FOREWORD A SMALL phial, I doubt not, could contain the attar of the epigrammatic literature of all time. Few of the perfumes of this diminutive form of wit and satire have survived. Pretty and scented vaporings, most of the thousands and thousands of them, that have died on the air of the foibles of their day. Yet how the pungent ones can persist! The racy old odors, which are as new as now, that still hover about the political and amorous... more...

INTRODUCTION Between 1710 and 1729 Anthony Collins was lampooned, satirized, and gravely denounced from pulpit and press as England’s most insidious defiler of church and state. Yet within a year of his death he became the model of a proper country gentleman, ... he had an opulent Fortune, descended to him from his Ancestors, which he left behind him unimpair’d: He lived on his own Estate in the Country, where his Tenants paid him... more...

THE MOTE IN THE MIDDLE DISTANCE By H*NRY J*M*S It was with the sense of a, for him, very memorable something that he peered now into the immediate future, and tried, not without compunction, to take that period up where he had, prospectively, left it. But just where the deuce had he left it? The consciousness of dubiety was, for our friend, not, this morning, quite yet clean-cut enough to outline the figures on what she had called his... more...

CHAPTER I. — UNDER TWO FLAGS. 'You send out teachers of religion to undermine and ruin thepeople.'—Black Flag Proclamation to the French, 1883. The moonlight, in wave on wave of silver, flooded all the Sacred Island. Far away and faint ran the line of the crests of Samoa, like the hills of heaven in the old ballad, or a scene in the Italian opera. Then came a voice from the Calling Place, and the smooth sea thrilled, and all the... more...

SHE emerges from the shop. She is any woman, and the shop from which she emerges is any shop in any town. She has been shopping. This does not imply that she has been buying anything or that she has contemplated buying anything, but merely that she has been shopping—a very different pursuit from buying. Buying implies business for the shop; shopping merely implies business for the clerks. As stated, she emerges. In the doorway she runs... more...

I. After the New Jersey Election, 1865. Saint’s Rest(wich is in the State uv Noo Gersey),November, 9, 1865. Never wuz I in so pleasant a frame uv mind as last night. All wuz peace with me, for after bein buffeted about the world for three skore years, at last it seemed to me ez tho forchune, tired uv persekootin a unforchnit bein, hed taken me into favor. I hed a solemn promise from the Demekratic State Central Committy in the great... more...

"Same Old Bill, Eh Mable!" Dere Mable: Were in sunny France at last. I cant tell you much about it yet on account of its havin been so foggy since we got here. We didnt deboat in Paris as I was expectin. We sailed up a river to a town with a wall around it and got off there. I dont know what the wall was for unless to keep people in. They certinly wouldnt need one to keep anybody out of that place. Were now in what they call a rest camp. If... more...