Laudator Temporis Acti

Joris-Karl Huysmans, À Rebours (Against Nature), chapter 3 (tr. Robert Baldick):

In prose, he was no more enamoured of the long-winded style, the redundant metaphors and the rambling digressions of old Chick-Pea, the bombast of his apostrophes, the wordiness of his patriotic perorations, the pomposity of his harangues, the heaviness of his style, well fed and well covered, but weak-boned and running to fat, the intolerable insignificance of his long introductory adverbs, the monotonous uniformity of his adipose periods clumsily tied awkwardly with conjunctions, and finally his wearisome predilection for tautology, all signally failed to endear him to Des Esseintes.

En prose, la langue verbeuse, les métaphores redondantes, les digressions amphigouriques du Pois Chiche, ne le ravissaient pas davantage; la jactance de ses apostrophes, le flux de ses rengaines patriotiques, l'emphase de ses harangues, la pesante masse de son style, charnu, nourri, mais tourné à la graisse et privé de moelles et d'os, les insupportables scories de ses longs adverbes ouvrant la phrase, les inaltérables formules de ses adipeuses périodes mal liées entre elles par le fil des conjonctions, enfin ses lassantes habitudes de tautologie, ne le séduisaient guère.

Old Chick-Pea is Cicero (Latin cicer = chick-pea).

Hat tip: Eric Thomson.