Through the Magic Door

I care not how humble your bookshelf may be, nor how lowly the room which it adorns. Close the door of that room behind you, shut off with it all the cares of the outer world, p...

He was a great fighter himself. He has left a secure reputation in other than literary circles—circles which would have been amazed to learn that he was a writer of books. With...

Beneath his varnish of chivalry, it cannot be gainsayed that the knight was often a bloody and ferocious barbarian. There was little quarter in his wars, save when a ransom migh...

There is, I admit, an intolerable amount of redundant verbiage in Scott’s novels. Those endless and unnecessary introductions make the shell very thick before you come to the oy...

It recalls the parallel case of the lost settlements in Greenland. That also has always seemed to me to be one of the most romantic questions in history—the more so, perhaps, as...

And then there is the vexed question of morals. Surely in talking of this also there is a good deal of inverted cant among a certain class of critics. The inference appears to b...

At the end of that time I returned through France. Having nothing to read I happened to buy a volume of Maupassant’s Tales which I had never seen before. The first story was cal...

Portsmouth, Plymouth, and Sheerness in flames, with London either levelled to the ground or ransomed at his own figure—that was a more feasible programme. Then, with the united...

Here we are at the final seance. For the last time, my patient comrade, I ask you to make yourself comfortable upon the old green settee, to look up at the oaken shelves, and to...

Most of my books deal with the days of his greatness, but here, you see, is a three-volume account of those weary years at St. Helena. Who can help pitying the mewed eagle? And...

It is all very well to pooh-pooh Boswell as Macaulay has done, but it is not by chance that a man writes the best biography in the language. He had some great and rare literary...

I have Stevenson’s collected poems over yonder in the small cabinet. Would that he had given us more! Most of them are the merest playful sallies of a freakish mind. But one sho...