Success Quote by James Loeb

The sentence performs a neat bit of class-coded stagecraft: it’s a businessman presenting scholarship as both duty and earned pleasure, and doing it in a register that signals restraint, not showmanship. “I therefore set to work” carries the moral cadence of the Protestant work ethic, but it’s also a subtle assertion of authority: Loeb isn’t merely funding a project, he’s participating in it, linking capital to intellectual stewardship.

The phrase “two and a half years of not inconsiderable labour” is Victorian understatement with an accountant’s precision. The exact duration advertises discipline; the coy “not inconsiderable” avoids bragging while still insisting the effort matters. This is how elite philanthropy often wants to sound: modest, industrious, unimpeachably sincere. He frames his role as service rather than control, yet the sentence quietly centers him as the hinge between “work” and “series,” between effort and public good.

Then comes the key move: “the privilege and the satisfaction.” Loeb doubles the payoff, moral and emotional, as if to pre-empt suspicion that wealth is buying prestige. In the context of the early Loeb Classical Library volumes, the preface becomes a kind of receipt for legitimacy. He’s not only introducing books; he’s introducing a philanthropic identity: the modern businessman as custodian of the past, translating private fortune into public culture while keeping the ego tucked neatly behind polished humility.