Dedicated to everyone who has ever had to swim the sea of script submissions to a theater festival, taken from the hypereducated Puritan snarkmeister John Milton:
…I shall briefly prove in my little half hour that the mind is neither entertained nor educated by these studies, nor any good done by them for society. And at the outset, O Collegians, I put it to you (if I can guess your feelings by my own), and I ask what possible pleasure can lurk in these gamesome quarrels of gloomy oldsters. If they were not born in the cave of Trophonius, their stench betrays their birth in the caves of the monks, they reek with the grim harshness of their authors and are as wrinkled as their fathers. Their style is terse but in spite of it they are so prolix that they bore us and nauseate us. When they are read at any length, they generate an almost instinctive aversion and an even stronger natural hatred in their readers. Too often, my hearers, when it has been my bad luck to be saddled with assignments of research in their contemptible sophistries, when both my eyes and my mind were dull with long reading—too often, I say, I have stopped for breath, and sought some miserable relief in measuring the task before me. But when—as always—I found more ahead of me than I had yet got through, how often have I wished that I had been set to shovel out the Augean ox-stalls rather than struggle with such absurd assignments. And I have called Hercules happy because Juno was so easy-going as never to give him a job like mine to struggle through.
—Prolusion III, “Against Scholastic Philosophy”
This translation from the Latin of one of Milton’s exercises from his time at Christ’s College, Cambridge is taken from Merritt Y. Hughes’s 1957 collection of the complete poems and major prose.