The simple truth is, there was never such a shambling half-and-half set of incapables collected in one government since the world began.
"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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Friday, April 02, 2021
The Simple Truth
William Pitt Fessenden (1806-1869), quoted in Shelby Foote, The Civil War: A Narrative, Vol. 1: Fort Sumter to Perryville (1958; rpt. New York: Vintage Books, 1986), p. 524: