Over at BibliOdyssey, Peacay has a fantastic quotation from Robert Payne, in a letter to Gilbert Sheldon written in 1650:
“The truth is, this Jesuit, as generally the most of his order, have a great ambition to be thoughte the greate and learned men of the world; and to that end writes greate volumes, on all subjects, with gay pictures and diagrams to set them forth, for ostentation And to fill up those volumes, they draw in all things, by head and shoulders; and these too for the most part, stolen from other authors. So that if that little, which is their owne, were separated from what is borrowed from others, or impertinent to their present arguments, their swollen volumes would shrink up to the size of our Almanacks. But enough of these Mountebankes.”
But you’d have to punch someone if they came up sprouting such convolutions near your headspace. Heh.
So…
In every great book there is a pamphlet struggling to get out…?
And what do have mountainbikes got to do with it…?
The real issue here is: who ate all the ‘e’s? Oh happy daye, when so manye wordes didst end with an ‘e’. I forget whiche politician started lobbying for less of them – and the date of the daye on which he got his ghastly request. Rest assured, the man was a mighty foole.