Daily Dose

From (The introduction to) The Country Doctor, by Honore de Balzac

MINUTENESS

"The extreme minuteness of detail, effective as it is in the picture of the house and elsewhere, becomes a little tedious even for well-tried and well-affected readers, in reference to the exact number of cartwrights and harness-makers, and so forth; while the modern reader pure and simple, though schooled to endure detail, is schooled to endure it only of the ugly."

Introduction by George Saintsbury, Everyman's Library edition