Again modern readers must use their historical imagination to think away modern politeness and to summon up a world in which strength and pride expressed themselves directly and brutally. They must think of men like the sixteenth-century nobles at Belluno who used to shout 'Take your hat off, dastard!' and to show their scorn for the multitude by writing 'Labouring plebs' on the walls.
"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, October 08, 2023
Nobles
Trevor Dean and Daniel Waley, The Italian City-Republics, 5th ed. (London: Routledge, 2023), p. 126: