Literary Collections Books

INTRODUCTION. I. The last century was yet in its infancy when the author of The Romany Rye first saw the light in the sleepy little East Anglian township of East Dereham, in the county distinguished by Borrow as the one in which the people eat the best dumplings in the world and speak the purest English.  “Pretty quiet D[ereham]” was the retreat in those days of a Lady Bountiful in the person of... more...

CHAPTER I It was a beautiful summer morning, and Rodney was out of his bed at six o'clock. He usually went for a walk before going to his studio, and this morning his walk had been a very pleasant one, for yesterday's work had gone well with him. But as he turned into the mews in which his studio was situated he saw the woman whom he employed to light his fire standing in the middle of the... more...

FRENCH LITERATURE. Of French literature, taken as a whole, it may boldly be said that it is, not the wisest, not the weightiest, not certainly the purest and loftiest, but by odds the most brilliant and the most interesting, literature in the world. Strong at many points, at some points triumphantly strong, it is conspicuously weak at only one point,—the important point of poetry. In eloquence, in... more...

DUKE OF GUISE. A TRAGEDY. Ουτως δε φιλοτιμοι φυσεις εν ταις πολιτειαις το αγαν μη φυλαξαμεναι, τωιαγαθου μειζον το κακον εχουσι. Plutarch. in Agesilao.003In the latter part of Charles the Second's reign, the stage, as well as every other engine which could affect the popular mind, was eagerly employed in the... more...

Here, if I cut my coat according to my cloth, t should have a garment which this whole volume would hardly stuff out with its form; and I have a fancy that if I begin by answering, as I have sometimes rather too succinctly done, that we have no more a single literary centre than Italy or than Germany has (or had before their unification), I shall not be taken at my word. I shall be right, all the same,... more...

THE HEDGE SCHOOL. There never was a more unfounded calumny, than that which would impute to the Irish peasantry an indifference to education. I may, on the contrary, fearlessly assert that the lower orders of no country ever manifested such a positive inclination for literary acquirements, and that, too, under circumstances strongly calculated to produce carelessness and apathy on this particular... more...

CHAPTER I. WHEREIN AN EXCURSION IS MADE IN A CELTIC MIND A young Irish gentleman of the numerous clan O'Donnells, and a Patrick, hardly a distinction of him until we know him, had bound himself, by purchase of a railway-ticket, to travel direct to the borders of North Wales, on a visit to a notable landowner of those marches, the Squire Adister, whose family-seat was where the hills begin to lift... more...

RICHARD HENRY DANA, SENIOR (1787-1879)Richard H. Danaichard Henry Dana the elder, although he died less than twenty years in 1787, in Cambridge, four years after Washington Irving. He came of a distinguished and scholarly family: his father had been minister to Russia during the Revolution, and was afterwards Chief Justice of Massachusetts; through his mother he was descended from Anne Bradstreet. At... more...

CHAPTER I—M. MYRIEL In 1815, M. Charles-Francois-Bienvenu Myriel was Bishop of D—— He was an old man of about seventy-five years of age; he had occupied the see of D—— since 1806. Although this detail has no connection whatever with the real substance of what we are about to relate, it will not be superfluous, if merely for the sake of exactness in all points, to mention here the various... more...

CERES’ RUNAWAY One can hardly be dull possessing the pleasant imaginary picture of a Municipality hot in chase of a wild crop—at least while the charming quarry escapes, as it does in Rome.  The Municipality does not exist that would be nimble enough to overtake the Roman growth of green in the high places of the city.  It is true that there have been the famous captures—those in the Colosseum,... more...