Shortly after his consecration as archbishop, Clemens publicly announced that on the first of April he would deliver a sermon in church. When the time came he climbed solemnly into the pulpit, bowed ceremoniously, made the sign of the cross, then suddenly shouted, "April fool!" and hastened out, shaking with mirth, amid a mocking tucket of trumpets and rattle of drums.
"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, August 09, 2024
Short Sermon
Robert Haven Schauffler, Beethoven: The Man Who Freed Music
(Garden City: Doubleday, Doran & Company, Inc., 1929), p. 10: