A cornucopia of elegant excerpts, a collectanea of passages, a florilegium of ideas, a gallimaufry of aperçus, musing flowers of yore, an anthologia of verse (a Parnassus), an omnium gatherum of etymologies and origins, all singled out carefully by hand.
Paul Hazard, European Thought in the eighteenth Century: from Montesquieu to Lessing, tr. J. Lewis May (Yale University Press, 1954), p. 8 (the author is describing what we find in Jonathan Swift's opus):
. . . And the Philosophers? A lot of numskulls grinding away in vacuo; nothing is too absurd, too outrageous, to be put forward by one or another of them.
Thomas Carlyle, ‘‘German Literature of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries (1831),’’ in Critical and Miscellaneaous Essays (New York: J...
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