Mr. Hobbes told me, that G. Duke of Buckingham had at Paris when he was about twenty yeares old, desired Him to reade Geometrie to him: his Grace had great naturall parts, and quicknesse of witt; Mr. Hobbes read, and his Grace did not apprehend, which Mr. Hobbes wondered at: at last, Mr. Hobbes observed that his Grace was at mastrupation (his hand in his Codpiece)."Mr. Hobbes" is of course Thomas Hobbes; "G. Duke of Buckingham" is George Villiers, 2nd Duke of Buckingham.
"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, May 13, 2017
Distracted from Learning Geometry
Aubrey's Brief Lives. Edited from the Original Manuscripts and with an Introduction by Oliver Lawson Dick, 2nd ed. (London: Secker and Warburg, 1950), pp. xcv-xcvi (Dick quoting Aubrey):