Idle Hours in a Library

The title of this little volume was chosen because it seems to indicate a characteristic possessed in common by the otherwise unrelated essays here brought together. They may al...

There was little of that never-ceasing bustle with which we are familiar—little of the eternal hurry, the intense strain, the rush and turmoil of our modern existence; but the b...

Turning from the houses themselves to the home life of the time, we may notice that in the establishments of the ancient nobility the arrangements were still on a large and almo...

St. Paul’s Walk and its varied interests would keep our young man occupied till the hour of dinner, a meal of which he would probably partake in the bustle and excitement of the...

But this is not all. Pepys’s unreserved frankness is to be partially accounted for by the fact that he had no fear lest any one but himself should ever read what he found such c...

Few readers probably will rise from the perusal of the Diary, dismissing it with such an entry as this as the closing note, without regretting that the end should have come just...

Let us not imagine that Pepys followed his career of pleasure without twinges of conscience and occasional remorse. The expense involved frequently worried him, and again and ag...

Lumped together in this way—and the above paragraph makes no pretence at completeness of statement,—the amount of prose fiction of one and another kind produced in England under...

But though this book, as we shall hereafter find, is not without its significance for the student of the English novel, it is less interesting and important from our point of vi...

Two points, then, are noticeable in this work. In the first place, it depends for its interest not on astonishing adventures, high-flown diction, or extravagant play of fancy, b...

Yet the Bohemians are a great race, and may boast a proud extraction. The founder of their illustrious family was none other than the great father of Western song, who, “living...

The heroes of the “Scenes of Bohemian Life” are four in number. To each member of the strange group—the “Quatuor Murger,” as it came to be called—we will yield the honor of a se...

It is while he is in their company, I suppose, more than at any other time, that the Anglo-Saxon reader feels how far the pathways of Bohemia lie outside the boundaries of respe...