The way to be esteemd Learned, is but only to have a Library, and to be able to Turn to the Indices, upon any Occasion of showing great Reading.That was in the 17th century. In the 21st, the way to be esteemed learned, is to resort to Google Book Search. Thus one may gain the reputation of wide reading, without the substance. Experto credite.
"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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Saturday, March 07, 2009
An Illusion
Samuel Butler, Characters and Passages from Note-Books, ed. A.R. Waller (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1908), p. 277: