She adores La Fontaine, reads Balzac with a kind of artist-scowl, and will not let Greek alone.
You hint at broken rest and an aching head at breakfast, and she will fling you a scrap of Anthology in lieu of the camphor-bottle, or chant the αἰαῖ, αἰαῖ, of tragic chorus.
"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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Monday, July 02, 2012
A Wife Who Reads Greek
Ik Marvel (Donald G. Mitchell), Reveries of a Bachelor (1850; rpt. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1889), p. 15: