"WHO WROTE-?"

Auckland Star, Volume LVI, Issue 260, 3 November 1925, Page 9

"WHO WROTE-?"

HUNTING UP QUOTATIONS. ELUSIVE QUARRY. While the crowd was waiting, first on one foot, and then on the other, for the doors at the Town Hall to open last night, two people on the outskirts, instead of taking part in the abortive attempt to cheer different brands of politicians, or decide the exact significance of a bouquet of virgin white lilies, were calmly discussing who wrote: "When I was a king in Babylon and you were a Christian slave." This queer power of detachment is one of the privileges of the British—especially where politics are concerned. It etarted over a cheer that did not rise to the lips of the waiting crowd, which naturally led the bookish one to paraphrase Macßeth'e difficulty with his "amen." which stuck in his throat. This recalled a missing quotation much discussed in a certain office, and that was about Babylon. The bookish one located it in W. E. Henley without a moment's hesitation. Then the talk drifted to other wellknown quotations, as such queries generally cause it to drift. "One touch of nature makes the wholo world" once gave a noted Shakespearean scholar an endless mental chase, and then he did not track it down, e\-en after naming half a dozen plays from Hamlet downwards. It occurs in a singularly fine speech in "Troilue and Cresida," which is not one of his best-known plays, and not one reader in a thousand can tell exactly where. But the most puzzling of all quotations is that so often used, "I shall pass through this world but once," etc. The bookish man eaid it had been attributed to several great men, chiefly to Carlyle, but none of them had written it. Going back and back, it was found still more remote, until it was recognised in the loth or ICth century, and even then its author could not be found. That such a well-known quotation should go in lack of proper parents seems too strange to be true. The bookish man said he had noticed thftt a London paper was offering a £5 prize to anyone tracing this familiar saying to its origin. Then these two went on raking up old quotations'. It is a most fascinating occupation, but one would hardly expect to hear of it on the fringe of an election crowd.