Mors deliciarum I

Mitt paper är på tok för lång, och jag skär och skär, men ändå blir det svårt att passa in det på 20 minuter. Sålunda lägger jag här ngra killed darlings:

Robert Louis Stevenson depict s his hero Robert Herrick in The Ebb-tide, first published in 1894, the year of his death, as a follower of sortes vergilianae, with a “tattered Vergil in his pocket”.
Herrick is stranded in the South Pacific, and would have sold even his beloved Vergil but, “the demand for literature, which is so marked a feature in some parts of the south Seas, extends not so far as the dead tongues”. He carries this book with him and occasionally “dips into the Aeneid, seeking sortes”. This apparently offers little satisfaction but does remind him of home; “visions of England, at least, would throng upon the exile’s memory- the busy schoolroom”.