Category: How To ...
There are plenty of books telling what we should read if we were wise and judicious scholars, with all the time in the world; and there are lists of the Hundred Best Books, as if there were some magic in the figures 100.
There are plenty of books telling what we should read if we were wise and judicious scholars, with all the time in the world; and there are lists of the Hundred Best Books, as i...
2. CHAPTER I.Poetry is unquestionably the oldest form of literature. Matthew Arnold once queried whether a people ought not to be barbarous to be really poetic. Perhaps it originated in the...
3. CHAPTER II.Prose has a bad name. We think of it and speak of it as including everything in language that is _not_ poetry. In former times art in literature meant poetry,--or, at a stretch,...
4. CHAPTER III.From the beginning of literature the most interesting thing which a writer can write has been the life history of a MAN. We are like boats borne on the swift current of the rush...
5. CHAPTER IV.Most people read in such a desultory way that they never know whether they are really familiar with standard literature or not. All the books of one author are read because they...
6. CHAPTER V.The reading and enjoyment of poetry may be said to be a fine art. Certainly no one is likely to have a taste for poetry who does not cultivate it. Yet nothing is so characterist...
7. CHAPTER VI.The best way to study Shakspere is to go to see his plays at the theatre, especially when they are presented as Edwin Booth or Henry Irving have played them. What a change from...
8. CHAPTER VII.Many people fancy that essays are not popular or easy reading; but when Addison published his Spectator, this little sheet of essays came out every morning, as a daily paper, an...
9. CHAPTER VIII.At the top of the ladder of literature is poetry, to which only a few succeed in climbing. Next is the essay, a large comfortable niche cut in the side of the rock of ages, whic...
10. CHAPTER IX.After the publication of the Vicar of Wakefield in 1766, for nearly fifty years no great novel appeared. True, Frances Burney’s Evalina appeared, but it is dry reading to-day. I...
11. CHAPTER X.The pendulum of human interest swings quickly from one side to the other. Within five years of the appearance of the last of the Waverley novels there appeared in England a nove...
12. CHAPTER XI.As we have seen, the original form of modern fiction was that of the short story--the tavern tale rendered in classic language by Boccaccio in The Decameron and by the unknown a...
13. CHAPTER XII.The boy or girl who has grown up without reading Robinson Crusoe, the Arabian Nights and Gulliver’s Travels is to be pitied; but it is to be presumed that there are few such. Th...