Richard Garnett

Richard Garnett combined English librarianship, biographer, poet, and writer whose long career at the British Museum placed him within nineteenth-century literary scholarship. De Flagello Myrteo gathers brief thoughts and fancies on love, presenting them as a sequence of compact reflections rather than a continuous argument. First issued by Elkin Mathews around 1905, the book ranges across spiritual, physical, literary, and philosophical aspects of its subject. Garnett joined the British Museum as a young man and eventually became Keeper of Printed Books, combining institutional work with an extensive output of criticism, biography, translation, verse, and fiction. His best-known imaginative collection is often considered The Twilight of the Gods. De Flagello Myrteo belongs to the aphoristic side of his writing, where learning is compressed into short observations that invite agreement, disagreement, or reconsideration. The volume’s form suits an author accustomed both to broad reading and to organising knowledge for other readers.