"Ah, John, you'd better be employed in reading the Good Book than in your wild courses. Here take it, father, and read it" — and she handed to him the well-worn black volume from the shelf. Enderby paused a moment and held the volume in his hand .... "Take the book," she said. "Read, John, in this hour of affliction; it brings comfort."Hat tip: Conrad H. Roth.
The farmer took from her hand the well-worn copy of Euclid's Elements, and laying aside his hat with reverence, he read aloud: "The angles at the base of an isoceles triangle are equal, and whosoever shall produce the sides, lo, the same also shall be equal each unto each."
"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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Sunday, March 01, 2009
The Good Book
Stephen Leacock, Caroline's Christmas: or, The Inexplicable Infant: