A more humane exponent of English ethics was Archdeacon [James L.] Garland, who lived here [in Isfahan] thirty years. During that time, he used to say, he made one convert. She was an old woman, who was ostracized for her apostasy, so that on her deathbed the Archdeacon was the only friend she could send for. She had one last request, she told him.
'What is it?' asked the Archdeacon, anxious to ease his protégée's last moments.
'Please summon a mullah.'
He did so, and repeated the story afterwards.
"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).
Pages
▼
Tuesday, September 05, 2017
Conversion
Robert Byron (1905-1941), The Road to Oxiana (London: Picador, 1994), p. 174: