The superiority of metropolitan society cannot be disputed, and its more enlarged and liberal modes of thinking and acting; but neither then nor now, had I or have I, any affection for blackened brick walls, interminable streets, rattling vehicles, howling costermongers, wretchedness, poverty, and vice, made more deplorable and vicious by close contact with dissipation, wealth, and luxury. The shady side of a wood in summer, a mountain-top, or the ocean-shore, the lodge in some irriguous valley by the dashing stream for me, before the architectual [sic] extravagances of Buckingham House, or the plaistered mansions and empty show of Belgravia. This may be want of taste for what the hour may deem superlative things; I cannot help my bad taste.
"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, February 26, 2014
I Cannot Help My Bad Taste
Cyrus Redding (1785-1870), Fifty Years' Recollections, Literary and Personal, with Observations on Men and Things, 2nd ed., Vol. I (London: Charles J. Skeet, 1858), pp. 45-46: