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... Philologists, who chase

A panting syllable through time and space,

Start it at home, and hunt it in the dark,

To Gaul, to Greece, and into Noah's ark.

William Cowper, 'Retirement' (1782)

Philology always leads to crime.

Eugène Ionesco, The Lesson (1951)

BALD heads forgetful of their sins,

Old, learned, respectable bald heads

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That young men, tossing on their beds,

Rhymed out in love's despair

To flatter beauty's ignorant ear.

All shuffle there; all cough in ink;

All wear the carpet with their shoes;

All think what other people think;

All know the man their neighbour knows.

Lord, what would they say

Did their Catullus walk that way?

William Butler Yeats, 'The Scholars'