He had been chaplain to Lord Exmouth, and was present at the bombardment of Algiers. As the action thickened he was seized with a comical religious frenzy, dashing round the decks, and diffusing spiritual exhortation amongst the half-stripped, busy sailors, till the first lieutenant ordered a hencoop to be clapped over him, whence his little head emerging continued its devout cackle, quite regardless of the balls, which flew past him and killed eight hundred sailors in our small victorious fleet.
"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 22, 2013
A Comical Religious Frenzy
W. Tuckwell, Reminiscences of Oxford (London: Cassell and Company, Limited, 1900), p. 24 (on John Brickenden Frowd):