At the library table

Three of the papers in this volume have been privately printed. I have added, however, some new matter to the sketches of Ainsworth and James; and it has been suggested to me th...

Whether the poet’s later emendations of his published verses are always improvements is problematical. We have been surfeited of late with examples of Tennyson’s amendments. He...

A Dofob does not trouble himself much about what others think of him or of his favorite pursuits, because he has what may be fairly styled the true Dofobian spirit and lives up...

Not that I am averse to a certain method of arrangement, or to a well-defined color-scheme in the matter of bindings. No one wishes to put a tiny 16mo by the side of a towering...

Here let us approach with hesitation and timidity, for however dry and disagreeable a book may be, still it is a book. “Somebody loved it”. The man who evolved it, who brought i...

Fourteenth Street! It must be difficult for the New Yorkers of to-day who have not passed the half-century mark to realize that only fifty years ago it was really “up-town.” It...

All these excursions in the field of authorship were fatal to the grave study of the law, for which he had no taste, and although when his father died in 1824 he went to London...

But however painful it will be to me to put myself in communication once again with Mr. Bentley, and openly appeal to you to confirm what I shall tell him, I have no alternative...

It is unnecessary to do more than to enumerate his later productions, for although they showed the scrupulous care which he exercised in respect to details and the pains he took...

To say truth, I do not know why I should wish to get rid of my two horsemen, especially the one on the white horse. Wouvermans always had a white horse in all his pictures; and...

Mr. Hamilton sums up in a careless and indifferent way the literary career of James. “Flimsy and melodramatic as James’s romances are, they were highly popular. The historical s...

The same Major Dwyer relates at some length the conversations of the guests at Lever’s home in Ireland. Speaking of a visit of Thackeray about 1842, he says: “James had been liv...

MY DEAR SIR: I thank you very much for your renewed kindness. The perusal of your last work gave me very great pleasure, most of all (though that is but a very slender testimony...

I do not know very well how or why, but I have been lately sickening of poetry; and though once as great a dreamer as ever felt the sweet music of imagination in his heart of he...

“*** I am very glad you were pleased with what I said at the Literary Fund dinner. I could have said a great deal more upon the same subject and opened my views for the benefit...

It is difficult to give an accurate list of James’s books with the dates of their publication. The one given by Allibone is the most complete, but it is not always correct. The...