I am truly glad to read of your pleasure from your little girl and your château. The haunts of Happiness are varied, and rather unaccountable; but I have more often seen her among little children, and home firesides, and in country houses, than anywhere else,—at least, I think so. God bless you!
"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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Saturday, June 01, 2024
The Haunts of Happiness
Sydney Smith, letter to Francis Jeffrey (1814), in A Memoir of the Reverend Sydney Smith. By His Daughter Lady Holland. With a Selection from His Letters, Edited by Mrs. Austin, 3rd ed., Vol. II: Letters (London: Longman, Brown, Green, and Longmans, 1855), p. 121: