I am now settynge forthe for the countrie, where I will read Petrarch, Ariosto, Horace, and such wise ones. I will make verses on the maidens, and give my wine to the maisters; but it shall be such as I do love, and do love me. I do muche delight to meete my goode freindes, and discourse of getting rid of our foes. Each nighte do I spende, or muche better parte thereof, in counceil with the aunciente examples of lerninge; I con over their histories, their poetrie, their instructions, and thence glean my own proper conducte in matters bothe of merrimente or discretion...Hat tip: Ian Jackson.
"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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Sunday, March 31, 2013
Wise Ones
John Harrington, letter to Thomas Howard (April 1603), in The Letters and Epigrams of Sir John Harrington, ed. Norman Egbert McClure (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1930), pp. 99-100: