August 19, 2009

If you weren't H-- J--, someone would have made you revise this sentence...

To touch successively upon these points is to attempt a portrait, which I shall perhaps not altogether have failed to produce.
I'm just saying, most of us would not put our pens down and say, there, that's done.

2 comments:

Bookphilia said...

I take your point. But I think that anything HJ wrote while, for example, drunk, sleep-deprived, and under attack by a swarm of locusts would still likely be 10 times better than anything I could write at the best of times - so it's hard for me to really criticize him. ;)

JRussell said...

Maybe it's not so bad in context? :-)
I have to admit that even as a confirmed Jacobite, I have no idea where the sentence is from.