I'd say it comes across as affected simply because it's very old-fashioned (I'd expect it in books from around 1600 - 1700).

It's a quote. I first came across it as a boy, in a book of comic verse called 'Verse and Worse', and the battered copy from then I've just fished out of a bookshelf.

The phrase in this form comes from a poet called Charles Stuart Calverley, who was parodying a ridiculous piece by the rather better-known Irish poet Thomas Moore, who didn't quite use these words.

I would say 'humorous' rather than 'affected'

Moore's lines:
Oh! ever thus from childhood's hour
I've seen my fondest hopes decay;
I never loved a tree or flower,
Bur 'twas the first to fade away.

Calverley's:
'Twas ever thus from childhood's hour!
My fondest hopes would not decay;
I never loved a tree or flower
Which was the first to fade away!

Moore's poem was also parodied by Lewis Carroll, so I imagine the whole thing was a well-known Victorian joke, and the phrase entered the language in this way.

I agree with escoville. I've used it myself (including in translations), often to indicate resignation with a humorous undertone.

like saying "methinks" instead of "it seems"?

@ spinatwachtel

No, not really. 'methinks' is a bit of an affectation.

#2: I too was given "Verse and Worse" as a girl, and still have my much-read copy!

@escoville - a-ha. I am not questioning the truth of your statement, but I'd be genuinely interested to know what makes you call one old-fashioned expression being used today "humorous", and another "affected". (in the vain hope of deducing some kind of general principle to work with, I suppose.)

One of the other parodies reads:

I never had a piece of toast
Particularly long and wide
But fell upon the sanded floor
And always on the buttered side.

I imagine this inspired the philosophy of Resistentialism ('Les choses sont contre nous') worked out by the journalist Paul Jennings, one of whose leading exponents was a Martin Fried-Egg. The more scientific advocates of the theory came up with the µδ (marmalade downward) index ('the chances of toast landing with the marmalade downwards vary directly with the quality of the carpet')

Spinatwachtel:

Using a consciously archaic (and intentionally humorous) quote is not quite the same as using self-consciously archaic grammar.

However: as probably most people nowadays use 'Twas ever thus as self-consciously archaic grammar, maybe you're right.

One could also say: Plus ça change! (Pretentious? Moi?)

I agree with escoville and others.
I would say that "affected" tends to imply "pompous" (deadly sin) , whereas "'twas ever thus" humorously parodies pompous usage.
Even if no-one can remember why it is said tongue-in-cheek it is still classified as humorous (in BE), and attempts at humour are a required component of nearly all conversation in Britain.

whereas "'twas ever thus" humorously parodies pompous usage.

wenn ich das richtig verstanden habe, muss man da aber diesen Gedichtband kennen, oder? Ist das eine Generationsfrage? Oder kommt es auch darauf an, wer das sagt (Stephen Fry vs. Del Boy, for example?)

I think 'Twas ever thus is simply too common to be considered an affectation, and besides, it fulfils a useful function, as the alternative is longer and clumsier (unless you use the French phrase, which many do).

As I pointed out above, this was almost certainly a catchphrase among educated Victorians, and stayed in use even after its origin was forgotten.

By contrast, methinks, methinks, serves no very useful function.

Twas ever thus hat es bis zum Kölner Karneval und Millowitsch geschafft: Wir sind alle kleine Sünderlein, S war immer immer so...

Just heard it used by Robert Peston, the BBC's Economics Editor, on the lunchtime TV news - with a bit of good humour and resignation about the economy and the forthcoming election here.

#11
I don't think you have to know the poem, but I think it is usually said in an allusive way, like a quote, even if you don't know where it came from.

I think it requires a certain (mock) gravitas and world-weariness, the impression that the speaker feels in a position to comment sadly on the ways of the world; so I can very well imagine Stephen Fry using the phrase, especially when he is being his usual parody of himself.

I cannot imagine Del Boy saying it (though he may have done so), but I can imagine him saying "Plus ça change!" (probably meaning something else).

Here's one mildly famous occurrence I'm familiar with -

Keating: "But only in their dreams can man be truly free. 'Twas always thus, and always thus will be."
McAllister: Tennyson?
Keating: No, Keating.

(from the movie Dead Poets Society)

I understand what you mean by asking if they're too pompous or affected, but I would agree with others that those words may be a little too negative for this kind of thing. There are lots of phrases like these that educated people use, that are just passed down in families or by reading classic literature. They might sound a little pompous or affected to some -- perhaps more so to people who have grown up in a household with less reading and indeed, fewer sayings, or young people who have grown up mainly with electronic devices, or people who just prefer modern language and think anything traditional sounds old-fashioned. Maybe all I'm saying is that it depends on the context.

I'm familiar with ' 'Twas ever thus' as a thing people say, though not often in my family, so I suppose it could be somewhat more common in BE. I agree you don't have to know the poem at all to know the phrase -- it seems to me like sheer coincidence that a couple of people in this thread happened to have come across the poem. It's at least common enough as a fixed phrase that ' 'Twas always thus,' as in #16, just sounds a little off to me -- close but no banana.

I'm also familiar with 'Plus ça change' as a thing people say mainly in books. If you want to reach a modern, younger audience, I'm not sure I'd use either one, but if your target audience is more literary, either would be okay.

I can't think of a more modern equivalent that's any shorter than 'The more things change, the more they stay the same,' or just 'Some things never change.'

I don't think you're that far off base to come up with 'Methinks' as roughly similar in being just a fixed expression that has survived despite being outdated. But at the same time, I don't think English speakers really use 'Methinks' very much at all -- perhaps a good deal less than German speakers use 'mich dünkt'? So, yes, it might be a little more likely to sound pompous or humorous, but to me it's not out of the ballpark.

I would say #1 was off base to guess 1600-1700 for 'twas, since it survived in poetic language at least through the 19th century and into the 20th, along with similar contractions such as 'tis, e'en, o'er, ne'er, and so on, and words like alas.

Indeed, ever meaning always is in the same style of diction, though in that style of language it's often contracted to e'er to save a syllable. Or aye is a less common word meaning 'ever' that occasionally shows up -- again, often for practical reasons of meter and/or rhyme.

There might be a thread in the archive that collects poetic language like this, which students do need to know to read poems and Shakespeare and so on. I know at one time we thought about whether it would be helpful to add, for example, some of the most common irregular verb forms in -st and -th to the dictionary, but IIRC no one could think quite how.

"But only in their dreams can man be truly free. 'Twas always thus, and always thus will be."

I don't know the quote, but I suspect it is either "in his dreams can man" or "in their dreams can men".

As I said above, I think it was a Victorian catchphrase. Our modern catchphrases come from film and TV, but sometimes live on after most people have forgotten where they started. In this case, Calverley was deliberately exaggerating the slightly absurd aspect by combining archaic bits of two lines from Moore's poem (which was undoubtedly quite well known, Moore was famous). Educated Victorian families would quote the line, and it hung around long after Calverley's poem was forgotten.

The phrase may have been popularized still further because Dickens quotes a mix of Moore's poem and Calverley's parody (in even more absurd form) in The Old Curiosity Shop.

#17 I agree you don't have to know the poem at all to know the phrase -- it seems to me like sheer coincidence that a couple of people in this thread happened to have come across the poem. 

Of course. I wasn't saying (in #6) that I was familiar with the phrase "'Twas ever thus" because I had encountered the Calverley poem. As Spike BE indicates in #14, thousands of people will have heard it on TV today, without knowing about any poems.

I was just commenting that the particular anthology of humorous verse referred to by escoville was a favourite of mine too - OT really.

To return to my #19...

I hadn't known about the Dickens reference before, but the fact that he (mis)quotes Moore's poem and partly incorporates Calverley's changes is an indication that he believed that all his readers would recognize it. In other words, both the poem and the parody were VERY well known in Victorian England.

(It is also possible that Dickens has the priority: I haven't been able to find whether Calverley's poem ('Disaster') predates The Old Curiosity Shop.)

#18
If it had been Tennyson it probably would have been "in his dreams can man"; "... in their dreams can men" would probably have been sexist in 1959.
Nowadays, I suppose it would have to be "But only in their dreams can humans be truly free. "
In the 1980s, when the film was produced, I suppose it should have been "Even in their dreams, only men can be truly free."

Calverley, Fly Leaves (1872; 1884 ed.)
"Disaster," p. 56
http://www.gutenberg.org/files/4739/4739-h/47...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Stuart_...
vs.
Dickens, Old Curiosity Shop (1841)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Old_Curiosi...

If all that is right, Dickens's book was apparently published first, and he was nearly 20 years older than Calverley (who apparently was pronounced Cahverly), but I'm not sure if that proves anything.

It seems entirely possible that the phrase was around before either of them. The OED might cast some light, or not.

This was a phrase my mother used and she was, well, old-fashioned. ;-) I figured it came from some poem or play, but until this thread I never knew where.

Is this expression pompous / affected, or would you say it was a good equivalent of saying "things never change" or "it's always been this way"?

I'd say it's somewhere in between or maybe neither. I suspect that at least some Americans are not familiar with this phrase. Maybe in GB the situation is different. I think it does usually have a slight ironic undertone to it, simply because no one speaks that way today. Or it could be used fairly seriously expressing resignation.