Every particularity has gone: the atoms of Democritus, Terence’s nosy neighbor, Petrarch’s lack of patience and Boccaccio’s bawdy stories, the Lake Nemi ships and the fishlike Genoese divers, Aldus Manutius and his exuberance (“Aldus is here!”), students floating down rivers, Platina’s recipe for grilled eel à l’orange, Erasmus’s polite farts, the Encyclopédie (all 71,818 articles of it), Hume’s games of backgammon and whist, Dorothy L. Sayers’s comfortable trousers, Frederick Douglass’s magnificently
