Abraham Lincoln is supposed to have said “For those who like this sort of thing, this is the sort of thing they would like”.
But what I want to know is what he was describing. Some sites seem to suggest it was in a book review, others that he “offered to endorse a product” thus. [peeve](Not “thusly”, please!)[/peeve].
Anyone care to enlighten me?
This quote is attributed to both Lincoln and Max Beerbohm, but no cite to a source, or context, shows up for either in my perfunctory searching. Beerbohm was born in 1872 so arguably he could have said it in some famous context himself, quoting Lincoln, and had the quote attributed to him (he was reasonably renowned for his Wildean propensity for epigrams that makes me think of these Victorians (or Johnson, for that matter) spending an hour or two each day coining witty bon mots, then anxiously waiting for an opportunity to shoehorn them into conversation or print).
Just dug out a dictionary of quotations. It looks as though he actually used a slightly more elegant turn of phrase: “People who likes this sort of thing will find this the sort of thing they like”.
The dictionary says “judgment on a book” but gives no other clues…