A happy half-century, and other essays

The half-century, whose more familiar aspects this little book is designed to illustrate, has spread its boundary lines. Nothing is so hard to deal with as a period. Nothing is...

To this array of feminine virtue and feminine authorship, Lamb was singularly unresponsive. He was not one of the _literati_ honoured by Lady de Crespigny’s correspondence. He e...

Few people care to confess to “paltry tastes” and “limited understandings.” They would rather join in any general acclamation. “Browning’s poetry obscure!” I once heard a lectur...

How was this mass of correspondence preserved? How did it happen that the letters were never torn up, or made into spills,--the common fate of all such missives when I was a lit...

They grow faint with rapture when they enter her presence, and, when she repels their advances, they signify their disappointment by gnashing their teeth, and beating their head...

With Misnian arsenic, deleterious bane, Pound up the ripe cassada’s well-rasped root, And form in pellets; these profusely spread Round the Cane-groves where skulk the vermin-br...

Miss Hannah More’s dazzling renown rested on the same solid support. She was so strong morally that to have cavilled at her intellectual feebleness would have been deemed profan...

Miss Anna Maria Porter--she who delighted “critical audiences” by reciting Shakespeare at five--published her “Artless Tales” at fifteen; and Mrs. Hemans was younger still when...

A vastly different counsellor of youth was Mrs. West, who wrote a volume of “Letters to a Young Lady” (the young lady was Miss Maunsell, and she died after reading them), which...

The wave of sentimentality which submerged England when the clear-headed, hard-hearted eighteenth century had done its appointed work, and lay a-dying, the prodigious advance in...

We leave the unamiable Mr. Darcy snorting at his friend’s remark, to consider the paucity of Mr. Bingley’s list. Tables, screens, and purses represent but the first beginnings o...

Miss Seward made it her happy boast that the number and the warmth of Mr. Hayley’s tributes--inserted duly in her album--raised her to a rivalry with Swift’s Stella, or Prior’s...