However, Adam's style is frankly astounding. His every word bursts with an irrepressible vigor, every clause betrays a keen sense of wit, and every prolonged simile or metaphor (even when they cross into quaintness for a modern ear) demonstrate a total passion for wordweaving. His imagery is bold and precise, and his sense of sound impeccable. The interplay between message and his means of communicating it (the content's plodding regularity versus the high flights and melodic meanderings of his words) lends the sermons a weird, almost contrapuntal quality. At times, of course, he tries a bit too hard and is a bit too clever and becomes wincingly strained, but the sheer fact that he's turning platitudes into poetry is worth at least a skimread. Not to mention puns in Latin.
He also has some real zingers. Taken from a single page selected at random: "A dangerous brood of Jesuits in foreign courts croaking like frogs" and "Harlots, scattering their stews, like the lice of Egypt, over all the world."
