That book meme

* Grab the nearest book.
* Open the book to page 56.
* Find the fifth sentence.
* Post the text of the sentence in your journal along with these instructions if you want to.
* Don't dig for your favorite book, the cool book, or the intellectual one: pick the CLOSEST.

Hard to see which is the closest, really, because the shelf is in front of me. I'll close my eyes and touch one.

Okay, here it is. Page 56 is in fact blank, since page 55 is a plate. Page 57 doesn't have five sentences on it. If we take pages 54 and 57 as one and count five sentences, the fifth is mostly in Latin and the fourth is a few yards long. This is unhelpful. Here are the fourth and fifth together.

We live indeed in a thieving, cheating, and plundering Age: Cozening is become a topping Trade, only we have got a genteeler way of ſtealing now, than only to take a man's Horſe from under him on the Highway, and a little looſe Money out of his Pocket; our Rapparees are Men of better Breeding and Faſhion, and ſcorn to play at ſuch ſmall Game, they ſweep away a noble Eſtate with one ſlight Bruſh, and bid both the Gallows and Horſe-Pond defiance; and the Mob is not always juſt in this Point, for one Pick-Pocket deſerves a Horſe-Pond as well as another, without any regard to Quality or fine Clothes. But Dat Veniam Corvis, vexat cenſura Columbas, ſay the Latins.

(Google tells me that the Latin quotation is from Juvenal. "The censor pardons the crows but condemns the doves." Someone has written it up here.)

Syndicated 2008-10-05 15:57:45 (Updated 2008-10-05 16:30:52) from Monument