A Friend, a Booke, and a Garden shall for the future perfectly circumscribe my utmost designes...Hat tip: Ian Jackson.
"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, March 04, 2015
My Utmost Designs
John Evelyn, letter to his uncle William Prettyman (December 2, 1651), in The Letterbooks of John Evelyn, Vol. I: British Museum Add Ms 78298, edd. Douglas D.C. Chambers and David Galbraith (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2014), pp. 103-104 (at 104):