Another child, Mary Anne Schimmelpenninck was of sterner stuff. Having extracted four front teeth, her kindly dentist offered '... a packet of comfits as my reward. But I drew up and said, "Do you think Regulus, and Epictetus, and Seneca, would take a reward for bearing pain; or the little Spartan boys?"'.
"A peculiar anthologic maze, an amusing literary chaos, a farrago of quotations, a mere olla podrida of quaintness, a pot pourri of pleasant delites, a florilegium of elegant extracts, a tangled fardel of old-world flowers of thought, a faggot of odd fancies, quips, facetiae, loosely tied" (Holbrook Jackson, Anatomy of Bibliomania) by a "laudator temporis acti," a "praiser of time past" (Horace, Ars Poetica 173).
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Friday, January 12, 2007
Classical Bravery
Richard Carter, review of R. Porter, Bodies Politic: Disease, Death and Doctors in Britain (1650-1900) (London: Reaction Books, 2001), in Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine 95.3 (March 2002) 157-159 (at 157-158):