In our chosen fields we shall understand our authors better if we read what they read, see what they saw, believe for the moment what they believed, enjoy the art and music of their day, enter into their enthusiasms and hatreds, fight their battles with them, hobnob with their fellows, in a word, be their most intimate associates in all respects.
"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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Wednesday, December 18, 2024
Intimate Associates
Tenney Frank (1876-1939), "Changing Conceptions of Literary and Philological Research," Journal of the History of Ideas 3.4 (October, 1942) 401-414 (at 413):