hidden in plain view
Two shelves of lost or fictional works of the Ancients. © National Trust / Bryan Rutledge.
of the Ancients, many obscure. So, hidden in clear view amongst the false spines at Mount Stewart is a fictional library containing a significant body of ancient philosophy, satire, comedy, drama, his- tory and biography wholly lost to the scholars and classicists of the early nineteenth century. The reference to the Pinakes is pertinent and the message is clear, if slightly tongue-in-cheek – the library at Mount Stewart presented as a modern day Alexandria. The false books at Mount Stewart are an intellectual conceit, a self-referential in-joke, and one which ultimately proved too clever by half. The erudition of the Belfast classicist William Bruce (1757–1841), who must have provided the list of lost classics for Robert Stewart, should be applauded. It fits neatly into what W. B. Stanford described as the tradition of ‘rustic’ Irish classical schol- arship, which had at its heart ‘an element of showmanship’ and a tradition of Irish academic humour, ‘the playful use of erudition’, stretching back to Columbanus. 30 There was no published list of lost works in 1805, indeed, the earliest attempt comprehensively to list the lost Latin works of antiquity did not appear until the 1950s
30 . W. B. Stanford, Ireland and the Classical Tradition (Dublin: Allen Figgis, 1976), pp. 173–75.
723
Made with FlippingBook Online newsletter