snarky

i don't know what it means when one is genuinely amused by a college textbook/reader, but ninteenth-century art critics are funny:

"the academy contained the usual proportion of landscapes, and these landscapes contained the usual proportion of mild merit."

"a third is a head of a german professor, most grotesquely hideous in feature and physiognomy, looking a great deal, as to his complexion and eyeballs, as if he has just been cut down from an unpractical attempt to hang himself."

evidently, sugarcoating was not en vogue back then.