Memorabilia
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Table-talk; or, Selections from the ana. Containing extracts from the different collections of ana, French, English, Italian, and German (1827) by George Moir is a colllection of ana.
From the introduction[1]:
- The taste for those collections which, under the title of Ana form so conspicuous and so interesting a portion of French literature, is both of high antiquity, and wide extent. The same blending of moral apothegms, of critical remarks, of serious and comic anecdotes, of scientific or literary information, which distinguishes the French Ana is to be traced, more or less modified by natural habits, and the state of human knowledge in the Nasr Eddin the Bassiri, and Teudai of the Turks and Arabians, in the Memorabilia of Plato and Xenophon, in the Enchiridion of Arrian, and in the Noctes Atticae of Aulus Gellius. The Bons Mots of Cicero we know were compiled by no less a person than Julius Caesar, while another collection of his good things, we are told by Quinctilian, was made by a freedman under the title, De Jods Ciceronis. Quinctilian himself has favoured us with not a few specimens of the Roman Orator's jocular vein, from which we may fairly conclude, that these collections of his sayings would have borne no inconsiderable resemblance to the comic portion of the Menagiana.
In modern' Italy the taste for such collections seems to have been not less general. Of the older works of this class little is known; though there is every reason to think that the Facetiae sLaAPoggiana pf Poggio were by no means the earliest works of the kind. Many of the novels of Boccaccio are merely repartees and remarks attributed to celebrated persons, in the style of the Poggitiana and the collection attributed to [[iBneas Syl* vius Piccolomini]] ; and nearly one half of the tales of Sacchetti are composed of anecdotes of this kind. The Facetice of P(^gio, however, is the only Italian work of this class which is geperally known. It embodies the scandal of the time, and the coarsely licentious, but often singularly comic tales and anecdotes, with which Poggio and the other clerks of the Roman Chancery used to amuse themselves in an apartment of the Vatican to which they had given the appropriate nam of the Btiggialef or as Poggio himself translates it, Mendaciorum Officina. Unfornately, the best articles in that collection so strongly tinctured with coarseness or obscenity, that few specimens of it can be 'hibited in translation*
lany again, the Loci Communes of n and the CdOoquia Mensalia of oiigh differing in the character of )nts from the coarser works of the dong also to the class of .^6ia. The larkable for the theolc^cal leam- lays, and'the information it com- as to the early state of the re- ircb. The second is a most sin- rd of the conversations of the in which learning is strangely tk gross ignorance on some points, acute reasoning with mysticism, ous and intrepid spirit of inquiry, "ossest superstition and credulity, to France that we are indebted for iteresting, instructive, and amu- of this class. And, accordingly, hese sources that the present vo- 3en principall V derived. Of these the earKest, m point of date, is ^ono, which professes to contain IS and conversations of Joseph nd was published in 1699. But is altogether unworthy of that », and affords little which is cal- afford either amusement or in- From the remaining collections acts have been made, particular- Mmagtana^ and the Mekatges cf ^e Litifyrature of Vigneul Mar ville. and short notices of the authors ha\ prefixed to the selections from each. English Literature affords bat few of this kind, and it can scarcely be sa any of these possesses distinguished The lable-Talk of Selden derives il interest from the learned name with it is associated. The JValpoliana is t which approaches nearest to the chi of the French Ana. Some of the mo king passages in the conversations oi son, extracted fromBoswell'sLife^ an under the head of Johnsoniana; anc selections from the valuable, but impc known Omniana of Southey, close tracts from the English Jna.
--Edinburgh, July 1827.
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