Treat the sermons of your old greybeard of a father as a joke, follow your own way, I tell you, and ignore him. My opinion is that these peevish dotards only bamboozle us with their silly tales; and, virtuous because they cannot help it, out of sheer envy, they seek to prevent young people from enjoying the pleasures of life!
Moquez-vous des sermons d'un vieux barbon de pere,
Poussez votre bidet, vous dis-je, et laissez faire.
Ma foi, j'en suis d'avis, que ces penards chagrins
Nous viennent étourdir de leurs contes badins,
Et vertueux par force, espèrent par envie
Oter aux jeunes gens les plaisirs de la vie!
"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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Monday, November 18, 2019
Virtuous Because They Cannot Help It
Molière (1622-1673), The Blunderer, Act I, Scene 2 (tr. A.R. Waller):