He was also alive to the dangers of over-specialism, and took rather a mischievous pleasure in pointing out the vagaries of an eminent German critic who, having come across a detached line of so familiar a book as the Georgics of Virgil, had taken it for a fragment of a lost writer, and proceeded to emend it on this hypothesis by the light of his inner consciousness.
"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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Saturday, September 20, 2014
Dangers of Over-Specialism
William Walrond Jackson, Ingram Bywater: The Memoir of an Oxford Scholar, 1840-1914 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1917), p. 55: