Though my life, like the lives of my contemporaries, covers a period of more material advance in the world than any of the same length can have done in other centuries, I do not find that real civilization has advanced equally. People are not more humane, so far as I can see, then they were in the year of my birth. Disinterested kindness is less.
"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
▼
Sunday, October 20, 2019
Progress
Thomas Hardy, quoted in Florence Emily Hardy, The Life of Thomas Hardy 1840–1928 (1962; rpt. London: The Macmillan Press Ltd, 1983), pp. 405-406 ("Birthday Notes," 1920):