Janet was surprised at how much casual dating had changed since she was last single.

The shepherd[…]did[…] fall part-colour'd lambs

I can’t do a back handspring unless somebody spots me.

Yet such defects are trivial compared with his grasp of early modern city-dwelling as a heteroglot assemblage of discontinuities, as a sensory overload out of which intimations of order fleetingly emerge, as a state of being in which consciousness and identity are continually shaped and reshaped via interaction, in which solitary and collective personhood are fused in unstable synthesis.