Linguistic gusto!

Michael Dirda, in the Washington Post: "I am a sucker for sentences with any sort of zingy rhetorical flourish. 'Farnsworth's Classical English Metaphor ' collects hundreds of short passages from English prose to demonstrate how figurative analogies bring excitement, richness and increased clarity to a writer's thought. 'A metaphor,' explains Ward Farnsworth, 'tries to create a little event in the mind of the reader — a mental picture, a surprise, a new idea, or all these at once.'" Samuel Johnson, Herman Melville and, best of all, Charles Dickens are probably quoted most often. Given their extraordinary linguistic gusto, G.K. Chesterton, P.G. Wodehouse and H.L. Mencken are also included but no authors more modern."