Biography & Autobiography Books

CHAPTER I INTRODUCTION This book is intended to deal with substance rather than with form. But, in estimating the work of a teacher who taught exclusively with the pen, it would be perverse to disregard entirely the qualities of the writing which so penetrated and coloured the intellectual life of the Victorian age. Some cursory estimate of Arnold's powers in prose and verse must therefore be... more...

ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON When a popular writer dies, the question it has become the fashion with a nervous generation to ask is the question, ‘Will he live?’  There was no idler question, none more hopelessly impossible and unprofitable to answer.  It is one of the many vanities of criticism to promise immortality to the authors that it praises, to patronise a writer with the assurance that our... more...

DIARY OF SAMUEL PEPYS. MAY 1667 May 1st. Up, it being a fine day, and after doing a little business in my chamber I left my wife to go abroad with W. Hewer and his mother in a Hackney coach incognito to the Park, while I abroad to the Excise Office first, and there met the Cofferer and Sir Stephen Fox about our money matters there, wherein we agreed, and so to discourse of my Lord Treasurer, who is a... more...

I The first great adventure in the life of our hero occurred on the twenty-eighth day of February in the year 1865. He was born that day. The greatest adventure as well as the greatest event that ever comes into anybody's life is the adventure of being born. If there is such a thing as luck, Wilfred Thomason Grenfell, as his parents named him, fell into luck, when he was born on February... more...

PRIOR. Matthew Prior is one of those that have burst out from an obscure original to great eminence. He was born July 21, 1664, according to some, at Winburn, in Dorsetshire, of I know not what parents; others say, that he was the son of a joiner of London: he was, perhaps, willing enough to leave his birth unsettled, in hope, like Don Quixote, that the historian of his actions might find him some... more...

CHAPTER I THE NEED FOR A DOER There come times in the affairs of men which call for "not a forgetful hearer, but a doer of the work." Such a time is at hand. A great war, the most devastating in history, has been concluded. Its moral lesson has been taught by its master minds and learned in penitence, we may hope, by the erring and wrongly willful. But the fruits of victory are ungathered and... more...

TO THE RIGHT HONORABLEROBERT D’EVREVX, EARLE OF ESSEX AND EVVE, VISCOVNT of Hereford and Bourchier, Lord Ferrers ofChartley, Bourchier, and Louaine, Maisterof the Queenes Maiesties horse,and knight of the most honorableorder of the Garter. T. C.vvisheth increase of allhonour and happinesse. Right Honorable, hauing by chaunce recouered of late into my handes (after I had once lost the same) a copie of... more...

While "The Choir Invisible" was primarily a love story, the setting in which its action moved was historical. Apart from the masterly handling of human passion and the harmony of thought and expression with which he has treated the larger and deeper movements of life, it is probably Mr. Allen's ability to picture forth the early settlement of Kentucky that has given his writings so solid a... more...

INTRODUCTION. In the early morning of Midsummer's-day, 1868, I might have been seen slowly wending my way towards the office of the Deputy Inspector General of Hospitals, at Peshawur—for the purpose of appearing before the standing Medical Committee of the station, and having an enquiry made concerning the state of my health. A Dooley followed me lest my strength should prove inadequate to the... more...

It would appear that for inquirers into Foreign Literature, for all men anxious to see and understand the European world as it lies around them, a great problem is presented in this Goethe; a singular, highly significant phenomenon, and now also means more or less complete for ascertaining its significance. A man of wonderful, nay, unexampled reputation and intellectual influence among forty millions... more...