LETTER 272. TO MR. MURRAY. "Venice, April 9. 1817. "Your letters of the 18th and 20th are arrived. In my own I have given you the rise, progress, decline, and fall, of my recent malady. It is gone to the devil: I won't pay him so bad a compliment as to say it came from him;—he is too much of a gentleman. It was nothing but a slow fever, which quickened its pace towards the end of its... more...

WHO SHALL RULE THE WAVES?   A contest of a very remarkable kind is now going on, one which is pregnant with important results in respect to commerce, to naval architecture, to geographical discovery, to colonisation, to the spread of intelligence, to the improvement of industrial art, and to the balance of political power among nations. The nature of this contest cannot be better made intelligible... more...

MODERN TYPES. (By Mr. Punch's Own Type Writer.) No. XXI.—THE AVERAGE UNDERGRADUATE. Those who live much in the society of the very middle-aged, hear from them loud and frequent complaints of the decay of courtesy and the general deterioration, both of manners and of habits, observable in the young men of the day. With many portentous shakings of the head, these grizzling censors inform those who... more...

BLACK OXEN I "Talk. Talk. Talk.… Good lines and no action … said all … not even promising first act … eighth failure and season more than half over … rather be a playwright and fail than a critic compelled to listen to has-beens and would-bes trying to put over bad plays.… Oh, for just one more great first-night … if there's a spirit world why don't the ghosts of dead... more...

THREE BOROUGHS Proposed to be wholly disfranchised by the REFORM BILL.1. DUNWICH. 2. OLD SARUM. 3. BRAMBER. THREE BOROUGHS: 1. DUNWICH, SUFFOLK. 2. OLD SARUM, WILTS. 3. BRAMBER, SUSSEX. Proposed to be wholly disfranchised by "the Reform Bill." We feel ourselves on ticklish—debateable ground; yet we only wish to illustrate the topographical history of the above places; their parliamentary... more...

Now this is the beginning of the Hollow Tree stories which the Story Teller told the Little Lady in the queer old house which stands in the very borders of the Big Deep Woods itself. They were told in the Room of the Lowest Ceiling and the Widest Fire—a ceiling so low that when the Story Teller stands upright it brushes his hair as he walks, and a fire so deep that pieces of large trees do not need... more...

THE ideal is the essence of poetry. In the virginal innocence of the world, poetry was a term that meant discourse of the gods. A world grown grey has learned to regard the gods as diseases of language. Conceived, it may be, in fevers of fancy, perhaps, originally, they were but deified words. Yet, it is as children of beauty and of dream that they remain. "Mortal has made the immortal," the... more...

Introduction Although I had already inquired for them from Ilocano boys, my first actual knowledge of Filipino riddles was due to Mr. George T. Shoens, American teacher among the Bisayans. He had made a collection of some fifty Bisayan riddles and presented a brief paper regarding them at the Anthropological Conference held at Baguio, under my direction, on May 12–14, 1908. My own collection was... more...

In consequence of the extreme prevalence of Scrofulous, Scorbutic, and Cancerous Diseases, and the ignorance which exists on the part of the public, as to their causes, symptoms, and nature, I have been induced to reprint my observations on those subjects, and to send forth an Eighth Edition for the information of the afflicted. To these remarks, I have appended a relation of several cases, which have... more...

CHAPTER I. "The Universe is a mistake!" Thus spake Herbert Brande, a passenger on the Majestic, making for Queenstown Harbour, one evening early in the past year. Foolish as the words may seem, they were partly influential in leading to my terrible association with him, and all that is described in this book. Brande was standing beside me on the starboard side of the vessel. We had been... more...