ABSTRACT
But I digress, in a possibly ill-advised effort to span a bridge between distant centuries and resonating parallels. Problematical, too, could be the broad use of professional terms like reportage, news, and even journalism. Nevetheless, my references in this chapter-quotations, actually-to Robert Burton as “reporter” are not really an anachronistic play on words; for Burton came very close to the modern usage, i.e., when he offered this couplet to his seventeenth-century readers in the famous “Democritus Junior” preface to his magnum opus:
