On re-reading Robert Burton’s wondrously strange The Anatomy of Melancholy tonight I finally figured out why Burton’s classic book is more appealing every time I read it. With its digressive prose, with the profanity-loving clergyman’s compulsive quoting, paraphrasing and inline commentary — and his non-step textual hyper-linking — the 17th century writer was truly the first blogger.
And his critics could have been talking about bloggers as well. Here is T.E. Brown from a review in 1895 (as paraphrased in a 1932 introduction to my edition):
His learning is but a “parade,” the “product of omnivorous folio-bolting and quarto-gulping, urged on and sustained by inordinate vanity [ed. That word again]“; his method naught but a “pseudo-method,” a mere “affectation of method and order.” It is merely something with “slanging power … a hurly-burly of invective.”
Related posts:
i haven’t gotten to it yet, but it’s online:
http://www.exclassics.com/anatomy/anatcont.htm
A “hurly-burly of invective” — nice. It does sound like more than a few blogs I know
But I thought Samuel Pepys was the first blogger.