Exhibit A:
Unsuccessful application by James Murray, who in 1879 would become the primary editor and generative force behind the Oxford English Dictionary, for a position at the British Museum Library in 1866:
I have to state that Philology, both Comparative and special, has been my favourite pursuit during the whole of my life, and that I possess a general acquaintance with the languages and literature of the Aryan and Syro-Arabic classes—not indeed to say that I am familiar with all or nearly all of these, but that I possess that general lexical & structural knowledge which makes the intimate knowledge only a matter of a little application. With several I have a more intimate acquaintance as with the Romance tongues, Italian, French, Catalan, Spanish, Latin & in a less degree Portuguese, Vaudois, Provençal & various dialects. In the Teutonic branch, I am tolerably familiar with Dutch (having at my place of business correspondence to read in Dutch, German, French & occasionally other languages), Flemish, German and Danish. In Anglo-Saxon and Moeso-Gothic my studies have been much closer, I having prepared some works for publication upon these languages. I know a little of the Celtic, and am at present engaged with the Sclavonic, having obtained a useful knowledge of Russian. In the Persian, Achaemenian Cuneiform, & Sanscrit branches, I know for the purposes of Comparative Philology. I have sufficient knowledge of Hebrew & Syriac to read at sight the Old Testament and Peshito; to a less degree I know Aramaic Arabic, Coptic and Phenician to the point where it was left by Gesenius.
Exhibit B:
Required reading for guest lecturer W. H. Auden’s one-semester course “Fate and the Individual in European Literature,” open to juniors, seniors, and graduate students at the University of Michigan in 1941:
The Divine Comedy—Dante
The Agamemnon—Aeschylus
or
The Antigone—Sophocles
Odes—Horace
Confessions—Augustine
Henry IV, Part 2, Othello, Hamlet, The Tempest—Shakespeare
Volpone—Ben Jonson
Pensées—Pascal
Phèdre—Racine
Marriage of Heaven and Hell—William Blake
Faust, Part 1—Goethe
Fear and Trembling—Kierkegaard
Journals—Baudelaire
Peer Gynt—Ibsen
The Brothers Karamazov—Dostoevsky
Une Saison en Enfer—Rimbaud
The Education of Henry Adams—H. Adams
Moby Dick—Melville
Journal of My Other Self—Rilke
Das Schloß—Kafka
Family Reunion—Eliot
The Libretti for the following operas:
Orpheus—Glück
Don Giovanni—Mozart
The Magic Flute—Mozart
Fidelio—Beethoven
Flying Dutchman—Wagner
Tristan and Isolde—Wagner
Götterdämmerung—Wagner
Carmen—Bizet
Traviata—Verdi
Recommended Critical Reading:
Patterns of Culture—Ruth Benedict
From the South Seas—Margaret Mead
Middletown—Lynd
The Heroic Age—Chadwick
Epic and Romance—W. P. Ker
Plato Today—R. H. S. Crossman
Christianity and Classical Culture—C. N. Cochrane
The Allegory of Love—C. S. Lewis