People in high or in distinguished life ought to have a greater circumspection in regard to their most trivial actions. For instance, I saw M. Pope—and what was he doing when you saw him?—why to the best of my memory, he was picking his nose.
"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).
Pages
▼
Monday, December 12, 2011
Pope's Nose
William Shenstone, Works in Verse and Prose (London: R. and J. Dodsley, 1764), vol. II, p. 174: