The violence of newspaper talk at that time, both on the part of editors and anonymous correspondents, cannot fail to impress the modern reader even though he be inured to political invective....The political tricks of the day — name-calling, allegations of guilt by association, and the like — were so similar to those employed within present memory that twentieth-century demagogues of either the right or left would have felt very much at home, no doubt, if translated to the late eighteenth century.
"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, September 07, 2025
Political Invective
Dumas Malone (1892-1986), Jefferson and His Time, vol. 3: Jefferson and the Ordeal of Liberty (1948; rpt. Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1962), p. 391: