I am not prepared to back Charles Lamb's Index Expurgatorius. It is
difficult, almost impossible, to find the book from which something
either valuable or amusing may not be found, if the proper alembic be
applied. I know books that are curious, and really amusing, from their
excessive badness. If you want to find precisely how a thing ought not
to be said, you take one of them down and make it perform the service of
the intoxicated Spartan slave. There are some volumes in which, at a
chance opening, you are certain to find a mere platitude delivered in
the most superb and amazing climax of big words, and others in which
you have a like happy facility in finding every proposition stated with
its stern forward, as sailors say, or in some other grotesque
mismanagement of composition. There are no better farces on or off the
stage than when two or three congenial spirits ransack books of this
kind, and compete with each other in taking fun out of them.--J. H.
BURTON. _The Book-Hunter._