Treatise
2 volumes
The Key to All Mythologies Described
Edward Casaubon — Middlemarch · George Eliot
A vast unfinished work intended to show that all the world's myths are corruptions of a single original revelation — compiled by a man who cannot read German, will not finish a chapter, and marries a young woman to be his secretary.
Slawkenbergius's Treatise on Noses Extensive excerpts
Slawkenbergius — Tristram Shandy · Laurence Sterne
A vast Latin work on noses, from which Tristram lifts one tale — a stranger, a long nose, Strasbourg in uproar — because his own biography has got stuck on the same organ.