"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, December 17, 2023
The Finest Men
The Note-books of Samuel Butler, ed. Henry Festing Jones (New York: E.P. Dutton & Co., 1917), p. 36:
I suppose an Italian peasant or a Breton, Norman or English fisherman,
is about the best thing nature does in the way of men—the richer and the poorer being alike mistakes.