Library Notes

Is there anything more curious or remarkable in fiction than the simple fact expressed by Thucydides, that ignorance is bold and knowledge reserved? or that by Thomas Fuller, th...

In the same character opposite faculties and qualities are sometimes so blended as to give very mysterious results. Every reader knows how difficult it often is to separate the...

Lowell, in one of his critical essays, says that "all men are interested in Montaigne in proportion as all men find more of themselves in him; and all men see but one image in t...

Hazlitt, in one of his discursive essays, says, "I stopped these two days at Bridgewater, and when I was tired of sauntering on the banks of its muddy river, returned to the inn...

"When we see a special reformer, we feel like asking him," says Emerson, "What right have you, sir, to your one virtue? Is virtue piecemeal?" "Your mode of happiness," said Cole...

"The Latin tongue," says Montaigne, "is, as it were, natural to me; I understand it better than French, but I have not used to speak it, nor hardly to write it, these forty year...

Addison, in one of the papers of The Spectator, enlarges upon the thought of Socrates, that if all the misfortunes of mankind were cast into a public stock, in order to be equal...

Wendell Phillips, in his lecture upon the Lost Arts, made some remarkable statements, to prove the superiority of the ancients in many things. "In every matter," he said, "that...

What a contrast with all these ailing souls was the magnificent Christopher North! You remember the scene of his triumph on the occasion of his first lecture to the moral philos...

"Prosperity," says Froude, in one of his essays, "is consistent with intense worldliness, intense selfishness, intense hardness of heart; while the grander features of human cha...

But man, at last, is the creature fullest of contradictions, and his vanity is at the bottom of most of them. "What a sensible and agreeable companion is that gentleman who has...

"We must patiently suffer," says Montaigne, "the laws of our condition; we are born to grow old, to grow weak, and to be sick, in spite of all physic. 'Tis the first lesson the...

Goldsmith, in one of his delightful Chinese Letters, gives this illustration of the vanity and uncertainty of human judgment: "A painter of eminence was once resolved to finish...

"You see in my chamber," said Goethe, near the close of his life, "no sofa; I sit always in my old wooden chair, and never, till a few weeks ago, have permitted even a leaning p...

Excellence is not matured in a day, and the cost of it is an old story. The beginning of Plato's Republic was found in his tablets written over and over in a variety of ways. It...

Hayward (translator of Faust), in his article on Pearls and Mock Pearls of History, says, "We are gravely told, on historical authority, by Moore, in a note to one of his Irish...

Thomas Aikenhead, a student of eighteen, was hanged at Edinburgh, in 1697, for having uttered, says Macaulay, in his History, free opinions about the Trinity and some of the boo...

It is reported of Scaramouche, the first famous Italian comedian, that being in Paris, and in great want, he bethought himself of constantly plying near the door of a noted perf...

Think of this in connection with the fact that "in five years Charles II. touched twenty-three thousand six hundred and one of his subjects for the evil; that the bishops invent...

It would be curious to know how much chance or accident has had to do with even the best of the productions of literature. Wordsworth, in a conversation with one of his friends,...

Did you ever read that remarkable paper of Lamb's, the Reminiscences of Juke Judkins, Esq., of Birmingham? It is a nice, microscopic, philosophic study and analysis of meanness,...

Produced by Adrian Mastronardi, Josephine Paolucci and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net. (This file was produced from images generously made avail...

"In the first year of this persecution, Cotton Mather wrote a history of the earliest of the trials. This history was introduced to the English public by Richard Baxter, who dec...

"You may remember," says Farrar, in his Silence and Voices of God, "how, in the old legend, St. Brendan, in his northward voyage, saw a man sitting upon an iceberg, and with hor...

Many a famous name, it has been truly said, has been indebted for its brightest lustre to things which were flung off as a pastime, or composed as an irksome duty, whilst the pe...

The world will never be tired reading and talking of the peculiarities and struggles of some of its literary worthies, they seem so incredible. Poor Goldsmith, for example: ever...

John Brown, when he was twelve years old, from seeing a negro slave of his own age cruelly beaten, began to hate slavery and love the slaves so intensely as "sometimes to raise...

Goethe, confesses his ignorance, 29; reason can never be popular, 62; anecdote of Merck and the grand duke, 89; to know how cherries and strawberries taste, 90; a fortunate mist...

In the early history of New England the law compelled the people to attend church, the services commencing at nine o'clock and continuing six to eight hours. Near the church edi...

The absorbing desire for wealth--"that bad thing, gold," that "buys all things good"--like ambition, "often puts men upon doing the meanest offices: so climbing is performed in...

The novelty of a real work of genius is sufficient to decry it with the incredulous public. All new things, much out of the ordinary way, must make a struggle for existence. It...

Margaret Fuller, speaking of the greatest of German poets, says, "He believes more in man than men, effort than success, thought than action, nature than providence. He does not...

Religion, a subject proscribed in general society, 242; if charity were made the principle of it instead of faith, 357; two religions, the religion of amity and the religion of...

And there was Blake--"artist, genius, mystic, or madman?" "Probably all," thought Robinson, one of his warmest admirers; for he had admirers, and some of them were eminent. Cole...

The author of The Eclipse of Faith, in one of his intellectual visions, saw suddenly expunged--"remorselessly expunged"--from literature "every text, every phrase, which had bee...

Literature is full of such facts as at first blush appear incredible. Consider, that "although the soil of Sweden is not rich in either plants or insects, and many of its feathe...