Category: Essays, Letters & Speeches
_O blessed Letters, that combine in one All ages past, and make one live with all: By you we doe conferre with who are gone, And the dead-living unto councell call: By you th' unborne shall have communion Of what we feele, and what doth us befall_.
Captain George Farquhar, in 1702, was four-and-twenty years of age. He was a smart, soldier-like Irishman, of "a splenetic and amorous complexion," half an actor, a quarter a po...
5. Chapter 5The volume of plays is not exhausted. Here is Weston's _Amazon Queen_, of 1667, written in pompous rhymed heroics; here is _The Fortune Hunters_, a comedy of 1689, the only play...
3. Chapter 3or contend for the "fine napkin wrought with blue," if those base clowns called critics are busy with his detraction. But Roget instructs him that Verse is its own high reward,...
9. Chapter 9The copy of the first edition of _Pompey the Little_, which lies before me, contains an excellent impression of the frontispiece by Louis Boitard, the fashionable engraver-desig...
10. Chapter 10Goldsmith treats Nash with very much the same sort of indulgent and apologetic sympathy with which the late M. Barbey d'Aurevilly treats Brummell. He does not affect to think th...
4. Chapter 4Our good herbalist, however, cannot get through his sixteen hundred accurate and solemn pages without one slip. After accompanying him dutifully so far, we double up with uncont...
13. Chapter 13These two extracts give a fair notion of the Tractarian poetry, with its purity, its idealism, its love of Nature and its unreal conception of life, Faber also wrote an _England...
2. Chapter 2"On this side the bridge, where standeth the greater part by far of the City, you have a pleasant sight everywhere to the eye, what of fair streets orderly ranged, what of a num...
8. Chapter 8So he starts away on his dissertation, with all its elegant pedantry, its paradoxical wit, its genuine touches of observation and its constant sparkle of anecdote. He is trouble...
1. Chapter 1_O blessed Letters, that combine in one All ages past, and make one live with all: By you we doe conferre with who are gone, And the dead-living unto councell call: By you th' u...
6. Chapter 6There is no other book in my library to which I feel that I possess so clear a presumptive right as to this manuscript. Other rare volumes would more fitly adorn the collections...
12. Chapter 12Be not too hard on this piece of barbarism, virtuous reader! Virtue is well revenged by the inevitable question! "Who was John Randall?" In 1820 it was said: "Of all the great m...
11. Chapter 11Who cares now for Parr's praise or Soame Jenyns' censure? Yet in our Diarist's pages these take equal rank with names that time has spared, with Robertson and Gibbon, Burke and...
14. Chapter 14BACON, Lord Baldwin, William _Ballad of the Book Hunter_, Lang's Balzac, Honoré de Bancroft's _Sertorius_ Banks, Sir Joseph Barnacle Goose Tree, The Barrington, Hon. Daines Bayl...