Michael Pollak wrote:
>
> I tell you, every time someone cites another passage it brings out for me
> just how wonderful a writer Smith was. He was one of the greatest
> non-fiction stylists the English language has ever produced. It's a
> mountain of a book on the driest of topics and yet almost every paragraph
> is a physical pleasure to read.
Yes, he is a pleasure to read. But there _are_ others.
Gibbon. Boxwell. Johnson. Byron (the letters).
And re SA's sarcasm. Butler (and other 20th-c writers) is not allowed the sheer length in which whch 18th-c writers indulged and were indulged. I wonder what Butler's books would be like expanded to the length of Smith's or Gibbon's.
Carrol