Coxcombs and blockheads always have been, and always will be, innovators; some in dress, some in polity, some in language.
"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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Sunday, March 28, 2021
Innovators
Walter Savage Landor, "Samuel Johnson and John Horne (Tooke)," First Conversation, Imaginary Conversations, Vol. III (London: J.M. Dent & Co., 1909), pp. 346-400 (at 353, Johnson speaking):