History Books

PREFACE In approaching "The Historical Nights' Entertainment" I set myself the task of reconstructing, in the fullest possible detail and with all the colour available from surviving records, a group of more or less famous events. I would select for my purpose those which were in themselves bizarre and resulting from the interplay of human passions, and whilst relating each of these events... more...

A NARRATIVE &c. &c. &c. I arrived at the camp at Wady Haifa on the Second Cataract, on the 16th of the moon Zilhadge, in the year of the Hegira 3255, where I found about four thousand troops, consisting of Turkish cavalry, infantry and artillery, and a considerable proportion of Bedouin cavalry and Mogrebin foot soldiers, besides about one hundred and twenty large boats loaded with... more...

CHAPTER I The remotest fact in the history of England is written in her rocks. Geology tells us of a time when no sea flowed between Dover and Calais, while an unbroken continent extended from the Mediterranean to the Orkneys. Huge mounds of rough stones called Cromlechs, have yielded up still another secret. Before the coming of the Keltic-Aryans, there dwelt there two successive races, whose story is... more...

A DAY WITH FRIEDRICH.—(23d July, 1779.) "OBERAMTMANN (Head-Manager) Fromme" was a sister's son of Poet, Gleim,—Gleim Canon of Halberstadt, who wrote Prussian "grenadier-songs" in, or in reference to, the Seven-Years War, songs still printed, but worth little; who begged once, after Friedrich's death, an OLD HAT of his, and took it with him to Halberstadt (where I hope it... more...

Thirty-five years ago I made a voyage to the Arctic Seas in what Chaucer calls   A little boteNo bigger than a mannë’s thought; it was a Phantom Ship that made some voyages to different parts of the world which were recorded in early numbers of Charles Dickens’s “Household Words.”  As preface to Richard Hakluyt’s records of the first endeavour of our bold Elizabethan mariners to find... more...

PREFACE If a new translation of Herodotus does not justify itself, it will hardly be justified in a preface; therefore the question whether it was needed may be left here without discussion. The aim of the translator has been above all things faithfulness—faithfulness to the manner of expression and to the structure of sentences, as well as to the meaning of the Author. At the same time it is... more...

A DESTROYER IN ACTIVE SERVICE BY AN AMERICAN OFFICERApril7.War accepted with equanimity.Life on a destroyer is simple.Well, I must confess that, even after war has been declared, the skies haven't fallen and oysters taste just the same. I never would have dreamed that so big a step would be accepted with so much equanimity. It is due to two causes, I think. First, because we have trembled on the... more...

EMILY BRONTË. There are, perhaps, few tests of excellence so sure as the popular verdict on a work of art a hundred years after its accomplishment. So much time must be allowed for the swing and rebound of taste, for the despoiling of tawdry splendours and to permit the work of art itself to form a public capable of appreciating it. Such marvellous fragments reach us of Elizabethan praises; and we... more...

CHAPTER I HOW SLAVERY GREW IN AMERICA An English traveler, riding along the banks of the Potomac in mid-July, 1798, saw ahead of him on the road an old-fashioned chaise, its driver urging forward his slow horse with the whip, until a sharp cut made the beast swerve, and the chaise toppled over the bank, throwing out the driver and the young lady who was with him. The traveler—it was John Bernard, an... more...

INTRODUCTION Of the great incidents of History, none has attracted more attention or proved more difficult of interpretation than the French Revolution. The ultimate significance of other striking events and their place in the development of mankind can be readily estimated. It is clear enough that the barbarian invasions marked the death of the classical world, already mortally wounded by the rise of... more...