Category: Essays, Letters & Speeches

My Contemporaries In Fiction

When these essays were originally printed (they appeared simultaneously in many newspapers), I expected to make some enemies. So far, I have been most agreeably disappointed in that regard; but I can affirm that they have made me many friends, and that I have had encouragement...

Chapters

2. Chapter 2

When all is said and done, his claim to immortality lies less in the books which deal with the splendours and the scandals of his own age than in that monument of learning, of h...

3. Chapter 3

This be the verse you grave for me: Here he lies where he longed to be: Home is the Sailor, home from sea, And the Hunter home from the hill.

1. Chapter 1

When these essays were originally printed (they appeared simultaneously in many newspapers), I expected to make some enemies. So far, I have been most agreeably disappointed in...

6. Chapter 6

When one calls to mind the rapid and extensive popularity achieved by the latest school of Scottish dialect writers, one is tempted to wonder a little at the comparative neglect...

8. Chapter 8

Mr. Bret Harte has made California his own, but it is not the California of to-day. ‘Gone is that camp, and wasted all its fire,’ but the old life lives in some of its pages sti...

7. Chapter 7

Clark Russell is captain on his own deck, whether he sail a coffin or a princely Indiaman of the old time. Sir Walter Besant is lord of his own East End, and of that innocent se...

5. Chapter 5

To the sympathetic reader it was evident from the first that Mr. Moore was not greatly enamoured of his work for its own sake, and that he chose his themes, not because of any i...

4. Chapter 4

The thing which strikes everybody who reads Kipling--and who does not?--is the truly astonishing range of his knowledge of technicalities. He is very often beyond me altogether,...

9. Chapter 9

Genius is as rare as ever, and is likely to continue so, but talent multiplies its appearances in full accordance with economic rules. No age ever submitted so constantly as our...