A Bit of His Life Talbot Mundy was born in London on April 23, 1879. He was educated at Rugby, and served nearly ten years, beginning in 1900, as a government official in Africa and India. While in India, he wandered all over the sub-continent on horseback, and even into Tibet. Eastern occult lore first attracted, then fascinated, his active and unorthodox mind. Mundy absorbed all he could learn of the... more...

NORAH'S HOME The grey old dwelling, rambling and wide,With the homestead paddocks on either side,And the deep verandahs and porches tallWhere the vine climbs high on the trellised wall.G. ESSEX EVANS. Billabong homestead lay calm and peaceful in the slanting rays of the sum that crept down the western sky. The red roofs were half hidden in the surrounding trees—pine and box and mighty blue gums... more...

INTRODUCTION Of all the novels and stories which Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley left in manuscript, only one novelette, Mathilda, is complete. It exists in both rough draft and final copy. In this story, as in all Mary Shelley's writing, there is much that is autobiographical: it would be hard to find a more self-revealing work. For an understanding of Mary's character, especially as she saw... more...

When they are very little just only a baby you can never tell which one is to be a lady. There are some when they feel it inside them that it has been with them that there was once so very little of them, that they were a baby, helpless and no conscious feeling in them, that they knew nothing then when they were kissed and dandled and fixed by others who knew them when they could know nothing inside... more...

"MATRIMONIAL OPENINGS" Mr. Dowson sat by the kitchen fire smoking and turning a docile and well- trained ear to the heated words which fell from his wife's lips. "She'll go and do the same as her sister Jenny done," said Mrs. Dowson, with a side glance at her daughter Flora; "marry a man and then 'ave to work and slave herself to skin and bone to keep him." "I... more...

CHAPTER I INTRODUCTION This book is intended to deal with substance rather than with form. But, in estimating the work of a teacher who taught exclusively with the pen, it would be perverse to disregard entirely the qualities of the writing which so penetrated and coloured the intellectual life of the Victorian age. Some cursory estimate of Arnold's powers in prose and verse must therefore be... more...

Chapter I. Life till Marriage, and Work till the Publication of the Poems of 1853. Even those who are by no means greedy of details as to the biography of authors, may without inconsistency regret that Matthew Arnold’s Letters do not begin till he was just five-and-twenty. And then they are not copious, telling us in particular next to nothing about his literary work (which is, later, their constant... more...

INTRODUCTION A SHORT LIFE OF ARNOLD Matthew Arnold, poet and critic, was born in the village of Laleham,Middlesex County, England, December 24, 1822. He was the son of Dr.Thomas Arnold, best remembered as the great Head Master at Rugby andin later years distinguished also as a historian of Rome, and of MaryPenrose Arnold, a woman of remarkable character and intellect. Devoid of stirring incident, and,... more...

GEORGE SAND Napoleon in exile declared that were he again on the throne he should make a point of spending two hours a day in conversation with women, from whom there was much to be learnt. He had, no doubt, several types of women in mind, but it is more than probable that the banishment of Madame de Stael rose before him as one of the mistakes in his career. It was not that he showed lack of judgment... more...

I. One noon in 189-, a young man stood in front of the new Gewandhaus in Leipzig, and watched the neat, grass-laid square, until then white and silent in the sunshine, grow dark with many figures. The public rehearsal of the weekly concert was just over, and, from the half light of the warm-coloured hall, which for more than two hours had held them secluded, some hundreds of people hastened, with... more...