Query, British Saying

[Fred Shapiro]

On Thu, 30 Oct 2003, Kathleen E. Miller wrote:

> Back in 1997, Anne Widdecombe said of Michael Howard, former Home Affairs
> minister, that Howard had, "something of the night" about him. The quote
> has been applied to him as "Mr. Something-of-the-Night" and resurfaced
> today in the IHT. Most of the hits I come across refer to this comment. But
> there are others, mostly in British publications.

Compare the phrase "keeps their fallen day about her" from the following
great passage from Walter Pater, Studies in the History of the Renaissance
(1873) (Pater is writing about DaVinci's Mona Lisa):

"She is older than the rocks among which she sits; like the vampire, she
has been dead many times, and learned the secrets of the grave; and has
been a diver in deep seas, and keeps their fallen day about her; and
trafficked for strange webs with Eastern merchants; and, as Leda, was the
mother of Helen of Troy, and as Saint Anne, the mother of Mary; and all
this has been to her but as the sound of lyres and flutes, and lives only
in the delicacy with which it has moulded the changing lineaments, and
tinged the eyelids and the hands."

Fred Shapiro


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Fred R. Shapiro                             Editor
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