Pièce 1 - Letter from W. K. Clifford to Frederick Pollock

Trinity College, Cambridge.—Refers to the subject of marriage. Is annoyed at having to write testimonials. Presents a Latin credo in honour of the goddess Liberty.

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Transcript

Trin. Coll. Camb.

Dear Fred

Here, until the 12th. It is ordained for the procreation of children, and for a godly and wholesome discipline. {1}

Oh, I am mad!—mad!

x x x

17 people have written to ask me for prescriptions, I mean testimonials. They know that writing matrimonials drives me mad, that every testimony takes me a week to do, that it sears my conscience and sores my brain, that—why are people such fiends? They only does it to annoy, because they knows it teases. {2}

Therefore pity & forgive me, and persuade others to do the like.

I have killed 9 establishments and 4 baptists with Moss’s story about the cockatoo who letusprayed.

Make somebody put music to this

Credo in deam solam libertatem Matrem vitæ
Matrem viventium omnium Inscriptæ legis
fontem Humani generis totam gloriam {3}

or do you put it into latin with additions or subtractions.

Thine
(I will write a testimonial for the rest this evening)
W.K.C.

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{1} The first phrase comes from the marriage service in the Prayer Book; the second appears to be Clifford’s own invention, though the phrase ‘godly and wholesome Doctrine’ occurs in the thirty-fifth of the Thirty-Nine Articles (‘On the Homilies’).

{2} An adaptation of verses in Alice in Wonderland (1865):

Speak roughly to your little boy,
And beat him when he sneezes:
He only does it to annoy,
Because he knows it teases.

{3} ‘I believe in the only goddess Liberty, mother of life, mother of all living things, source of the written law, the whole glory of the human race.’