The Archbishop of Canterbury has published, in the Canterbury Diocesan
Gazette, a message to his diocese, "Excita to ipsum, admone to ipsum, quidquid de aliis sit, non negligas to ipsum," to which he adds : " Unwatchful- mess over Self, is the secret of poor Service." The drift of this is obvious enough,—namely, " Be unselfish yourselves before you preach unselfishness to others ; " and this the Westminster Gazette clearly sees and gives the Archbishop credit for. But it adds very hypercritically : "Bat his motto is hardly felicitous,—for to the plain man, it is likely, we fancy, to get itself translated into some such doggerel para- phrase as the following :—
" Whatever else is said or done.
Dear friends neglect not number one."
The "plain man" who translates it thus must be a plain man with a very plain ignorance of Latin. How the injunction "to rouse oneself up, to admonish oneself, and whatever happens with others, not to spare pains with oneself," can be inter- preted as an injunction to "look after number one " in the ordinary sense of that phrase, it is not easy to imagine. A paper must be very hard up for a chance of picking holes, to pick so very superfluous a hole as that. The only criticism we should have been inclined to pass on the Archbishop's advice is that it is not always the way to get the best work out of yourself to think too much about even your own faults, especially in a very self-conscious generation like the present.
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