Much of what one reads regarding public law, law and administration, and indeed constitutional law is often only really hearsay, anecdotal. Scholars like to use buzz words, especially the word nuanced or context to prop up their hearsay. Yet, for me, as a scholar of the old school (so old, that it harks back to the time of Plato) I was absolutely delighted to have a seminal work by Albert Venn Dicey arrive. I am enjoying it more than one can imagine. After a hard day's work at that... place (Hades, the Infernal Regions, a cruel and unforgiving world presided over by foreign juvenile brutes lacking any kind of reason, untutored, unschooled and tyrannical) I was so very relieved to begin reading such an excellent work as this. I speak of Dicey's Introduction to the Study of the Law of the Constitution.
It became really rather clear to me, from my first acquaintance with this man's work, that this is only one of many great works, not just by the great Dicey himself, but also his forebears. I was astonished to discover that his tutor was none other than the illustrious Benjamin Jowett. People pretend to have read Plato, and if one has read Plato in the vernacular, the chances are that one has read Benjamin Jowett's translation (though there are many fine translations of Plato, if truth be told).
No less than his renowned tutor, Dicey's mother was also, seemingly, an excellent influence upon his learning: teaching him Latin, ancient Greek, French and German. Equal to this was the influence of his father, a Cambridge man, though Dicey himself would become an Oxford man.
As I wander through this arduous, fretful and meaningless subsistence of a "life", here, now, in Dark Age Britain (for surely were I in any other country in the world, I would most certainly not be slaving away beneath brutish unlettered juveniles, the meanest most basest slave that ever walked this once great nation's green fields and tranquil pastures - holding a master's degree in classical Latin I would be a teacher, or at the very least, a resident piano player, guitarist and singer) I take much solace in the fact that this is a nation of paupers, slaves, beggars, and that Latin - where once it was an illustrious, profound and intellectual language, is now the common currency of the basest most servile members of society.
Dicey was, I believe, at heart a classicist. This is evidenced by the fact that he chose classical studies for his academic specialism in his first two degrees (precisely as I did). Yet, instead of embarking on a "career" of working in McDonald's, Dicey had the fortunate grace of being in a better place - an England that was once great, not an England which is fit only for the beggar, the pauper, the slave (unless one happens to be a crook, most especially a crook in the City of London). Yet for all the necessary hardships a classical scholar must endure in this, most basest and servile of all states in the world, I am glad, that this says more about this once great nation, than it does about me.
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