Books and men

As a result of the modern tendency to desert the broad beaten roads of history for the bridle-paths of biography and memoir, we find a great many side lights thrown upon matters...

If, sick of the brutality of the schools, we seek those rare cases in which a home education was substituted, we are generally rewarded by finding the comforts greater and the c...

Yet the supernatural, provided it be not too horrible, is legitimate food for a child’s mind, nourishes its imagination, inspires a healthy awe, and is death to that precocious...

“To us who are nourished from childhood,” says Mr. Fiske again, “on the truths revealed by science, the sky is known to be merely an optical appearance, due to the partial absor...

Fairy tales, and Harry and Lucy! But the real, old-fashioned, earnest, half-sombre fairy tales of our youth have slipped from the hands of children into those of folk-lore stude...

The whole scene, as we look back upon it now, is a quaint illustration of how far a man’s emotions could carry him, when they were nourished alike by the peculiarities of his ge...

At present, however, the new disciples of “earnestness” are trying hard to persuade us that we are too humorous, and that it is the spirit of universal mockery which stifles all...

was but a cockney poet, who wrote vulgar indecorums, “probably in the indulgence of his social propensities”? How did they feel when the same Maginn called the Adonais “dreary n...

The same key is struck with more firmness in that strange poem, The Sick King in Bokhara, where the vizier can find no better remedy for his master’s troubled mind than by point...

The pessimist, however,--be it recorded to his credit,--is seldom an agitating individual. His creed breeds indifference to others, and he does not trouble himself to thrust his...

Much of this universal harmony of abuse may be fairly charged to Macaulay, for it is he who in a few strongly written passages has presented to the general reader that remarkabl...

When Plutarch was asked why he did not oftener select virtuous characters to write about, he intimated that he found the sinners more interesting; and while his judgment is to b...