You do well to make your letters merry ones, though not very merry yourself. And that both for my sake and your own.—For your own sake, because it sometimes happens that by assuming an air of cheerfullness we become cheerfull in reality, and for mine, because I have always more need of a Laugh than a Cry, being somewhat disposed to melancholy by natural temperament as well as by other causes.
"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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Thursday, October 14, 2010
In Need of a Laugh
William Cowper, letter to William Unwin (May 8, 1785):