INTRODUCTION BY THE EDITOR. Recitation with dramatic energy by men whose business it was to travel from one great house to another and delight the people by the way, was usual among us from the first. The scop invented and the glee-man recited heroic legends and other tales to our Anglo-Saxon forefathers. These were followed by the minstrels and other tellers of tales written for the people. They... more...

INTRODUCTION. William Edward Parry, the son of a physician, was born at Bath in December, 1790.  At the age of thirteen he was entered as a first-class volunteer on board the flag-ship of the Channel fleet, and after seven years’ service and careful study of his profession he obtained a commission in 1810 as lieutenant in the navy.  He was then at once, aged twenty, sent to the Arctic seas, where... more...

INTRODUCTION. Again, on behalf of readers of this National Library, I have to thank a poet of our day—in this case the Oxford Professor of Poetry—for joining his voice to the voices of the past through which our better life is quickened for the duties of to-day.  Not for his own verse only, but for his fine sense also of what is truest in the poets who have gone before, the name of Francis Turner... more...

INTRODUCTION Mrs. Piozzi, by her second marriage, was by her first marriage the Mrs. Thrale in whose house at Streatham Doctor Johnson was, after the year of his first introduction, 1765, in days of infirmity, an honoured and a cherished friend.  The year of the beginning of the friendship was the year in which Johnson, fifty-six years old, obtained his degree of LL.D. from Dublin, and—though he... more...

It was in 1824 that Robert Southey, then fifty years old, published “Sir Thomas More, or Colloquies on the Progress and Prospects of Society,” a book in two octavo volumes with plates illustrating lake scenery.  There were later editions of the book in 1829, and in 1831, and there was an edition in one volume in 1837, at the beginning of the reign of Queen Victoria. These dialogues with a... more...