The clotted and cobwebbed prose

From The Sixties: The Last Journal, 1960–1972 by Edmund Wilson 

Lately I have found it a nocturnal refuge to read books of the early and middle nineteenth century: Skeats’s edition of Chatterton, Dickens’s Life of Grimaldi, Collins and Cruikshank’s Punch and Judy, Dyce’s edition of Beaumont and Fletcher.  They take me back to the days when I bought at the old bookshops on 42nd St. the Ettrick Shepherd's Tales, the Roxburghe Ballads and the Mermaid volume of Marlowe, and they are also associated in my mind with Charles Lamb, Percy's Reliques and The Ingoldsby Legends.   I like the atmosphere of English antiquities, the Gothic churches and the slang of old London, the clotted and cobwebbed prose, the elaborate introductions that are so close to the original sources, the local gossip and informal memoirs, and the footnotes that do not care how much they may impede the main narrative and that may fill up the bottoms of several pages. When not many years ago I started to read The Heart of Midlothian, I found that I was impatient with the interminable preface, a perfect example of this atmosphere and method; but I find a certain solace in the murkiness and tangledness of texts that leave so much of the past mysterious. They give me shelter from the income tax problem, with which I must very soon deal.