Tuesday, October 5, 2010

Lord Gardenstone: This wreck was easy in a stupid age.

Lord Gardenstone (1721-1793) was a distinguished judge, bon vivant and a wonderful eccentric noted for his fondness for pigs: he was ‘distinguished for his conviviality, at a period when, especially in Scotland, it must be admitted that real proficiency was requisite to procure fame in that qualification’ (Robert Chambers, A Biographical Dictionary of Eminent Scotsmen, 1835).

He also found time to be an occasional writer, and his Miscellanies in Prose and Verse (1792) is a charming selection of some of his pensées and poems, which unsurprisingly includes a rollicking ode ‘On Hard Drinking.' The same collection also includes the following poem 'On the Loss of Ancient Literature':



1 comment:

Joyce said...

Hi Matt, do you know much about the burning of Voltaire Philosophical Letters in France in the 1730s? Did the French has an official officer in charge of book burning?