The talk in another thread of "florid" style (and the implications such talk bears for our decadent days) made me think of Sir Thomas Browne.
CAS was a great admirer of Sir Thomas Browne's writings. Those who are interested in learning more about Browne could do worse than to consult
this Wikipedia article (with all the usual caveats). Below is an excerpt from Browne's famous work
Hydriotaphia, to whet or repel the appetite, as the case may be:
Quote:Why the Female Ghosts appear unto Ulysses, before the Heroes and masculine spirits? Why the Psyche or soul of Tiresias is of the masculine gender; who being blinde on earth sees more then all the rest in hell; Why the Funerall Suppers consisted of Eggs, Beans, Smallage, and Lettuce, since the dead are made to eat Asphodels about the Elyzian medows? Why since there is no Sacrifice acceptable, nor any propitiation for the Covenant of the grave; men set up the Deity of Morta, and fruitlesly adored Divinities without ears? it cannot escape some doubt.
The dead seem all alive in the humane Hades of Homer, yet cannot well speak, prophesie, or know the living, except they drink bloud, wherein is the life of man. And therefore the souls of Penelope's Paramours conducted by Mercury chirped like bats and those which followed Hercules made a noise but like a flock of birds.
Who could not find fascinating a writer admired by both Dr. Johnson
and Thomas de Quincey? (It's hard to think of a more antipodal pair in English letters). As De Quincey himself enthused about
Hydriotaphia,
Quote:What a melodious ascent as of a prelude to some impassioned requiem breathing from the pomps of earth, and from the sanctities of the grave! What a fluctus decumanus of rhetoric! Time expounded, not by generations or centuries, but by the vast periods of conquests and dynasties: by cycles of Pharaohs and Ptolemies, Antiochi and Arsacides!