Superne Lucerne, guberne this pestilens

The woozy “Black Market Baby” and spooky sprechstimme of “What's He Building?” are prime latter-day Waits, as are a host of other numbers that sound like work songs bellowed down a Tin Pan Alley.

[…] as in the French, Spanish, and almost all the other revolutions, that began by an equal division of power, whilst both knowledge and property were very unequally divided, where all returned to their antisociable habits.

When we see a man dramatically lamenting in a publication intended to be believed, that “The age of chivalry is gone;” that “the glory of Europe is extinguished forever!” that “the unbought grace of life (if any one knows what it is,) the cheap defence of nations, the nurse of manly sentiment and heroic enterprise is gone!” And all this because the Quixotic [1791: Quixote] age of chivalric nonsense is gone, what opinion can we form of his judgment, or what regard can we pay to his facts?