And Even Now

I offer here some of the essays that I have written in the course of the past ten years. While I was collecting them and (quite patiently) reading them again, I found that a few...

The question is not merely rhetorical. There is the large class of politicians, who would have had no scope in the old days. And there are the many men who in other days would h...

If she possessed a manual for young house-hunters it was assuredly not by the light of this that she had chosen the home they were installed in. The ‘sort of cottage’ had been v...

‘Latterly,’ writes Goethe, ‘I have observed Tischbein regarding me; and now’--note the demure pride!--‘it appears that he has long cherished the idea of painting my portrait.’ E...

The strain of talking in words of not more than three syllables had begun to tell on me. I bade the artist good-bye, wandered away up the half-dozen steps to the Parade, sat dow...

It was always when Watts-Dunton spoke carelessly, casually, of some to me illustrious figure in the past, that I had the sense of being wafted right into that past and plumped d...

While I stood talking to Watts-Dunton--talking as loudly as he, for he was very deaf--I enjoyed the thrill of suspense in watching the door through which would appear--Swinburne...

On the whole, our novelists have always tended to optimism--especially they who have written mainly to please their public. It pleases the public to read about any sort of succe...

Beautifully vague though the English language is, with its meanings merging into one another as softly as the facts of landscape in the moist English climate, and much addicted...

Some of the shallower historians would have us believe that powder is deleterious to the race of footmen. They point out how plenteously footmen abounded before 1790, and how st...

If I knew why Brett ceased to be butler in that household, I might be in less doubt as to the true inwardness of him. I knew only that he was gone. That was fully ten years ago....

Nobody could have been more surprised than I was at what I had done--done so neatly, so quietly and gently. The book stood closed, upright, with its back to me, just as on a boo...

Every virtue, as we were taught in youth, is a mean between two extremes; and I think any virtue is the better understood by us if we glance at the vice on either side of it. I...

Would that I had made some such confession years ago! O folly of pride! I liked the delusion that I spoke French well, a delusion common enough among those who had never heard m...

DEAR MR. POBSBY-BURFORD, Though I am myself an ardent Tory, I cannot but rejoice in the crushing defeat you have just suffered in West Odgetown. There are moments when political...

No evening ever had an unlikelier ending. The omens were all for gloom. Johnson had gone to dine at General Paoli’s, but was so ill that he had to leave before the meal was over...