“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” by a “laudator temporis acti,” a “praiser of time past” . There were none of those thousand sources of irritation that the ingenuity of civilized man has created to mar his own felicity.
