“[Bishop Hall] sobs me out half a dozen phthisical mottoes wherever he had them, hopping short in the measure of convulsion-fits; in which labour the agony of his wit having escaped narrowly, instead of well-sized periods, he greets us with a quantity of thumb-ring posies. ‘He has a fortune therefore good, because he is content with it.’ This is a piece of sapience not worth the brain of a fruit trencher”

John Milton, An Apology For Smectymnuus or An Apology for a Pamphlet (1642)