Classics Books

CHAPTER I "What's on for to-night, Burt?" Mr. St. John, a large automobile manufacturer of New Britain, Connecticut, looked across the dinner table at his son Burton. The latter was a boy of seventeen. Although he was sturdy for his age, his features were pale and denoted hard study. As his father and mother watched him there was just a hint of anxiety in their faces. "Lots,"... more...

CHAPTER I. "My dear Dunshunner," said my friend Robert M'Corkindale as he entered my apartments one fine morning in June last, "do you happen to have seen the share-list? Things are looking in Liverpool as black as thunder. The bullion is all going out of the country, and the banks are refusing to discount." Bob M'Corkindale might very safely have kept his information to... more...

One of the most striking, and perhaps the most intellectual advances of the age, is in the progress of geographical discovery. It is honourable to England, that this new impulse to a knowledge of the globe began with her spirit of enterprise, and it is still more honourable to her that that spirit was originally prompted by benevolence. Cook, with whose voyages this era may be regarded as originating,... more...

If our readers have perchance stumbled upon a novel called "The Improvisatore" by one Hans Christian Andersen, a Dane by birth, they have probably regarded it in the light merely of a foreign importation to assist in supplying the enormous annual consumption of our circulating libraries, which devour books as fast as our mills do raw cotton;—with some difference, perhaps, in the result, for... more...

Part I."España de la guerraTremola la pendon." Cancion Patriotica. It wanted about an hour of sunset on the last day of September 1833, when two young men, whose respective ages did not much exceed twenty years, emerged from a country lane upon the high-road from Tarazona to Tudela, in that small district of Navarre which lies south of the river Ebro. The equipments of the travellers—for... more...

In order to deal effectively with pauperism, it is necessary to know the causes which lead to the impoverishment of individuals and masses of individuals, and to be familiar with the condition, manners, customs, habits, prejudices, feelings, and superstitions of the poor. We do not propose to institute an elaborate inquiry into the causes of pauperism, or to make the topic a subject of separate... more...

GROTE'S HISTORY OF GREECE. The appearance of a new history of Greece, of the pretensions, and the just pretensions, of this of Mr Grote, is an event in literature which must not pass by without some note or comment. Never were historical studies pursued with so much success, or in so philosophical a spirit, as in the present day, and that by the whole corps of European scholarship, whether German,... more...

CROMWELL. Mr Carlyle's services to history in collecting and editing these letters and speeches of Cromwell, all men will readily and gratefully acknowledge. A work more valuable as a guide to the study of the singular and complex character of our pious revolutionist, our religious demagogue, our preaching and praying warrior and usurper, has not been produced. There is another portion of Mr... more...

NORTH AMERICA, SIBERIA, AND RUSSIA. The circumnavigation of the world is now a matter of ordinary occurrence to our bold mariners: and after a few years it will be a sort of summer excursion to our steamers. We shall have the requisitions of the Travellers' Club more stringent as the sphere of action grows wider; and no man will be eligible who has not paid a visit to Pekin, or sunned himself in... more...

M. De Tocqueville is one of the greatest, perhaps the very greatest, of the political philosophers of the present day. Alone of all his contemporaries, his best works will bear a comparison with those of Machiavelli and Bacon. Less caustic and condensed than Tacitus, less imaginative and eloquent than Burke, he possesses the calm judgment, the discriminating eye, and the just reflection, which have... more...