Hours in a Library, Volume 1 New Edition, with Additions

But his real fault is that he is not consistently pantheistic. Pope was attacked both for his pantheism and fatalism and for having borrowed from Bolingbroke. It is curious enou...

Such a hero as this may be worthy and respectable, but is not a very exalted ideal. Neither do his circumstances increase our interest. It would be rather a curious subject of i...

gained by his later numbers a secure position, and used his position to go on rhyming to the end of his life. He never failed to do his very best. He regarded the wealth which h...

Many eminent men of his time were polite to Richardson after he had won fame at the mature age of fifty. He was not the man to presume on his position. He was 'very shy of obtru...

Yet criticism of this one-sided kind has its value. At least it suggests a problem. What is the element left out of account? Folly is never the real secret of a literary reputat...

Walpole, in fact, represents a common creed amongst comfortable but clear-headed men of his time. It was the strange mixture of scepticism and conservatism which is exemplified...

If, therefore, Pope gains something in clearness and brilliancy by the comparative simplicity of his art, he loses by the extreme obviousness of its results. We cannot give him...

One remark must be added, which scarcely seems to have been sufficiently noticed by Defoe's critics. He cannot be understood unless we remember that he was primarily and essenti...

The story which perhaps generally passes for his masterpiece is 'Transformation,' for most readers assume that a writer's longest book must necessarily be his best. In the prese...

Eugénie Grandet is perhaps the purest of his women; but then Eugénie Grandet is simply stupid, and interesting from her sufferings rather than her character. She reminds us of s...

These and a string of similar maxims are the pith of Franklin's message to the world. Franklin, however, was not merely a man in whom the practical intelligence was developed in...

We may ask again, therefore, what is the peculiar source of De Foe's power? He has little, or no dramatic power, in the higher sense of the word, which implies sympathy with man...

De Quincey implicitly puts forward a claim which has been accepted by all competent critics. They declare, and he tacitly assumes, that he is a master of the English language. H...

To take a more serious case. De Quincey undertakes to refute Hume's memorable argument against miracles. There are few better arenas for intellectual combats, and De Quincey has...

For this reason, again, Scott bestows an apparently disproportionate amount of imagination upon the mere scene-painting, the external trappings, the clothes, or dwelling-places...

Was the man who could utter such blasphemous sentiments--for so they undoubtedly appear to us--a being of ordinary flesh and blood? One would rather have supposed his solids to...

Let us, however, pass from the anteroom, and enter this queer museum. We pause in sheer bewilderment on the threshold, and despair of classifying its contents intelligibly withi...

Edwards was thus a martyr to his severe sense of discipline. His admirers have lamented over the sentence by which the ablest of American thinkers was banished in a kind of disg...

Scott is not one of the coruscating geniuses, throwing out epigrams at every turn, and sparkling with good things. But the poetry, which was first admired to excess and then rej...

The method, however, of telling the story by the correspondence of the actors produces more important effects. The hundred and forty-four pages in question are all devoted to th...

One other peculiarity shows itself chiefly in the last pages of the 'Religio Medici.' His worthy commentators have laboured to defend Sir Thomas from the charge of vanity. He ex...

What a place to be in is an old library! It seems as though all the souls of all the writers that have bequeathed their labours to the Bodleian were reposing here as in some dor...

This last touch, which is one of De Foe's favourite expedients, is most fully exemplified in the story of Mrs. Veal. The author affects to take us into his confidence, to make u...

Even one of Richardson's abject lady-correspondents was revolted by this exaggerated servility. But narrow as his vision might be in some directions, his genius is not the less...

Voltaire and Rousseau have the double title to hatred of being Frenchmen and freethinkers. But even orthodox Frenchmen fare little better. 'The French Bossuets, Bourdaloues, Fén...

The startling realisation may be due in part to a mere literary trick. We meet with artifices like those by which De Foe cheats us into forgetfulness of his true character. One...

The ostentatious belief which is paraded in this instance is turned to more artistic account in the wonderful story of the 'Peau de Chagrin.' Balzac there tries as conscientious...

whilst Scott seems half to admit that his conduct required justification, and urges that he sacrificed to literature very fair chances in his original profession. Many people mi...

When such a man spins us a yarn the conditions of its being interesting are tolerably simple. The first condition obviously is, that the plot must be a good one, and good in the...

To represent the Puritan from within was not, indeed, a task suitable to Hawthorne's powers. Carlyle has done that for us with more congenial sentiment than could have been well...

Edwards is thus in the singular position of a Pantheist who yet regards all nature as alienated from God; and in the treatise on Original Sin he brings out the more revolting co...

Yet, babyish as this mass of nursery tales may appear to us, it is curious that the theory which Walpole advocated has been exactly carried out. He wished to relieve the prosaic...