Be not righteous over much—the enthusiasts often give us their own fanatical absurditys for gospel & condemn everybody's religion but their own—these people think as familiar of the Deity as a man would of his children & a master of his servants—& as Warburton says they make God after man's image & chuse the worst models they can find—themselves
"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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Friday, May 02, 2014
Fanatical Absurdities
John Clare (1793-1864), The Prose of John Clare, edd. J.W. and Anne Tibble (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1951), pp. 226-227: