Familiar Quotations A Collection of Passages, Phrases, and Proverbs Traced to Their Sources in Ancient and Modern Literature — A Closer Reading

The Thread That Binds: Bartlett's Editorial Principle

The epigraph on the title page—'I have gathered a posie of other men's flowers, and nothing but the thread that binds them is mine own'—announces the compiler's role as arranger rather than creator. Bartlett's preface elaborates: he admits passages 'without a claim to familiarity, but solely on the ground of coincidence of thought.' This principle allows the collection to function as a map of shared language, where a phrase from Shakespeare reappears in a footnote to a line from Du Bartas. The cross-references are not merely citations; they are invitations to observe how a metaphor migrates from one author to another, sometimes across languages and centuries.

Movement Between Scenes: From Ancient to Modern

The arrangement moves from classical sources (Greek tragedians, Marcus Aurelius, Pilpay) through medieval and Renaissance writers to nineteenth-century poets. A reader opening to Du Bartas (page 783) finds lines like 'Living from hand to mouth' and 'In the jaws of death,' each traced to Shakespeare or other later authors in the footnotes. The footnotes themselves form a secondary text: they list page numbers for Shakespeare, Milton, Pope, and others, creating a network of references that spans the volume. This structure turns the book into a tool for tracing the movement of a phrase across time, from its earliest recorded use to its later adaptations.

Recurring Images: The Garden, the Stage, and the Body

Certain images recur across entries. The garden metaphor appears in the epigraph and in Du Bartas's 'Out of the old fieldes cometh al this new corne.' The stage image surfaces in 'I take the world to be but as a stage, Where net-maskt men do play their personage,' footnoted to Shakespeare. Bodily imagery—'weakened and wasted to skin and bone,' 'flesh of thy flesh'—connects physical vulnerability to moral or emotional states. These recurring motifs are not analyzed by Bartlett but emerge through the juxtaposition of quotations, allowing the reader to observe patterns of thought across authors.

The Role of the Footnotes: A Web of Echoes

The footnotes are the most structurally innovative element of this edition. They do not merely identify sources; they link a given line to its later or earlier counterparts. For example, Du Bartas's 'Will change the pebbles of our puddly thought To orient pearls' is footnoted to Milton and to Shakespeare's 'orient pearls.' A line about 'cattle upon a thousand hills' is traced to Psalm 50:10. These cross-references transform the book from a simple anthology into a concordance of literary memory, showing how phrases travel from scripture to poetry to proverb. The reader is encouraged to follow these threads, discovering unexpected connections.

Bartlett's ninth edition rewards the reader who treats it not as a reference to be consulted in isolation but as a text to be browsed. The cross-references invite movement between entries, and the chronological arrangement reveals how language accumulates meaning over time. For those interested in the history of phrases or the migration of images, this volume offers a structured yet open-ended map of the English literary tradition.

Leafing through Familiar Quotations, I paused at the preface, struck by how editorial care can feel almost like tenderness. It reminded me of an afternoon in the library at Yale, tracing bookplates and marginalia in the Catalogue of the William Loring Andrews Collection of Early Books in the Library of Yale University — Inside the Classic. Both are quiet acts of preservation, keeping old voices within reach.