-like man, full of simple suggestions for the common good ; a man like Sir Rowland Hill, or Lord Shaftesbury. A wider reading of the poet, after leaving school, showed me that in some respects he was not like Lord Shaftesbury or Sir Rowland Hill, but even in this first Latin reader one could sec that Ovid had the knack of making things interesting. Concurrently with Ovid, I was studying Maclear's Old Testament History. The late Dr. Maclear had few of Ovid's gifts, and I have been " conditioned," as the psychologists would tell me, to find the Olympians more attractive than the patriarchs. I am not ashamed to say that, in my opinion, Venus is more debonair than Abraham, and that, after one has left Adam and Eve, there is no person of charm in the .Sacred Text until one comes to David. Of course, it is only fair to remember that writing the Bible must have been like taking down a piece of French dieter; you had to follow Inspiration. Otherwise a great deal more might have been made of Nimrod.
I thought of Ovid the other day when I was watching the heralds proclaim the King's coronation at Temple Bar. The thing was a little like Romulus and Remus ; all this palaver about the City, the policemen holding up a silken rope to represent a vanished gate, the Lord Mayor and the aldermen as the conscript fathers, and myself, with the rest of us on the pavement, as the Roman people. Until the heralds came along, and until I heard the trumpets, I thought it most incon- siderate to hold this pleasant make-believe and dressing-up in a main street at three o'clock in the afternoon, but if you took Bentham's calculations, you might hold that the number of people inconvenienced by the diversion of the traffic was not greater than the number of people diverted by the spectacle. In any case there is a good deal to be said for giving lawfully constituted authority its share of sound and colour. It is not politically expedient to leave all the magnificence to the dictators.
Moreover, there is no harm in making a charade out of the fact that authority in England is carefully watched by the citizens. I liked to see the Lord Mayor and the officers of London standing in the middle of the road, and barring the way to a king's messenger until they knew what he had come to tell them. I also liked my fellow-citizens on the pavement. They showed a sound judgement in giving their admiration pri- marily to the Lord Mayor's coachman and the Lord Mayor's carriage.
The only thing I disliked was the memory of Temple Bar. In my great-grandfather's time, when the Bar still stood, you could see the iron spikes on which the heads of traitors were impaled, and there were men living in 1836 who could remember two heads rotting above the gate. These heads had been fixed for a quarter of a century ; Horace Walpole noted that, for a halfpenny, you could look at them through spyglasses ; Goldsmith made a grim joke (quoting Ovid) about them to Dr. Johnson. At last the winds of March blew them down. With their fall at least one form of public beastliness was over, and, at least in one respect, a new year began for England.
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