Goodman Fact is allowed by every Body to be a plain-spoken Person, and a Man of very few Words. Tropes and Figures are his Aversion. He affirms every Thing roundly, without any Art, Rhetorick, or Circumlocution. He is a declared Enemy to all Kinds of Ceremony and Complaisance. He flatters no Body. Yet so great is his natural Eloquence, that he cuts down the finest Orator, and destroys the best-contrived Argument, as soon as ever he gets himself to be heard. He never applies to the Passions or Prejudices of his Audience: When they listen with Attention and honest Minds, he never fails of carrying his Point.
"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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Tuesday, March 18, 2014
Goodman Fact
Joseph Addison (1672-1719), The Late Tryal and Conviction of Count Tariff (London: A. Baldwin, 1713), pp. 2-3: