After a painful life in study spent,
The learn'd themselves their ignorance lament;
And aged men, whose lives exceed the space,
Which seems the bound prescrib'd to mortal race,
With hoary heads, their short experience grieve,
As doom'd to die before they've learn'd to live.
So hard it is true knowledge to attain,
So frail is life, and fruitless human pain!
"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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Wednesday, March 16, 2011
Ars Longa, Vita Brevis
William Congreve (1670-1729), Verses to the Memory of Grace Lady Gethin, Occasioned by reading her Book, intitled Reliquiae Gethinianae, lines 1-8: