Vox Meditantis

Thursday, the 25th of February, 1675

The candle-wick drowndeth in its own tallow, and the hour is grown small and terrible. I sit here amidst the dust of a thousand years, yet I feel myself a mere vapour, thin and translucent. How is it that a man may spend his life uncovering the foundations of the world, only to find his own foundation is but shifting sand? My heart is heavy, oppressed by a black distemper of the soul that I cannot shake. I am unmasked in this silence; the gravity I wear before the Fellows of the Society is cast aside like a moth-eaten cloak.

I look upon these coins – the sestertii of Vespasian, so cold and round – and I see not the glory of Rome, but the face of Master Vane. It is a sharp and biting canker, this Envy. It gnaweth at my vitals to see him, a man of such shallow plummet, possess that effortless grace of speech which the King so favoureth. He hath a nimbleness of wit that danceth like sunlight upon water, while my own thoughts move like heavy oxen through the mire. He hath acquired, by some foul stroke of fortune, that marble fragment of the weeping Niobe which I have coveted these seven winters. I see it in my mind’s eye – the exquisite sorrow carved in the stone, the very breath of beauty captured in a cold mineral sigh. It is a piece of such rare industry, such perfect expression, that it maketh the soul to ache. And it sits upon his mantel, mocked by his trivial jests, while I, who have studied the very veins of the earth to understand its making, am left with naught but the shadow of its memory.

Yet, I must check this turbulent sea within me. Have I not bin a man of constancy? For twenty years I have waited upon the earth to yield its secrets. I have stood in the rain at the digging of barrows, my limbs stiff and aching, without a murmur of discontent. I have spent months over a single broken inscription, scraping away the filth of centuries with a needle’s point, content to let the truth reveal itself in its own slow season. Patience hath bin my bride, my long-suffering companion through many a lean winter. I know how to endure the delay of the world; I know how to sit still while the Great Disposer turneth the wheel of the years. Why then, doth the success of a butterfly like Vane cause me such inward tumult? It is a sin against the quietude I have laboured to build.

There is a word that haunteth the coffee-houses and the courts of this age, a word that I would, by my own hand, strike forever from the common tongue of men. That word is ‘Novelty’. It is a pox upon our discourse. Why must we banish it? Because it is the enemy of all that is grave and enduring. It is the cry of the vulgar, who care not for the deep roots of our fathers, but only for the latest fashion from France or the newest bauble from the East. To speak of ‘Novelty’ is to admit a thirst for the superficial; it turneth the mind away from the majestic ruins of antiquity and toward the flickering shadows of the present. If we could but lose the very breath of that word, perhaps men would return to the study of Ancientry with a proper reverence. It is a word that robbeth us of our weight. It flattereth the young in their ignorance and maketh the old feel like strangers in their own land.

I look at my hands, stained with the ink of old chronicles and the grit of the soil. They are trembling. I am exposed even to myself as a man of pride, for what is Envy but Pride turned inside out? I desire the beauty Vane possesses, not because I love the art more, but because I loathe my own obscurity. I have waited with the patience of a stone, yet I find I have the heart of a beggar. The wind howleth through the new-built chimneys of this City, a City risen from its ashes, and I am left to wonder if I shall ever find such a resurrection for my own weary spirit.

Bob Lynn | © 2026 Vox Meditantis. All rights reserved.