[Gutenberg 20083] • A Boswell of Baghdad; With Diversions

Excerpt from A Boswell of Baghdad

What indeed I particularly like about the book is the picture that it gives of sardonic pleasantry and intellectual and sophisticated virtuosity going quietly on side by side with all the splendours and barbarities of absolute autocracy and summary jurisdiction. It throws a new or unaccustomed light on those days. Not even yet - not even in Bloomsbury, where the poets meet-have we in England anything quite like it; whereas when Baghdad and Damascus were the theatres of these poetical and hair splitting competitions our ancestors had but just got the woad off.