Rarefied Repartee

James Gould Cozzens is an author whose prose you can chew for grist and pith.  He is of a conservative, Protestant disposition;  he has an especial affinity for Law, and not a little for Latin.   Witness this, from his semi-autobiographical first novel, depicting himself as “Francis”, a rather callow young American, moving somewhat aimlessly around the watering-holes of Europe, as tutor to the adolescent child of a wealthy mother:

[One Mr McKellar speaking, of a headstrong young woman] :
“It will be like trtying to get Lorna home from the Casino when she knows that next time it just has to be pair et rouge.  You don’t arise from the table gracefully.  No one does.  Lucretius was an ass.  What does he say?  Well, now I have forgotten.”

“Cur non ut plenus vitae conviva recedis,” Francis said distinctly -- almost viciously, for he felt entitled to one triumph, and what a wretched one this was! “Aequo animoque capis securam, stulte, quietem.”

“Bravo!” Mr McKella said, startled.  He swept a bow to Francis.  “… Plenus, indeed!  You can always use a little more.”

-- James Gould Cozzens,  Ask Me Tomorrow (1940), ch. 5

What is really arch about that exchange  is not so much the having of an apposite quotation from De rerum natura  at one’s fingertips, but rather that “Lucretius is an ass”.  All McKellar has done is to mention Lorna’s likely reluctance to leave the gaming-table, yet in the very next instant he presumes that such a situation, drawn from life, will instantly put the hearer -- or anyone of competence -- in mind of one particular a-propos zinger from a a Roman poet of the first century B.C., and that we -- you and I -- are so familiar, and overfamiliar, with the various bons mots of that man, that we can (using schoolboy phraseology) dismiss the old scribbler as “an ass”.