Ignorant Essays

My most ingenious friend met me one day, and asked me whether I considered I should be richer if I had the ghost of sixpence or if I had not the ghost of sixpence.

The nerves, let us suppose, in their normal condition of health have three skins over the absolute sentient tissue. In the ideal man in perfect health, let us say Hodge, the man...

But when I am in no humour for contemplation and alarms of eld I take up my Whitaker for 1886, and open it at page 285. There begins the most incredible romance ever written by...

Cobbett’s Grammar was written for sailors and soldiers and such men. I gave the only copy of it I ever had to a sailor who had abandoned living on the sea to live by the sea, wh...

Does not De Quincey tell us that, having lent some books to Coleridge, the poet not only wrote the lender’s name in them, but enriched the margins with observations and comments...

For a long time the name of one man had been almost daily in my ears. I had been hearing much through the friend to whom I have last referred about his intuitive eye and critica...

This is not the age of great poetry, but it is the age of “poetical poetry,” to quote the phrase of one of the finest critics using the English language--one who has, unfortunat...

“‘For this grieve not! Thou knowest what thanks The Weary-souled and Meek owe To Death!’ I awoke, and heard four planks Fall down with a saddening echo. _I heard four planks_ _F...

In the first place let us consider the “Injury of Knowledge.” How much better off the king would be if he had no knowledge! Suppose his mental ken had never been directed to any...