(Horrendously exaggerated, absolutely fabricated) praise for The Floating Harbour:
“I, thereupon my reading, before my blindness, of this poetry and prose, that which has been brought into a union attain’d by laudable endeavour with such naturall endowments as the Author himselfe is wont to demonstrate elegantly upon each and every page, thus discovr’d, without paucity of length, such divers sentences as I cannot praise with exactnesse enough, hinder’d as I am on such a cours by vertue of an imperfect talent, and thought I should be deny’d the joy of reading by the Imprimatur stamped upon any such work by the vulgar tyranny of our joyless, corrupt, and ignorant prelates.”
– John Milton
“Four hundred years, for all that stretch of time,
was I in rev’rence held and recognised
as a writer from whom love, life, and death
came in new depths, new utterance, new words.
Stay as that may for years, four hundred more,
I cannot claim no company with which
to share a place in English as an art.
At once, with one work, am I near surpassed,
I may be somewhat left alone, at last.”
– William Shakespeare
“Ther byyng not a doubt yn my mynd, I can seye that not evene I coude claim to have hadde so vast an ynfluence on the language of Engelond aes thies novel certeinly shal yn the yeeres to come, and for al tyme.”
– Geoffrey Chaucer
william altoft 