Now! Then! 2024! - Yorkshire On This Day

Excerpt

From a diary which I kept in 1863 the following passage shows that I had not passed beyond the primeval savage or cruel instincts with which we are all born, until education in the humanities “emollit mores, nec sinit esse feros” [“softens the manners and subdues the mind” (Ovid)]: “I saw a pig killed this afternoon. The first time it was struck it broke the rope and got away. It was pulled back and struck twice, and had its throat cut twice, and then was scalded to death.” Such miraculous changes come over us in process of time! for I, who would not now see a living thing hurt, if I could help it, was clearly interested in the butchery of that pig. I remember Bob Gowland, the Kilvington blacksmith, used to be called in when a pig had to be killed, and being, as I have said, not of sober habit, he did not strike with sufficient accuracy when attempting to fell the poor brute. It is horrible to think of now, but it is a reminder of what one was.

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Comment

Later:

Children nowadays are so old at such ages as from ten to twelve that it will seem no wonder at all when they are able, in due course, fifty years later, to tell what they did in their youth; but in my time children associated, for the most part, with children, and they did not so quickly become old-fashioned. I have mentioned taking pleasure in seeing a pig killed, and I ought in justice to myself to add that I and my sister were very kind to two young pet porkers, whom we named “Johnny” and “Jacky.”

It was a commonplace request, after doing lessons: ” Please may we go and play with the pigs ! ”

Pigs really are intelligent if you handle them kindly, and all went well with Johnny and Jacky till they grew big, and then, whichever was mine took fright at something and knocked me over on hard cobble-stones. I was partially stunned, and the pig galloped over my prostrate body. That ended this form of amusement, and the end of the pigs was not far distant.

The Englished Ovid is from a felicitous translation of the whole couplet added to a later edition of a 1711 essay on education by Addison:

Ingenuas didicisse fideliter artes
Emollit mores, nec sinit esse feros

Ingenuous arts, where they an entrance find,
Soften the manners, and subdue the mind.
(Addison 1755)

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Original

From a Diary which I kept in 1863 the following passage shows that I had not passed beyond the primeval savage or cruel instincts with which we are all born, until education in the humanities “emollit mores, nec sinit esse feros” [“soften the manners and subdue the mind” (Ovid)]. The extract is dated 22nd January 1863:

I saw a pig killed this afternoon. The first time it was struck it broke the rope and got away. It was pulled back and struck twice, and had its throat cut twice, and then was scalded to death.

Such miraculous changes come over us in process of time! for I, who would not now see a living thing hurt, if I could help it, was clearly interested in the butchery of that pig. I remember Bob Gowland, the Kilvington blacksmith, used to be called in when a pig had to be killed, and being, as I have said, not of sober habit, he did not strike with sufficient accuracy when attempting to fell the poor brute. It is horrible to think of now, but it is a reminder of what one was.

195 words.

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• Alcohol intoxication (27) ·
• Alcoholism (12) ·
• Allison, William (1851-1925) (12), Yorkshire-born sporting journalist ·
• Animal slaughter (2) ·
• Blacksmith (5) ·
• Epistulae ex Ponto (1) ·
• Joseph Addison (1) ·
• Latin (9) ·
• Ovid (1) ·
• Pig (11) ·
• Pork (3) ·
• South Kilvington (6) ·

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