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+Project Gutenberg's Modern English Books of Power, by George Hamlin Fitch
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Modern English Books of Power
+
+Author: George Hamlin Fitch
+
+Release Date: September 9, 2006 [EBook #19222]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK MODERN ENGLISH BOOKS OF POWER ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Juliet Sutherland, Jeannie Howse and the Online
+Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net
+
+
+
+
+
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+    +--------------------------------------------------------------+
+    | Transcriber's Note:                                          |
+    |                                                              |
+    | Inconsistent hyphenation in the original document has been   |
+    | preserved.                                                   |
+    |                                                              |
+    | A number of obvious typographical errors have been corrected |
+    | in this text. For a complete list, please see the end of     |
+    | this document.                                               |
+    |                                                              |
+    +--------------------------------------------------------------+
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+
+
+
+  [Illustration: CHARLES DICKENS READING "THE CHIMES" AT 58
+  LINCOLN'S INN FIELDS ON THE SECOND OF DECEMBER, 1844. FROM A
+  SKETCH BY DANIEL MACLISE, R.A.]
+
+
+
+
+MODERN
+ENGLISH BOOKS
+OF POWER
+
+BY GEORGE HAMLIN FITCH
+
+"A GOOD BOOK IS THE PRECIOUS
+LIFE-BLOOD OF A MASTER SPIRIT, EMBALMED AND TREASURED
+UP ON PURPOSE TO A LIFE BEYOND LIFE."
+MILTON: AREOPAGITICA
+
+ILLUSTRATED
+
+BARSE & HOPKINS
+NEW YORK   NEWARK
+N.Y.       N.J.
+
+
+
+
+_Copyright_, 1912
+by BARSE & HOPKINS
+
+The articles in this
+book appeared originally in the
+Sunday book-page of the San Francisco _Chronicle_.
+The privilege of reproducing them
+here is due to the courtesy of
+M.H. de Young, Esq.
+
+
+
+
+TO AMERIQUE
+WHOSE
+LOVE AND ENCOURAGEMENT
+HELPED ME TO WRITE
+THIS BOOK
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+
+                                                             PAGE
+
+INTRODUCTION                                                   ix
+
+THE VITAL QUALITY IN LITERATURE                                xi
+
+   To Get the Spiritual Essence of a Great Book One Must
+   Study the Man Who Wrote It--The Man Is the Best
+   Epitome of His Message.
+
+MACAULAY'S ESSAYS IN EUROPEAN HISTORY                           3
+
+   Foremost English Essayist--His Style and Learning
+   Have Made Macaulay a Favorite for Over a Half
+   Century.
+
+SCOTT AND HIS WAVERLEY NOVELS                                  11
+
+   Greatest Novelist the World Has Known--Made History
+   Real and Created Characters That Will Never Die.
+
+CARLYLE AS AN INSPIRER OF YOUTH                                20
+
+   Finest English Prose Writer--His Best Books, _Past
+   and Present_, _Sartor Resartus_ and the _French
+   Revolution_.
+
+DE QUINCEY AS A MASTER OF STYLE                                30
+
+   He Wrote the _Confessions of an English
+   Opium-Eater_--Dreamed Dreams and Saw Visions and
+   Pictured Them in Poetic Prose.
+
+CHARLES LAMB AND THE ESSAYS OF ELIA                            38
+
+   Best Beloved of All the English Writers--Quaintest
+   and Tenderest Essayist Whose Work Appeals to All
+   Hearts.
+
+DICKENS, THE FOREMOST OF NOVELISTS                             47
+
+   More Widely Read Than Any Other Story-Teller--The
+   Greatest of the Modern Humorists Appeals to the
+   Readers of All Ages and Classes.
+
+THACKERAY, GREATEST MASTER OF FICTION                          56
+
+   The Most Accomplished Writer of His Century--Tender
+   Pathos Under an Affectation of Cynicism and Great Art
+   in Style and Characters.
+
+CHARLOTTE BRONT�; HER TWO GREAT NOVELS                         66
+
+   _Jane Eyre_ and _Villette_ are Touched With
+   Genius--The Tragedy of a Woman's Life That Resulted
+   in Two Stories of Passionate Revolt Against Fate.
+
+GEORGE ELIOT AND HER TWO GREAT NOVELS                          76
+
+   _Adam Bede_ and _The Mill on the Floss_--Her Early
+   Stories Are Rich in Character Sketches, With Much
+   Humor and Pathos.
+
+RUSKIN, THE APOSTLE OF ART                                     87
+
+   Art Critic and Social Reformer--Best Books Are
+   _Modern Painters_, _The Seven Lamps_ and _The Stones
+   of Venice_.
+
+TENNYSON LEADS THE VICTORIAN WRITERS                           96
+
+   A Poet Who Voiced the Aspirations of His
+   Age--_Locksley Hall_, _In Memoriam_ and _The Idylls
+   of the King_ Among His Best Works.
+
+BROWNING, GREATEST POET SINCE SHAKESPEARE                     106
+
+   How to Get the Best of Browning's Poems--Read the
+   Lyrics First and Then Take Up the Longer and the More
+   Difficult Works.
+
+MEREDITH AND A FEW OF HIS BEST NOVELS                         115
+
+   One of the Greatest Masters of Fiction of the Last
+   Century--_The Ordeal of Richard Feverel_, _Diana of
+   the Crossways_ and Other Novels.
+
+STEVENSON, PRINCE OF MODERN STORY-TELLERS                     123
+
+   His Stories of Adventure and Brilliant
+   Essays--_Treasure Island_ and _Dr. Jekyll and Mr.
+   Hyde_ His Most Popular Books.
+
+THOMAS HARDY; HIS TRAGIC TALES OF WESSEX                      131
+
+   Greatest Living Writer of English Fiction--Resenting
+   Harsh Criticisms, the Prose Master Turns to Verse.
+
+KIPLING'S BEST SHORT STORIES AND POEMS                        140
+
+   Tales of East Indian Life and Character--Ideal
+   Training of the Genius That Has Produced Some of the
+   Best Literary Work of Our Day.
+
+BIBLIOGRAPHY                                                  151
+
+   Short Notes of Both Standard and Other Editions, With
+   Lives, Sketches and Reminiscences.
+
+INDEX                                                         165
+
+
+
+
+Illustrations
+
+
+                                                           FACING
+                                                             PAGE
+
+Charles Dickens Reading _The Chimes_ at 58 Lincoln's Inn
+  Fields on the Second of December, 1844. From a Sketch
+  by Daniel Maclise, R.A.                                  _Title_
+
+Thomas Babington Macaulay at the Age of Forty-nine--After
+  an Engraving by W. Holl, from a Drawing by George
+  Richmond, A.R.A.                                              6
+
+Sir Walter Scott--This Portrait is taken from Chantrey's
+  Bust now at Abbotsford, which, according to Lockhart,
+  "Alone Preserves for Posterity the Expression most
+  fondly Remembered by All who Ever Mingled in his
+  Domestic Circle."                                            12
+
+White Horse Inn--From an Illustration to _Waverley_,
+  Drawn by G. Cattermole and Engraved by E. Finden             14
+
+Thomas Carlyle--From the World-Famed Masterpiece of
+  Portraiture by James McNeill Whistler                        20
+
+Archhouse, Ecclefechan, Dumfriesshire, the Birthplace of
+  Thomas Carlyle--From a Photograph in the Possession of
+  Alexander Carlyle, M.A., on which Carlyle has Written
+  a Memorandum to Show in which Room he was Born               26
+
+Thomas De Quincey--From an old Engraving                       30
+
+De Quincey with Two Daughters and Grandchild--From a
+  Chalk Drawing by James Archer, R.S.A., made in 1855          34
+
+Charles Lamb--From the Portrait by William Hazlitt             38
+
+Mary and Charles Lamb--From the Painting by F.S. Cary
+  made in 1834                                                 44
+
+Charles Dickens at the Age of Twenty-seven--From the
+  Portrait by Daniel Maclise, R.A.                             48
+
+Original Pickwick Cover Issued in 1837 with Dickens'
+  Autograph--Most of Dickens' Novels were Issued in
+  Shilling Installments before being Published in the
+  Complete Volume                                              52
+
+William Makepeace Thackeray--From a Drawing by Samuel
+  Laurence, Engraved by J.C. Armytage                          56
+
+Title-page to _Vanity Fair_, Drawn by Thackeray, who
+  Furnished the Illustrations for Many of his Earlier
+  Editions                                                     58
+
+William Makepeace Thackeray--A Caricature Drawn by
+  Himself                                                      62
+
+Charlotte Bront�--From the Exquisitely Sympathetic Crayon
+  Portrait by George Richmond, R.A., now in the National
+  Portrait Gallery of London                                   66
+
+Mrs. Gaskell--From the Portrait by George Richmond, R.A.
+  Mrs. Gaskell's _Life of Bront�_ is one of the Finest
+  Biographies in the Language                                  72
+
+George Eliot in 1864--From the Etching by Mr. Paul
+  Rajon--Drawn by Mr. Frederick Burton--From the
+  Frontispiece to the First Edition of _George Eliot's
+  Life_, by Her Husband, J.W. Cross                            76
+
+George Eliot's Birthplace, South Farm, Arbury, Nuneaton        80
+
+John Ruskin--From a Photograph Taken on July 20, 1882, by
+  Messrs. Elliott & Fry                                        88
+
+John Ruskin--From the Semi-Romantic Portrait by Sir John
+  E. Millais                                                   92
+
+Lord Alfred Tennyson--After an Engraving by G.J. Stodart
+  From a Photograph by J. Mayall                               96
+
+Facsimile of Tennyson's Original Manuscript of _Crossing
+  the Bar_. (Copyright by the Macmillan Company)              100
+
+Robert Browning--From a Photograph by Hollyer after the
+  Portrait by G.F. Watts, R.A.                                106
+
+Elizabeth Barrett Browning--After the Portrait by Field
+  Talfourd                                                    110
+
+George Meredith with His Daughter and Grandchildren--From
+  a Photograph Taken Shortly Before His Death                 118
+
+Flint Cottage, Boxhill, the Home of George Meredith--His
+  Writing was done in a Small Swiss Chalet in the Garden      120
+
+Robert Louis Stevenson--The Author's Intimate Associates
+  Pronounce this Photograph a Perfect Presentation of His
+  Most Typical Expression                                     126
+
+Stevenson's Home at Valima, Samoa, Looking Toward Vaea        128
+
+Thomas Hardy--A Portrait Which Brings Out Strikingly the
+  Man of Creative Power, the Artist, the Philosopher and
+  the Poet                                                    132
+
+Rudyard Kipling--A Striking Likeness of the Author in a
+  Characteristic Pose                                         140
+
+Rudyard Kipling--From a Cartoon by W. Nicholson               144
+
+
+
+
+_Introduction_
+
+
+_My aim in this little book has been to give short sketches and
+estimates of the greatest modern English writers from Macaulay to
+Stevenson and Kipling. Omissions there are, but my effort has been to
+give the most characteristic writers a place and to try to stimulate
+the reader's interest in the man behind the book as well as in the
+best works of each author. Too much space is devoted in most literary
+criticism to the bare facts of biography and the details of essays or
+novels or histories written by authors. My plan has been to arouse
+interest both in the men and their books so that any reader of this
+volume may be stimulated to extend his knowledge of the modern English
+classics._
+
+_These chapters include the greatest English writers during the last
+one hundred and fifty years and they have been prepared mainly for
+those who have no thorough knowledge of modern English books or
+authors. They are of limited scope so that few quotations have been
+possible. But they have been written with an eager desire to help
+those who care to know the best works of modern English authors. In
+the same spirit the most appropriate illustrations have been secured
+and a helpful bibliography has been added. If this book helps readers
+to secure one lasting friend among these authors it will have done
+good missionary work; for to make the books of one man or woman of
+genius a part of our mental possessions is to be set on the broad
+highway to literary culture._
+
+
+
+
+_The Vital Quality in Literature_
+
+    _To Get the Spiritual Essence of a Great Book One Must Study
+    the Man Who Wrote It--The Man Is the Best Epitome His
+    Message._
+
+
+_In this volume as in its predecessor, "Comfort Found in Good Old
+Books," my aim has been to enforce the theory that behind every great
+book is a man, greater than the best book that he ever wrote. This
+strong spiritual quality which every one of the great authors puts
+into his best books is what we should strive to secure when we read
+these great classics. Unless we get this spiritual part we miss the
+essence of the book._
+
+_Hence it has been my aim in this volume to make clear what manner of
+men wrote these books which serve as the landmarks of modern English
+literature._
+
+_The scope of this book is limited, but from Macaulay to Kipling the
+effort has been to include those representative modern English
+authors who both in prose and verse best reflect the spiritual
+tendencies of their age. Whether essayists, historians, novelists or
+poets each of these writers has furnished something distinctive; each
+has caught some salient feature of his age and fixed it for all time
+in the amber of his thought._
+
+_And what a bead-roll is this of great English worthies: Macaulay, the
+most brilliant and learned of all English essayists; Scott, the finest
+story-teller of his own or any other age; Carlyle, the inspirer of
+ambitious youth; De Quincey, the greatest artist in style, whose words
+are as music to the sensitive ear; Dickens, the master painter of
+sorrows and joys of the common people; Thackeray, the best interpreter
+of human life and character; Charlotte Bront�, the brooding Celtic
+genius who laid bare the hearts of women; George Eliot, the greatest
+artist of her sex in mastery of human emotion; Ruskin, the first to
+teach the common people appreciation of art and architecture;
+Tennyson, the melodious singer who voiced the highest aspiration of
+his time; Browning, the greatest dramatic poet since Shakespeare;
+Charles Lamb, one of the tenderest of essayists; George Meredith, the
+most brilliant and suggestive novelist of the Victorian age;
+Stevenson, the best beloved and most artistic story-teller of his day;
+Hardy, the master painter of tragedies of rural life; and Kipling, the
+interpreter of Anglo-Indian life, the singer of the new age of science
+and discovery, the laureate of the gospel of blood and iron._
+
+_The work of each of these men and women who make up the splendid roll
+of English immortals varies in quality, in style, in capacity to touch
+the heart and inspire the thought of the reader of to-day. But great
+as are their differences, all meet on the common ground of a
+warm-hearted, sympathetic humanity that knows no distinctions of race
+or creed, no limitations of time or place. The splendid sermons on the
+gospel of work that Carlyle preached after long wrestlings of the
+spirit are as full of inspiration to the youth of to-day as they were
+when they came out from the mind of the man who actually lived the
+laborious life that he commended; the little lay discourses that may
+be found scattered through Thackeray's novels and essays are born of
+agony of spirit, and it is their spiritual power which keeps them
+fresh and full of inspiration in this age of doubt and materialism._
+
+_And so we might go down through the whole list. Each of these great
+writers had his Gethsemane, from which he emerged with the power of
+moving the hearts of men. So when we read that most beautiful essay of
+Lamb's on "Dream Children," our hearts ache for the lonely man who
+sacrificed the best things in life for the sake of the sister whom he
+loved better than his own happiness. And when we read Thackeray's
+eloquent words on family love we know that he wrote in his heart's
+blood, for the dearest woman in the world to him was lost forever in
+this world, when the light of her reason was clouded._
+
+_And so I have tried in these essays to show how bitter waters of
+sorrow have strengthened the spirit of all these masters of English
+thought and style, until they have poured out their hearts in eloquent
+words that can never die. Far across the gulf of years their sonorous
+voices reach our ears. Pregnant are they with the passionate
+earnestness of these men and women of genius, these bearers of the
+torch of spiritual inspiration passed from hand to hand down the
+centuries._
+
+_When our souls are moved by some great bereavement then the words of
+these inspired writers soothe our griefs. When we are beaten down in
+the dust of conflict they come with the refreshment of water from
+springs in the everlasting hills. When we are bitter over great
+losses or sore over hope deferred or stricken because friends have
+proved faithless, then they soften our hearts and give us courage to
+take up once more the battle of life._
+
+
+
+
+MODERN ENGLISH BOOKS OF POWER
+
+
+
+
+MACAULAY'S ESSAYS IN EUROPEAN HISTORY
+
+    THE FOREMOST ESSAYIST IN ENGLISH LITERATURE--HIS STYLE AND
+    LEARNING HAVE MADE MACAULAY A FAVORITE FOR OVER A HALF
+    CENTURY.
+
+
+Macaulay belonged to the nineteenth century, as he was born in 1800,
+but in his cast of mind, in his literary tastes and in his intense
+partisanship he belonged to the century that includes Swift, Johnson
+and Goldsmith. He stands alone among famous English authors by reason
+of his prodigious memory, his wide reading, his oratorical style and
+his singular ascendancy over the minds of young students. The only
+writers of modern times who can be classed with him as great personal
+forces in the development of young minds are Carlyle and Emerson, and
+of the three Macaulay must be given first place because of a certain
+dynamic quality in the man and his style which forces conviction on
+the mind of the immature reader. The same thing to a less extent is
+true of Carlyle, who suffers in his influence as one grows older.
+Emerson is in a class by himself. His appeal is that of pure reason
+and of high enthusiasm--an appeal that never loses its force with
+those who love the intellectual life.
+
+Many famous men have testified to the mental stimulus which they
+received from Macaulay's essays. Upon these essays, contributed to the
+EDINBURGH REVIEW in its prime, Macaulay lavished all the resources of
+his vast scholarship, his discursive reading in the ancient and modern
+classics, his immense enthusiasm and his strong desire to prove his
+case. He was a great advocate before he was a great writer, and he
+never loses sight of the jury of his readers. He blackens the shadows
+and heightens the lights in order to make heroes out of Clive and
+Warren Hastings; he hammers Boswell and Boswell's editor, Croker, over
+the sacred head of old Dr. Johnson; he lampoons every eminent Tory, as
+he idealizes every prominent Whig in English political history.
+Macaulay's style is declamatory; he wrote as though he were to
+deliver his essays from the rostrum; he abounds in antithesis; he
+works up your interest in the course of a long paragraph until he
+reaches his smashing climax, in which he fixes indelibly in your mind
+the impression which he desires to create. It is all like a great
+piece of legerdemain; your eyes cannot follow the processes, but your
+mind is amazed and then convinced by the triumphant proof of the
+conjuror's skill.
+
+Macaulay had one of the most successful of lives. His early advantages
+were ample. He had a memory which made everything he read his own,
+ready to be drawn upon at a moment's notice. He was famous as an
+author at the early age of twenty-five; he was already a distinguished
+Parliamentary orator at thirty; at thirty-three he had gained a place
+in the East Indian Council. He never married, but he had an ideal
+domestic life in the home of his sister, and one of his nephews,
+George Otto Trevelyan, wrote his biography, one of the best in the
+language, which reveals the sweetness of nature that lay under the
+hard surface of Macaulay's character. He made a fortune out of his
+books, and in ten years' service in India he gained another fortune,
+with the leisure for wide reading, which he utilized in writing his
+history of England. He died at the height of his fame, before his
+great mental powers had shown any sign of decay. Take it all in all,
+his was a happy life, brimful of work and enjoyment.
+
+Thomas Babington Macaulay was born October 25, 1800, the son of a
+wealthy merchant who was active in securing the abolition of the slave
+trade. His precocity is almost beyond belief. He read at three years
+of age, gave signs of his marvelous memory at four, and when only
+eight years old wrote a theological discourse. He entered Trinity
+College, Cambridge, at eighteen, but his aversion to mathematics cost
+him college honors. He showed at Cambridge great fondness for Latin
+declamation and for poetry. At twenty-four he became a fellow of
+Trinity. He studied law, but did not practice. Literature and politics
+absorbed his attention. At twenty-five he made his first hit with his
+essay on Milton in the EDINBURGH REVIEW.
+
+This was followed in rapid succession by the series of essays on which
+his fame mainly rests. In 1830 he was elected to Parliament, and in
+the following year he established his reputation as an orator by a
+great speech on the reform bill. But financial reverses came when he
+lost the lucrative post of Commissioner in Bankruptcy and his
+fellowship at Trinity lapsed. To gain an income he accepted the
+position of secretary of the Board of Control of Indian Affairs, and
+soon after was offered a seat in the Supreme Council of India at
+Calcutta at $50,000 a year. He lived in India four years, and it was
+mainly in these years that he did the reading which afterward bore
+fruit in his _History of England_.
+
+  [Illustration: THOMAS BABINGTON MACAULAY AT THE AGE OF
+  FORTY-NINE--AFTER AN ENGRAVING BY W. HOLL, FROM A DRAWING BY
+  GEORGE RICHMOND, A.R.A.]
+
+At thirty-nine Macaulay began his _History of England_, which
+continued to absorb most of his time for the next twenty years. While
+he was working on his history he published _Lays of Ancient Rome_,
+that had a success scarcely inferior to that of Scott's _Lady of the
+Lake_ or Byron's _Childe Harold_. He also published his essays, which
+had a remarkable sale. His history, the first two volumes of which
+appeared in 1848, scored a success that astounded all the critics.
+When the third volume appeared in 1855, no less than twenty-six
+thousand, five hundred copies were sold in ten weeks, which broke all
+records of that day. Macaulay received royalties of over $150,000 on
+history, a sum which would have been trebled had he secured payment
+on editions issued in the United States, where his works were more
+popular than in his own country. His last years were crowded with
+honors. He accepted a peerage two years before his death. When the end
+came he was given a public funeral and a place in Westminster Abbey.
+
+With Carlyle, Macaulay shares the honor of being the greatest of
+English essayists. While he cannot compare with Carlyle in insight
+into character and in splendor of imagination, he appeals to the wider
+audience because of his attractive style, his wealth of ornament and
+illustration and his great clearness. Carlyle's appeal is mainly to
+students, but Macaulay appeals to all classes of readers.
+
+Macaulay's style has been imitated by many hands, but no one has ever
+worked such miracles as he wrought with apparent ease. In the first
+place, his learning was so much a part of his mind that he drew on its
+stores without effort. Scarcely a paragraph can be found in all his
+essays which is not packed with allusions, yet all seem to illustrate
+his subject so naturally that one never looks upon them as used to
+display his remarkable knowledge.
+
+Macaulay is a master of all the literary arts. Especially does he love
+to use antithesis and to make his effects by violent contrasts. Add to
+this the art of skilful climax, clever alliteration, happy
+illustration and great narrative power and you have the chief features
+of Macaulay's style. The reader is carried along on this flood of
+oratorical style, and so great is the author's descriptive power that
+one actually beholds the scenes and the personages which he depicts.
+
+Of all his essays Macaulay shows his great powers most conspicuously
+in those on Milton, Clive, Warren Hastings and Croker's edition of
+Boswell's Johnson. In these he is always the advocate laboring to
+convince his hearers; always the orator filled with that passion of
+enthusiasm which makes one accept his words for the time, just as
+one's mind is unconsciously swayed by the voice of an eloquent
+speaker. It is this intense earnestness, this fierce desire to
+convince, joined to this prodigal display of learning, which stamps
+Macaulay's words on the brain of the receptive reader. Only when in
+cold blood we analyze his essays do we escape from this literary
+hypnotism which he exerts upon every reader.
+
+The essays of Macaulay are full of meat and all are worth reading,
+but, of course, every reader will differ in his estimate of them
+according to his own tastes and sympathies. It is fine practice to
+take one of these essays and look up the literary and historical
+allusions. No more attractive work than this can be set before a
+reading club. It will give rich returns in knowledge as well as in
+methods of literary study. Macaulay's _History_ is not read to-day as
+it was twenty years ago, mainly because historical writing in these
+days has suffered a great change, due to the growth of religious and
+political toleration. Macaulay is a partisan and a bigot, but if one
+can discount much of his bias and bitterness it will be found
+profitable to read portions of this history. Macaulay's verse is not
+of a high order, but his _Lays_ are full of poetic fire, and they
+appeal to a wider audience than more finished verse.
+
+Of all the English writers of the last century Macaulay has preserved
+the strongest hold on the reading public, and whatever changes time
+may make in literary fashions, one may rest assured that Macaulay will
+always retain his grip on readers of English blood.
+
+
+
+
+SCOTT AND HIS WAVERLEY NOVELS
+
+    THE GREATEST NOVELIST THE WORLD HAS KNOWN--HE MADE HISTORY
+    REAL AND CREATED CHARACTERS THAT WILL NEVER DIE.
+
+
+It is as difficult to sum up in a brief article the work and the
+influence of Sir Walter Scott as it is to make an estimate of
+Shakespeare, for Scott holds the same position in English prose
+fiction that Shakespeare holds in English poetry. In neither
+department is there any rival. In sheer creative force Scott stands
+head and shoulders above every other English novelist, and he has no
+superior among the novelists of any other nation. He has made Scotland
+and the Scotch people known to the world as Cervantes made Spain and
+the Spaniards a reality for all times.
+
+But he did more than Cervantes, for his creative mind reached over the
+border into England and across the channel to France and Germany, and
+even to the Holy Land, and found there historical types which he made
+as real and as immortal as his own highland clansmen. His was the
+great creative brain of the nineteenth century, and his work has made
+the world his debtor. His work stimulated the best story teller of
+France and gave the world _Monte Cristo_ and _The Three Guardsmen_. It
+fired the imaginations of a score of English historical novelists; it
+was the progenitor of Weyman's _A Soldier of France_ and Conan Doyle's
+_Micah Clarke_ and _The White Company_.
+
+Scott's mind was Shakespearean in its capacity for creating characters
+of real flesh and blood; for making great historical personages as
+real and vital as our next-door neighbors, and for bursts of sustained
+story telling that carry the reader on for scores of pages without an
+instant's drop in interest. Only the supreme masters in creative art
+can accomplish these things. And the wonder of it is that Scott did
+all these things without effort and without any self-consciousness. We
+can not imagine Scott bragging about any of his books or his
+characters, as Balzac did about Eugenie Grandet and others of his
+French types. He was too big a man for any small vanities. But he was
+as human as Shakespeare in his love of money, his desire to gather his
+friends about him and his hearty enjoyment of good food and drink.
+
+  [Illustration: SIR WALTER SCOTT THIS PORTRAIT IS TAKEN FROM
+  CHANTREY'S BUST NOW AT ABBOTSFORD, WHICH, ACCORDING TO LOCKHART,
+  "ALONE PRESERVES FOR POSTERITY THE EXPRESSION MOST FONDLY
+  REMEMBERED BY ALL WHO EVER MINGLED IN HIS DOMESTIC CIRCLE"]
+
+It has become the fashion among some of our hair-splitting critics to
+decry Scott because of his carelessness in literary style, his
+tendency to long introductions, and his fondness for description.
+These critics will tell you that Turgeneff and Tolstoi are greater
+literary artists than Scott, just as they tell you that Thackeray and
+Dickens do not deserve a place among the foremost of English
+novelists. This petty, finical criticism, which would measure
+everything by its own rigid rule of literary art, loses sight of the
+great primal fact that Scott created more real characters and told
+more good stories than any other novelist, and that his work will
+outlive that of all his detractors. It ignores the fact that
+Thackeray's wit, pathos, tenderness and knowledge of human nature make
+him immortal in spite of many defects. It forgets that Dickens' humor,
+joy of living and keen desire to help his fellow man will bring him
+thousands of readers after all the apostles of realism are buried
+under the dust of oblivion.
+
+Scott had the ideal training for a great historical novelist. Yet his
+literary successes in verse and prose were the result of accident. It
+is needless here to review his life. The son of a mediocre Scotch
+lawyer, he inherited from his father his capacity for work and his
+passion for system and order. From his mother he drew his love of
+reading and his fondness for old tales of the Scotch border. Like so
+many famous writers, his early education was desultory, but he had the
+free run of a fine library, and when he was a mere schoolboy his
+reading of the best English classics had been wider and more thorough
+than that of his teachers.
+
+Forced by boyish illness to live in the country, he early developed a
+great love for the Scotch ballads and the tales of the romantic past
+of his native land. These he gathered mainly by word of mouth. Later
+he was a diligent student and collector of all the old ballads. In
+this way his mind was steeped in historical lore, while by many
+walking tours through the highlands he came to know the common people
+as very few have ever known them.
+
+  [Illustration: WHITE HORSE INN FROM AN ILLUSTRATION TO "WAVERLEY"
+  DRAWN BY G. CATTERMOLE AND ENGRAVED BY E. FINDEN]
+
+Thus for forty years, while he was a working lawyer and a sheriff of
+his county, he was really laying up stores of material upon which he
+drew for his many novels. His literary tastes were first developed by
+study of German and by the translation of German ballads and plays.
+This practice led him to write _The Lay of the Last Minstrel_, and its
+success was responsible for _Marmion_, and _The Lady of the Lake_. But
+great as was his triumph in verse, he dropped the writing of poems
+when Byron's work eclipsed his own.
+
+Then, in his forty-third year, he turned to prose and began with
+_Waverley_; that series of novels which is the greatest ever produced
+by one man. The success of his first story proved a great stimulus to
+his imagination, and for years he continued to produce these novels,
+three of which may be ranked as the best in English literature. The
+element of mystery in regard to the authorship added to Scott's
+literary success. It was his habit to crowd his literary work into the
+early hours from four to eight o'clock in the morning; the remainder
+of the day was given up to legal duties and the evening to society.
+His tremendous energy and his power of concentration made these four
+hours equal to an ordinary man's working day. His mind was so full of
+material that the labor was mainly that of selection. Creative work,
+when once seated at his desk, was as natural as breathing. Scott came
+to his desk with the zest of a boy starting on a holiday, and this
+pleasure is reflected in the ease and spontaneity of his stories.
+
+But much as he liked his literary work, Scott would not have produced
+so great a number of fine novels had he not been impelled by the
+desire to retrieve large money losses. His old school friend,
+Ballantyne, forced into bankruptcy the printing firm in which Scott
+was a secret partner. The novelist was not morally responsible for
+these debts, but his keen sense of honor made him accept all the
+responsibility, and it drove him to that unceasing work which
+shortened his life. He paid off nearly all the great debt, and he gave
+in this task an example of high courage and power of work that has
+never been surpassed and seldom equaled. You may read the record of
+those last years in Lockhart's fine _Life of Scott_. Get the one
+volume edition, for the full work is too long for these busy days, and
+follow the old author in his heroic struggle. It will bring tears to
+your eyes, but it will make you a lover of Scott, the man, who was as
+great as Scott, the poet and novelist.
+
+Ruskin, when he was making up a list of great authors, put opposite
+Scott's name, "Every line." That bit of advice cannot be followed in
+these strenuous times, but one must make a selection of the best, and
+then, if he have time and inclination, add to this number. To my mind,
+the four great novels of Scott are _Ivanhoe_, _Quentin Durward_, _The
+Talisman_ and _The Heart of Midlothian_. The first gives you feudal
+England as no one else has painted it, with a picture of Richard the
+Lion-Hearted which no historian has ever approached. It contains some
+of the most thrilling scenes in all fiction.
+
+James Payn, who was a very clever novelist, relates the story that he
+and two literary friends agreed to name the scene in all fiction that
+they regarded as the most dramatic. When they came to compare notes
+they found that all three had chosen the same--the entry of the
+unknown knight at Ashby de la Zouch, who passes by the tents of the
+other contestants and strikes with a resounding clash the shield of
+the haughty Templar. This romance also contains one of Scott's finest
+women, the Jewess Rebecca, who atones for the novelist's many insipid
+female characters. Scott was much like Stevenson--he preferred to draw
+men, and he was happiest when in the clash of arms or about to
+undertake a desperate adventure.
+
+_Quentin Durward_ is memorable for its splendid picture of Louis XI,
+one of the ablest as well as one of the meanest men who ever sat on a
+throne. The early chapters of this novel, which describe the
+adventures of the young Scotch soldier at the court of France, have
+never been surpassed in romantic interest. _The Talisman_ gives the
+glory and the romance of the Crusades as no other imaginative work has
+done. It stands in a class by itself and is only approached by Scott's
+last novel, _Count Robert of Paris_, which gives flashes of the same
+spirit.
+
+Of the Scotch novels it is difficult to make a choice, but it seems to
+me _The Heart of Midlothian_ has the widest appeal, although many
+would cast their votes for _Old Mortality_, _The Antiquary_ or _Rob
+Roy_ because of the rich humor of those romances. Scott's dialect,
+although true to nature, is not difficult, as he did not consider it
+necessary to give all the colloquial terms, like the modern "kailyard"
+writers.
+
+If you read three or four of Scott's novels you are pretty apt to read
+more. It is an easy matter to skip the prolix passages and the
+unnecessary introductions. This done, you have a body of romance that
+is far richer than any present-day fiction. And their great merit is
+that, though written in a coarse age, the _Waverley_ novels are sweet
+and wholesome. One misses a great source of enjoyment and culture who
+fails to read the best of Scott's novels. Take them all in all, they
+are the finest fiction that has ever been written, and their continued
+popularity, despite their many faults, is the best proof of their
+sterling merit.
+
+
+
+
+CARLYLE AS AN INSPIRER OF YOUTH
+
+    THE FINEST ENGLISH PROSE WRITER OF THE LAST CENTURY--HIS BEST
+    BOOKS, "PAST AND PRESENT," "SARTOR RESARTUS" AND THE "FRENCH
+    REVOLUTION."
+
+
+As an influence in stimulating school and college students, Macaulay
+must be given a foremost place, but greater than Macaulay, because of
+his spiritual fervor and his moral force, stands Thomas Carlyle, the
+great prophet and preacher of the nineteenth century, whose influence
+will outlast that of all other writers of his time. And this spiritual
+potency, which resides in his best work, is not weakened by his love
+of the Strong Man in History or his fear of the rising tide of popular
+democracy, in which he saw a dreadful repetition of the horrors of the
+French Revolution. It was the Puritan element in his granite
+character which gave most of the flaming spiritual ardor to
+Carlyle's work. It was this which made him the greatest preacher of
+his day, although he had left behind him all the old articles of faith
+for which his forefathers went cheerfully to death on many a bloody
+field.
+
+  [Illustration: THOMAS CARLYLE FROM THE WORLD-FAMED MASTERPIECE OF
+  PORTRAITURE BY JAMES MCNEILL WHISTLER]
+
+Carlyle believed a strong religious faith was vital to any real and
+lasting work in this world, and from the day he gave out _Sartor
+Resartus_ he preached this doctrine in all his books. He was born into
+a generation that was content to accept the forms of religion, so long
+as it could enjoy the good things of this world, and much of Carlyle's
+speech sounded to the people of his day like the warnings of the
+prophet Isaiah to the Israelites of old. But Carlyle was never daunted
+by lack of appreciation or by any ridicule or abuse. These only made
+him more confident in his belief that the spiritual life is the
+greatest thing in this world. And he actually lived the life that he
+preached.
+
+For years Carlyle failed to make enough to support himself and his
+wife, yet he refused a large income, offered by the LONDON TIMES for
+editorial work, on the ground that he could not write to order nor
+bend his opinions to those of others. He put behind him the
+temptation to take advantage of great fame when it suddenly came to
+him. When publishers were eager for his work he spent the same time in
+preparing his books as when he was poor and unsought. He labored at
+the smallest task to give the best that was in him; he wrote much of
+his work in his heart's blood. Hence it is that through all of his
+books, but especially through _Past and Present_ and _Heroes and Hero
+Worship_, one feels the strong beat of the heart of this great man,
+who yearned to make others follow the spiritual life that he had found
+so full of strength and comfort.
+
+Carlyle's life was largely one of work and self-denial. He was born of
+poor parents at the little village of Ecclefechan, in Dumfriesshire,
+Scotland. His father, though an uneducated stone-mason, was a man of
+great mental force and originality, while his mother was a woman of
+fine imagination, with a large gift of story telling. The boy received
+the groundwork of a good education and then walked eighty miles to
+Edinburgh University. Born in 1795, Carlyle went to Edinburgh in 1809.
+His painful economy at college laid the foundation of the dyspepsia
+which troubled him all his days, hampered his work and made him take a
+gloomy view of life. At Edinburgh he made a specialty of mathematics
+and German. He remained at the university five years.
+
+The next fifteen years were spent in tutoring, hack writing for the
+publishers and translation from the German. His first remunerative
+work was the translation of Goethe's _Wilhelm Meister_, a version
+which still remains the best in English. After his marriage to Jane
+Welsh he was driven by poverty to take refuge on his wife's lonely
+farm at Craigenputtock, where he did much reading and wrote the early
+essays which contain some of his best work. The EDINBURGH REVIEW and
+FRASER'S were opened to him.
+
+Finally, in 1833, when he was nearly forty years old, he made his
+first literary hit with _Sartor Resartus_ which called out a storm of
+caustic criticism. The Germanic style, the elephantine humor, the
+strange conceits and the sledge-hammer blows at all which the smug
+English public regarded with reverence--all these features aroused
+irritation. Four years later came _The French Revolution_, which
+established Carlyle's fame as one of the greatest of English writers.
+From this time on he was freed from the fear of poverty, but it was
+only in his last years, when he needed little, that he enjoyed an
+income worthy of his labors.
+
+Carlyle's great books, beside those I have mentioned, are the lives of
+_Cromwell_ and of _Frederick the Great_. These are too long for
+general reading, but a single volume condensation of the _Frederick_
+gives a good idea of Carlyle's method of combining biography and
+history. Carlyle outlived all his contemporaries--a lonely old man,
+full of bitter remorse over imaginary neglect of his wife, and full
+also of despair over the democratic tendencies of the age, which he
+regarded as the outward signs of national degeneracy.
+
+Carlyle's fame was clouded thirty years ago by the unwise publication
+of reminiscences and letters which he never intended for print. Froude
+was chosen as his biographer. One of the great masters of English,
+Froude was a bachelor who idealized Mrs. Carlyle and who regarded as
+the simple truth an old man's bitter regrets over opportunities
+neglected to make his wife happier. Everyone who has studied Carlyle's
+life knows that he was dogmatic, dyspeptic, irritable, and given to
+sharp speech even against those he loved the best. But over against
+these failings must be placed his tenderness, his unfaltering
+affection, his self-denial, his tremendous labors, his small rewards.
+
+When separated from his wife Carlyle wrote her letters that are like
+those of a young lover, an infinite tenderness in every line. One of
+her great crosses was the belief that her husband was in love with the
+brilliant Lady Ashburton. Her jealousy was absurd, as this great lady
+invited Carlyle to her dinners because he was the most brilliant
+talker in all England, and he accepted because the opportunity to
+indulge in monologue to appreciative hearers was a keener pleasure to
+him than to write eloquent warnings to his day and generation.
+Froude's unhappy book, with a small library of commentary that it
+called forth, is practically forgotten, but Carlyle's fame and his
+books endure because they are real and not founded on illusion.
+
+Carlyle opens a new world to the college student or the ambitious
+youth who may be gaining an education by his own efforts. He sounds a
+note that is found in no other author of our time. Doubtless some of
+this attraction is due to his singular style, formed on a long study
+of the German, but most of it is due to the tremendous earnestness of
+the man, which lays hold of the young reader. Never shall I forget
+when in college preparatory days I devoured _Past and Present_ and was
+stirred to extra effort by its trumpet calls that work is worship and
+that the night soon cometh when no man can work.
+
+His fine chapter on _Labor_ with its splendid version of the _Mason's
+Song_ of Goethe has stimulated thousands to take up heavy burdens and
+go on with the struggle for that culture of the mind and the soul
+which is the more precious the harder the fight to secure it. I
+remember copying in a commonplace book some of Carlyle's sonorous
+passages that stir the blood of the young like a bugle call to arms.
+Reading them over years after, I am glad to say that they still
+appealed to me, for it seems to me that the saddest thing in this
+world is to lose one's youthful enthusiasms. When you can keep these
+fresh and strong, after years of contact with a selfish world, age
+cannot touch you.
+
+  [Illustration: ARCHHOUSE, ECCLEFECHAN, DUMFRIESSHIRE THE
+  BIRTHPLACE OF THOMAS CARLYLE--FROM A PHOTOGRAPH IN THE POSSESSION
+  OF ALEXANDER CARLYLE, M.A. ON WHICH CARLYLE HAS WRITTEN A
+  MEMORANDUM TO SHOW IN WHICH ROOM HE WAS BORN]
+
+In this appeal to all that is best and noblest in youth, Carlyle
+stands unrivaled. He has far more heart, force and real warm blood
+than Emerson, who saw just as clearly, but who could not make his
+thought reach the reader. A course in Carlyle should be compulsory in
+the freshman year at every college. If the lecturer were a man still
+full of his early enthusiasms it could not fail to have rich results.
+Take, for instance, those two chapters in _Past and Present_ that are
+entitled "Happy" and "Labor." In a dozen pages are summed up all
+Carlyle's creed. In these pages he declares that the only enduring
+happiness is found in good, honest work, done with all a man's heart
+and soul. And after caustic words on the modern craving for happiness
+he ends a noble diatribe with these words, which are worth framing and
+hanging on the wall, where they may be studied day by day:
+
+    Brief brawling Day, with its noisy phantasms, its poor
+    paper-crown's tinsel-gilt, is gone; and divine everlasting
+    Night, with her star-diadems, with her silences and her
+    veracities, is come! What hast thou done, and how? Happiness,
+    unhappiness; all that was but wages thou hadst; thou hast
+    spent all that, in sustaining thyself hitherward; not a coin
+    of it remains with thee; it is all spent, eaten; and now thy
+    work, where is thy work? Swift, out with it; let us see thy
+    work!
+
+_Sartor Resartus_ is very hard reading, but if you make up your mind
+to go through it you will be repaid by many fine thoughts and many
+noble passages of impassioned prose. Under the guise of Herr Diogenes
+Teufelsdrockh, Carlyle tells the story of his early religious doubts,
+his painful struggles that recall Bunyan's wrestlings with despair,
+and his final entry upon a new spiritual life. He wrote to let others
+know how he had emerged from the Valley of the Shadow of Pessimism
+into the delectable Mountains of Faith. Carlyle was the first of his
+day to proclaim the great truth that the spiritual life is far more
+important than the material life, and this he showed by the humorous
+philosophy of clothes, which he unfolded in the style of the German
+pedants. Carlyle evidently took great pleasure in developing this
+satire on German philosophy, which is full of broad humor.
+
+_The French Revolution_ has been aptly called "history by lightning
+flashes." One needs to have a good general idea of the period before
+reading Carlyle's work. Then he can enjoy this series of splendid
+pictures of the upheaval of the nether world and the strange moral
+monsters that sated their lust for blood and power in those evil
+days, which witnessed the terrible payment of debts of selfish
+monarchy. Carlyle reaches the height of his power in this book, which
+may be read many times with profit.
+
+The sources of Carlyle's strength as a writer are his moral and
+spiritual fervor and his power of making the reader see what he sees.
+The first insures him enduring fame, as it makes what he wrote eighty
+years ago as fresh and as full of fine stimulus as though it were
+written yesterday. The other faculty was born in him. He had an eye
+for pictures; he described what he saw down to the minutest detail; he
+made the men of the French Revolution as real as the people he met on
+his tour of Ireland. He made Cromwell and Frederick men of blood and
+iron, not mere historical lay figures. And over all he cast the
+glamour of his own indomitable spirit, which makes life look good even
+to the man who feels the pinch of poverty and whose outlook is dreary.
+You can't keep down the boy who makes Carlyle his daily companion; he
+will rise by very force of fighting spirit of this dour old
+Scotchman.
+
+
+
+
+DE QUINCEY AS A MASTER OF STYLE
+
+    HE WROTE "CONFESSIONS OF AN ENGLISH OPIUM-EATER"--DREAMED
+    DREAMS AND SAW VISIONS AND PICTURED THEM IN POETIC PROSE.
+
+
+Of all the English writers Thomas De Quincey must be given the palm
+for rhythmical prose. He is as stately as Milton, with more than
+Milton's command of rhythm. If you read aloud his best passages, which
+are written in what he calls his bravura style, you have a near
+approach to the music of the organ. De Quincey was so nice a judge of
+words, he knew so well how to balance his periods, that one of his
+sentences gives to the appreciative ear the same delight as a stanza
+of perfect verse.
+
+Ruskin had much of De Quincey's command of impassioned prose, but he
+never rose to the same sustained heights as the older author. In
+fact, De Quincey stands alone in these traits: the mass and accuracy
+of his accumulated knowledge; the power of making the finest
+distinctions clear to any reader, and the gorgeous style, thick with
+the embroidery of poetical figures, yet never giving the impression of
+over-adornment. And above all these merits is the supreme charm of
+melodious, rhythmical sentences, which give the same enjoyment as fine
+music.
+
+  [Illustration: THOMAS DE QUINCEY FROM AN OLD ENGRAVING]
+
+Forty years ago De Quincey's _Confessions of an English Opium-Eater_
+was read by everyone who professed any knowledge of the masters of
+English literature. To-day it is voted old-fashioned, and few are
+familiar with its splendid imagery. His other works, which fill over a
+dozen volumes, are practically forgotten, mainly because his style is
+very diffuse and his constant digressions weary the reader who has
+small leisure for books.
+
+No one, however, should miss reading the _Confessions_, the
+_Autobiography_ and some one essay, such, for instance, as "Murder as
+One of the Fine Arts," or "The Flight of a Tartar Tribe," or "The
+Vision of Sudden Death" in _An English Mail Coach_. All these contain
+passages of the greatest beauty buried in prolix descriptions. The
+reader must be warned not to drop De Quincey because of his
+digressions. With a little practice you may skip those which do not
+appeal to you, and there is ample sweetness at the heart of his work
+to repay one for removing a large amount of husk.
+
+De Quincey has always impressed me as a fine example of the defects of
+the English school and college training. Although he could write and
+speak Greek fluently at thirteen, and although he had equally perfect
+command of Latin and German, he was absolutely untrained in the use of
+his knowledge and he knew no more about real life when he came out of
+college than the average American boy of ten. With a splendid
+scholarly equipment at seventeen, when thrown upon his own resources
+in London, he came to the verge of starvation, and laid the seeds of
+disease of the stomach, which afterward drove him to the use of opium.
+
+All his training was purely theoretical; in the practical affairs of
+life he remained to the day of his death a mere child. As he says in
+his _Confessions_, he could have earned a good living as a corrector
+of Greek proofs in any big London publishing house, but it never
+occurred to his schoolboy mind that his mastery of this difficult
+classical language was of any practical value. In our day De Quincey
+would have been the greatest magazinist of the age, because his best
+work was in the short essay; but it is to be feared that the
+publishers of his time fattened on the good things which he produced
+and gave small sums to the man who turned out these masterpieces with
+so little effort.
+
+De Quincey was born in 1785 and died in 1859. His life was peculiar
+and its facts became very well known even in his own time because in
+his _Autobiography_ and his _Confessions_ he disclosed its details
+with the frankness of a child. These works are surcharged with some
+exaggeration, but in the main they ring true. As precocious as
+Macaulay, he had much of that author's fondness for books, and when he
+first went to public school at eleven years of age he had read as much
+as most men when they take a college degree. His mind absorbed
+languages without effort. At fifteen he could write Greek verse, and
+his tutor once remarked, "That boy could harangue an Athenian mob
+better than you or I could address an English one."
+
+He lost his father at the age of seven, and his mother seems to have
+given little personal attention to him. He was in nominal charge of
+four guardians, and at seventeen, when his health had been seriously
+reduced by lack of exercise and overdosing of medicines, the sensitive
+boy ran away from the Manchester Grammar school and wandered for
+several months in Wales. He was allowed a pound a week by one of his
+guardians, and he made shift with this for months; but finally the
+hunger for books, which he had no money to buy, sent him to London.
+There he undertook to get advances from money-lenders on his
+expectations. This would have been easy, as he was left a substantial
+income in his father's will, but these Shylocks kept the boy waiting.
+
+In his _Confessions_ he tells of his sufferings from want of food, of
+his nights in an unfurnished house in Soho with a little girl who was
+the "slavey" of a disreputable lawyer, of his wanderings in the
+streets, of the saving of his life by an outcast woman whom he has
+immortalized in the most eloquent passages of the book. Finally, he
+was restored to his friends and went to Oxford. His mental
+independence prevented him from taking a degree, and chronic
+neuralgia of the face and teeth led him to form the habit of taking
+opium, which clung to him for life.
+
+  [Illustration: DE QUINCEY WITH TWO DAUGHTERS AND GRANDCHILD--FROM
+  A CHALK DRAWING BY JAMES ARCHER, R.S.A. MADE IN 1855.]
+
+De Quincey was a close associate of Coleridge, Wordsworth, Southey,
+Lamb and others. He was a brilliant talker, especially when stimulated
+with opium, but he was incapable of sustained intellectual work. Hence
+all his essays and other work first appeared in periodicals and were
+then published in book form. It is noteworthy that an American
+publisher was the first to gather his essays in book form, and that
+his first appreciation, like that of Carlyle, came from this country.
+
+Much of De Quincey's work is now unreadable because it deals with
+political economy and allied subjects, in which he fancied he was an
+expert. He is a master only when he deals with pure literature, but he
+has a large vein of satiric humor that found its best expression in
+the grotesque irony of "Murder as One of the Fine Arts." In this essay
+he descants on the greatest crime as though it were an accomplishment,
+and his freakish wit makes this paper as enjoyable as Charles Lamb's
+essay on the origin of roast pig.
+
+De Quincey's fame, however, rests upon _The Confessions of an English
+Opium-Eater_. This is a record unique in English literature. It tells
+in De Quincey's usual style, with many tedious digressions, the story
+of his neglected boyhood, his revolt at school discipline and monotony
+that had shattered his health, his wanderings in Wales, his life as a
+common vagrant in London, his college life, his introduction to opium
+and the dreams that came with indulgence in the drug. The gorgeous
+beauty of De Quincey's pictures of these opium visions has probably
+induced many susceptible readers to make a trial of the drug, with
+deep disappointment as the result. No common mind can hope to have
+such visions as De Quincey records.
+
+His imagination has well been called Druidic; it played about the
+great facts and personages of history and it invested these with a
+background of the most solemn and imposing natural features. These
+dreams came to have with him the very semblance of reality. Read the
+terrible passages in the _Confessions_ in which the Malay figures;
+read the dream fugues in "Suspira," the visions seen by the boy when
+he looked on his dead sister's face, or the noble passages that
+picture the three Ladies of Sorrow. Here is a passage on the vision of
+eternity at his sister's death bier, which gives a good idea of De
+Quincey's style:
+
+    Whilst I stood, a solemn wind began to blow--the saddest that
+    ear ever heard. It was a wind that might have swept the fields
+    of mortality for a thousand centuries. Many times since upon
+    summer days, when the sun is about the hottest, I have
+    remarked the same wind arising and uttering the same hollow,
+    solemn, Memnonian, but saintly swell; it is in this world the
+    one great audible symbol of eternity.
+
+It is a great temptation to quote some of De Quincey's fine passages,
+but most of them are so interwoven with the context that the most
+eloquent bits cannot be taken out without the loss of their beauty. De
+Quincey was a dreamer before he became a slave to opium. This drug
+intensified a natural tendency until he became a visionary without an
+equal in English literature. And these visions, evoked by his splendid
+imagination, are worth reading in these days as an antidote to the
+materialism of present-day life; they demonstrate the power of the
+spiritual life, which is the potent and abiding force in all
+literature.
+
+
+
+
+CHARLES LAMB AND THE ESSAYS OF ELIA
+
+    THE BEST BELOVED OF ALL THE ENGLISH WRITERS--QUAINTEST AND
+    TENDEREST ESSAYIST WHOSE WORK APPEALS TO ALL HEARTS.
+
+
+Of all the English writers of the last century none is so well beloved
+as Charles Lamb. Thirty years ago his _Essays of Elia_ was a book
+which every one with any claim to culture had not only read, but read
+many times. It was the traveling companion and the familiar friend,
+the unfailing resource in periods of depression, the comforter in time
+of trouble. It touched many experiences of life, and it ranged from
+sunny, spontaneous humor to that pathos which is too deep for tears.
+Into it Lamb put all that was rarest and best in his nature, all that
+he had gleaned from a life of self-sacrifice and spiritual culture.
+
+  [Illustration: CHARLES LAMB FROM THE PORTRAIT BY WILLIAM
+  HAZLITT]
+
+Such men as he were rare in his day, and not understood by the
+literary men of harder nature who criticised his peculiarities and
+failed to appreciate the delicacy of his genius. Only one such has
+appeared in our time--he who has given us a look into his heart in _A
+Window in Thrums_ and in that beautiful tribute to his mother,
+_Margaret Ogilvie_. Barrie, in his insight into the mind of a child
+and in his freakish fancy that seems brought over from the world of
+fairyland to lend its glamour to prosaic life, is the only successor
+to Lamb.
+
+Lamb can endure this neglect, for were he able to revisit this earth
+no one would touch more whimsically than he upon the fads and the
+foibles of contemporary life; but it's a great pity that in the
+popular craze about the new writers, all redolent with the varnish of
+novelty, we should consign to the dust of unused shelves the works of
+Charles Lamb. All that he wrote which the world remembers is in Elia
+and his many letters--those incomparable epistles in which he quizzed
+his friends and revealed the tenderness of his nature and the delicacy
+of his fancy.
+
+Robert Louis Stevenson is justly regarded as the greatest essayist of
+our time, but I would not exchange the _Essays of Elia_ for the best
+things of the author of _Virginibus Puerisque_. Stevenson always,
+except in his familiar early letters, suggests the literary artist who
+has revised his first draft, with an eye fixed on the world of readers
+who will follow him when he is gone. But Lamb always wrote with that
+charming spontaneous grace that comes from a mind saturated with the
+best reading and mellow with much thought. You fancy him jotting down
+his thoughts, with his quizzical smile at the effect of his quips and
+cranks. You cannot figure him as laboriously searching for the right
+word or painfully recasting the same sentence many times until he
+reached the form which suited his finical taste. This was Stevenson's
+method, and it leaves much of his work with the smell of the lamp upon
+it. Lamb apparently wrote for the mere pleasure of putting his
+thoughts in form, just as he talked when his stammering tongue had
+been eased with a little good old wine.
+
+It is idle to expect another Lamb in our strenuous modern life, so we
+should make the most of this quaint Englishman of the early part of
+the last century, who seemed to bring over into an artificial age all
+the dewy freshness of fancy of the old Elizabethan worthies. Can
+anything be more perfect in its pathos than his essay on "Dream
+Children," the tender fancy of a bachelor whom hard fate robbed of the
+domestic joys that would have made life beautiful for him? Can
+anything be more full of fun than his "Dissertation on Roast Pig," or
+his "Mrs. Battle's Opinion on Whist"? His style fitted his thought
+like a glove; about it is the aroma of an earlier age when men and
+women opened their hearts like children. Lamb lays a spell upon us
+such as no other writer can work; he plays upon the strings of our
+hearts, now surprising us into wholesome laughter, now melting us to
+tears. You may know his essays by heart, but you can't define their
+elusive charm.
+
+Lamb had one of the saddest of lives, yet he remained sweet and
+wholesome through trials that would have embittered a nature less fine
+and noble. He came of poor people and he and his sister Mary inherited
+from their mother a strain of mental unsoundness. Lamb spent seven
+years in Christ's Hospital as a "Blue Coat" boy, and the chief result,
+aside from the foundations of a good classical scholarship, was a
+friendship for Coleridge which endured through life. From this school
+he was forced to go into a clerkship in the South Sea house, but after
+three years he secured a desk in the East India house, where he
+remained for thirty years.
+
+Four years later his first great sorrow fell upon Lamb. His sister
+Mary suddenly developed insanity, attacked a maid servant, and when
+the mother interfered the insane girl fatally wounded her with a
+knife. In this crisis Lamb showed the fineness of his nature. Instead
+of permitting poor Mary to be consigned to a public insane asylum, he
+gave bonds that he would care for her, and he did care for her during
+the remainder of her life. Although in love with a girl, he resolutely
+put aside all thoughts of marriage and domestic happiness and devoted
+himself to his unfortunate sister, who in her lucid periods repaid his
+devotion with the tenderest affection.
+
+Lamb's letters to Coleridge in those trying days are among the most
+pathetic in the language. To Coleridge he turned for stimulus in his
+reading and study, and he never failed to get help and comfort from
+this great, ill-balanced man of genius. Later he began a
+correspondence with Southey, in which he betrayed much humor and great
+fancy. In his leisure he saturated his mind with the Elizabethan poets
+and dramatists; practically he lived in the sixteenth century, for his
+only real life was a student's dream life. He contributed to the
+London newspapers, but his first published work to score any success
+was his _Tales From Shakespeare_, in which his sister aided him. Then
+followed _Poets Contemporary With Shakespeare_, selections with
+critical comment, which at once gave Lamb rank among the best critics
+of his time. He wrote, when the mood seized him, recollections of his
+youth, essays and criticisms which he afterward issued in two volumes.
+
+Twenty-five essays that he contributed to the LONDON MAGAZINE over the
+signature of Elia were reprinted in a book, the _Essays of Elia_, and
+established Lamb's reputation as one of the great masters of English.
+Another volume of _Essays of Elia_ was published in 1833. In 1834 Lamb
+sorrowed over the death of Coleridge, and in November of the same year
+death came to him. Of all English critics Carlyle is the only one who
+had hard words for Lamb, and the Sage of Chelsea probably wrote his
+scornful comment because of some playful jest of Elia.
+
+Charles Lamb's taste was for the writers of the Elizabethan age, and
+even in his time he found that this taste had become old-fashioned. He
+complained, when only twenty-one years old, in a letter to Coleridge,
+that all his friends "read nothing but reviews and new books." His
+letters, like his essays, reflect the reading of little-known books;
+they show abundant traces of his loiterings in the byways of
+literature.
+
+Here there is space only to dwell on some of the best of the _Essays
+of Elia_. In these we find the most pathetic deal with the sufferings
+of children. Lamb himself had known loneliness and suffering and lack
+of appreciation when a boy in the great Blue Coat School. Far more
+vividly than Dickens he brings before us his neglected childhood and
+all that it represented in lonely helplessness. Then he deals with
+later things, with his love of old books, his passion for the play,
+his delight in London and its various aspects, his joy in all strange
+characters like the old benchers of the Inner Temple.
+
+  [Illustration: MARY AND CHARLES LAMB FROM THE PAINTING BY F.S.
+  CARY MADE IN 1834]
+
+The essay opens with that alluring picture of the South Sea house, and
+is followed by the reminiscences of Christ's Hospital, where Lamb
+was a schoolboy for seven years. These show one side of Lamb's
+nature--the quaintly reminiscent. Another side is revealed in "Mrs.
+Battle's Opinions on Whist," with its delicate irony and its playful
+humor, while still another phase is seen in the exquisite phantasy of
+"Dream Children," with its tender pathos and its revelation of a heart
+that never knew the joys of domestic love and care. Yet close after
+this beautiful reverie comes "A Dissertation On Roast Pig," in which
+Lamb develops the theory that the Chinese first discovered the virtues
+of roast suckling pig after a fire which destroyed the house of Ho-ti,
+and that with the fatuousness of the race they regularly burned down
+their houses to enjoy this succulent delicacy.
+
+_The Last Essays of Elia_, a second series which Lamb brought out with
+a curious preface "by a friend of the late Elia," do not differ from
+the earlier series, save that they are shorter and are more devoted to
+literary themes. Perfect in its pathos is "The Superannuated Man,"
+while "The Child Angel" is a dream which appeals to the reader more
+than any of the splendid dreams that De Quincey immortalized in his
+florid prose. Lamb in these essays gives some wise counsel on books
+and reading, urging with a whimsical earnestness the claims of the
+good old books which had been his comfort in many dark hours. It is in
+such confidences that we come very close to this man, so richly
+endowed with all endearing qualities that the world will never forget
+Elia and his exquisite essays.
+
+
+
+
+DICKENS THE FOREMOST OF NOVELISTS
+
+    MORE WIDELY READ THAN ANY OTHER STORY TELLER--THE GREATEST OF
+    THE MODERN HUMORISTS APPEALS TO THE READERS OF ALL AGES AND
+    CLASSES.
+
+
+Charles Dickens is the greatest English novelist since Scott, and he
+and Scott, to my mind, are the greatest English writers after
+Shakespeare. Many will dissent from this, but my reason for giving him
+this foremost place among the modern writers is the range, the
+variety, the dramatic power, the humor and the pathos of his work. He
+was a great caricaturist rather than a great artist, but he was
+supreme in his class, and his grotesque characters have enough in them
+of human nature to make them accepted as real people.
+
+To him belongs the first place among novelists, after Scott, because
+of his splendid creative imagination, which has peopled the world of
+fiction with scores of fine characters. His genial humor which has
+brightened life for so many thousands of readers; his tender pathos
+which brings tears to the eyes of those who seldom weep over imaginary
+or even real grief or pain; his rollicking gayety which makes one
+enjoy good food and good drink in his tales almost as much as if one
+really shared in those feasts he was so fond of describing; his keen
+sympathy with the poor and the suffering; his flaming anger against
+injustice and cruelty that resulted in so many great public reforms;
+his descriptive power that makes the reader actually see everything
+that he depicts--all these traits of Dickens' genius go to make him
+the unquestioned leader of our modern story tellers. Without his humor
+and his pathos he would still stand far above all others of his day;
+with these qualities, which make every story he ever wrote throb with
+genuine human feeling, he stands in a class by himself.
+
+Many literary critics have spent much labor in comparing Dickens with
+Thackeray, but there seems to me no basis for such comparison. One was
+a great caricaturist who wrote for the common people and brought tears
+or laughter at will from the kitchen maid as freely as from the
+great lady; from the little child with no knowledge of the world as
+readily as from the mature reader who has known wrong, sorrow and
+suffering. The other was the supreme literary artist of modern times,
+a gentleman by instinct and training, who wrote for a limited class of
+readers, and who could not, because of nature and temperament, touch
+at will the springs of laughter and tears as Dickens did. Dickens has
+created a score of characters that are household words to one that
+Thackeray has given us.
+
+  [Illustration: CHARLES DICKENS AT THE AGE OF TWENTY-SEVEN--FROM
+  THE PORTRAIT BY DANIEL MACLISE, R.A.]
+
+Both were men of the rarest genius, English to the core, but each
+expressed his genius in his own way, and the way of Dickens touched a
+thousand hearts where Thackeray touched but one. Personally, Thackeray
+appeals to me far more than Dickens does, but it is foolish to permit
+one's own fancies to blind or warp his critical judgments. Hence I set
+Dickens at the head of modern novelists and give him an equal place
+with Scott as the greatest English writer since Shakespeare.
+
+Take it all in all, Dickens had a successful and a happy life. He was
+born in 1812 and died in 1870. His boyhood was hard because of his
+father's thriftlessness, and it always rankled in his memory that at
+nine years of age he was placed at work pasting labels on boxes of
+shoe blacking. But he had many chances in childhood and youth for
+reading and study, and his keen mind took advantage of all these. He
+was a natural mimic, and it was mere blind chance that kept him from
+the stage and made him a great novelist. He drifted into newspaper
+work as a shorthand reporter, wrote the stories that are known as
+_Sketches by Boz_, and in this way came to be engaged to write the
+_Pickwick Papers_, to serve as a story to accompany drawings by
+Seymour, a popular artist. But Dickens from the outset planned the
+story and Seymour lived only to illustrate the first number.
+
+The tale caught the fancy of the public, and Dickens developed
+Pickwick, the Wellers and other characters in a most amusing fashion.
+Great success marked the appearance of the _Pickwick Papers_ in book
+form, and the public appreciation gave Dickens confidence and
+stimulus. Soon appeared _Oliver Twist_, _Nicholas Nickleby_, _Old
+Curiosity Shop_ and the long line of familiar stories that ended with
+_The Mystery of Edwin Drood_, left unfinished by the master's hand.
+
+All these novels were originally published in monthly numbers. In
+these days, when so many new novels come from the press every month,
+it is difficult to appreciate the eagerness with which one of these
+monthly parts of Dickens' stories was awaited in England as well as in
+this country. My father used to tell of the way these numbers of
+Dickens' novels were seized upon in New England when he was a young
+man and were worn out in passing from hand to hand. Dickens first
+developed the Christmas story and made it a real addition to the joy
+of the holiday season. His _Christmas Carol_ and _The Cricket on the
+Hearth_ still stand as the best of these tales that paint the simple
+joys of the greatest of English Holidays. Dickens was also a great
+editor, and in HOUSEHOLD WORDS and ALL THE YEAR ROUND he found a means
+of giving pleasure to hosts of readers as well as a vehicle for the
+monthly publication of his novels.
+
+Dickens was the first to make a great fortune by giving public
+readings from his own works. His rare dramatic ability made him an
+ideal interpreter of his own work, and those who were fortunate enough
+to hear him on his two trips to this country speak always of the
+light which these readings cast on his principal characters and of the
+pleasure that the audience showed in the novelist's remarkable powers
+as a mimic and an elocutionist.
+
+Most of the great English writers have labored until forty or over
+before fame came to them. Of such were Scott, Thackeray, Carlyle and
+George Eliot. But Dickens had an international fame at twenty-four,
+and he was a household word wherever English was spoken by the time he
+was thirty. From that day to the day of his death, fame, popularity,
+wealth, troops of friends, were his portion, and with these were
+joined unusual capacity for work and unusual delight in the exercise
+of his great creative powers.
+
+In taking up Dickens' novels it must always be borne in mind that you
+will find many digressions, many bits of affectation, some mawkish
+pathos. But these defects do not seriously injure the stories. You
+cannot afford to leave _Pickwick Papers_ unread, because this novel
+contains more spontaneous humor than any other of Dickens' work, and
+it is also quoted most frequently. The boy or girl who cannot follow
+with relish the amusing incidents in this book is not normal. Older
+readers will get more from the book, but it is doubtful whether they
+will enjoy its rollicking fun with so keen a zest. Mr. Pickwick, Sam
+Weller and his father, Bob Sawyer and the others, how firmly they are
+fixed in the mind! What real flesh and blood creatures they are,
+despite their creator's exaggeration of special traits and
+peculiarities!
+
+  [Illustration: ORIGINAL PICKWICK COVER ISSUED IN 1837 WITH
+  DICKENS' AUTOGRAPH--MOST OF DICKENS' NOVELS WERE ISSUED IN
+  SHILLING INSTALLMENTS BEFORE BEING PUBLISHED IN THE COMPLETE
+  VOLUME]
+
+After the _Pickwick Papers_ the choice of the most characteristic of
+Dickens' novels is difficult, but my favorites have always been _David
+Copperfield_ and _A Tale of Two Cities_, the one the most spontaneous,
+the freshest in fancy, the most deeply pathetic of all Dickens' work;
+the other absolutely unlike anything he ever wrote, but great in its
+intense descriptive passages, which make the horrors of the French
+Revolution more real than Carlyle's famous history, and in the sublime
+self-sacrifice of Sidney Carton, which Henry Miller, in "The Only
+Way," has impressed on thousands of tearful playgoers. That _David
+Copperfield_ is not autobiographical we have the positive assertion of
+Charles Dickens the younger, yet at the same time every lover of this
+book feels that the boyhood of David reproduces memories of the
+novelist's childhood and youth, and that from real people and real
+scenes are drawn the humble home and the loyal hearts of the
+Peggottys, the great self-sacrifice of Ham, the woes of Little Emily
+and the tragedy of Steerforth's fate. One misses much who does not
+follow the chief actors in this great story, the masterpiece of
+Dickens.
+
+Other fine novels, if you have time for them, are _Nicholas Nickleby_,
+which broke up the unspeakably cruel boarding schools for boys in
+Yorkshire, in one of which poor Smike was done to death; or _Our
+Mutual Friend_ which Dickens attacked the English poor laws; or
+_Dombey and Son_, that paints the pathos of the child of a rich man
+dying for the love which his father was too selfish to give him; or
+_Bleak House_, in which the terrible sufferings wrought by the law's
+delay in the Court of Chancery are drawn with so much pathos that the
+book served as a valuable aid in removing a great public wrong, while
+the satire on foreign missions served to draw the English nation's
+attention to the wretched heathen at home in the East Side of London,
+of whom Poor Jo was a pitiable specimen. In other novels other good
+purposes were also served.
+
+But several pages could be filled with a mere enumeration of Dickens'
+stories and their salient features. You cannot go wrong in taking up
+any of his novels or his short stories, and when you have finished
+with them you will have the satisfaction of having added to your
+possessions a number of the real people of fiction, whom it is far
+better to know than the best characters of contemporary fiction,
+because these will be forgotten in a twelvemonth, if not before. The
+hours that you spend with Dickens will be profitable as well as
+pleasant, for they will leave the memory of a great-hearted man who
+labored through his books to make the world better and happier.
+
+
+
+
+THACKERAY GREATEST MASTER OF FICTION
+
+    THE MOST ACCOMPLISHED WRITER OF HIS CENTURY--TENDER PATHOS
+    UNDER AN AFFECTATION OF CYNICISM AND GREAT ART IN STYLE AND
+    CHARACTERS.
+
+
+Of all modern English authors, Thackeray is my favorite. Humor,
+pathos, satire, ripe culture, knowledge of the world and of the human
+heart, instinctive good taste and a style equaled by none of his
+fellows in its clearness, ease, flexibility and winning charm--these
+are some of the traits that make the author of _Vanity Fair_ and
+_Esmond_ incomparably the first literary artist as well as the
+greatest writer of his age. Whether he would have been as fine a
+writer had he been given a happy life is a question that no one can
+answer. But to my mind it has always seemed as though the dark shadow
+that rested on his domestic life for thirty years made him
+infinitely tender to the grief and pain of others. Probably it came
+as a shock to most lovers of Thackeray to read in a news item from
+London only three or four years ago that the widow of Thackeray was
+dead, at the great age of ninety years. She had outlived her famous
+husband nearly a full half century, but of her we had heard nothing in
+all this time. When a beautiful young Irish girl she was married to
+the novelist, and she made him an ideal wife for a few years. Then her
+mind gave way, and the remainder of her long career was spent within
+the walls of a sanatorium--more lost to her loved ones than if she had
+been buried in her grave. The knowledge of her existence, which was a
+ghastly death in life, the fact that it prevented him from giving his
+three young girls a real home, as well as barred him under the English
+law from marrying again--all these things to Thackeray were an
+ever-present pain, like acid on an open wound. It was this sorrow,
+from which he could never escape that gave such exquisite tenderness
+to his pathos; and it was this sorrow, acting on one of the most
+sensitive natures, that often sharpened his satire and made it
+merciless when directed against the shams and hypocrisies of life.
+
+  [Illustration: WILLIAM MAKEPEACE THACKERAY FROM A DRAWING BY
+  SAMUEL LAURENCE, ENGRAVED BY J.C. ARMYTAGE]
+
+Thackeray's fame rests mainly on two great books--_Vanity Fair_ and
+_Henry Esmond_. The first has been made very real to thousands of
+readers by the brilliant acting of Mrs. Fiske in Becky Sharp. The
+other is one of the finest historical novels in the language and the
+greatest exploit in bringing over into our century the style, the mode
+of thought, the very essence of a previous age. Thackeray was
+saturated with the literature of the eighteenth century, and in
+_Esmond_ he reproduced the time of Addison and Steele as perfectly as
+he made an imitation of a number of the SPECTATOR. This literary _tour
+de force_ was made the more noteworthy by the absolute lack of all
+effort on the novelist's part. The style of Queen Anne's age seemed a
+part of the man, not an assumed garment. While in the heroine of
+_Vanity Fair_ Thackeray gave the world one of the coldest and most
+selfish of women, he atoned for this by creating in _Esmond_ the
+finest gentleman in all English literature, with the single exception
+of his own Colonel Newcome.
+
+Strict injunctions Thackeray left against any regulation biography,
+and the result is that the world knows less of his life before fame
+came to him than it does of any other celebrated author of his age.
+The scanty facts show that he was born in Calcutta in 1811; that he
+was left a fortune of $100,000 by his father, who died when he was
+five years old; that, like most children of Anglo-Indians, he was sent
+to school in England; that he was prepared for college at the old
+Charter House School; that he was graduated from Trinity College,
+Cambridge, and that while in college he showed much ability as a
+writer of verse and prose, although he took no honors and gained no
+prizes. After reading law he was moved to become an artist and spent
+some time in travel on the Continent.
+
+  [Illustration: TITLE-PAGE TO "VANITY FAIR" DRAWN BY THACKERAY, WHO
+  FURNISHED THE ILLUSTRATIONS FOR MANY OF HIS EARLIER EDITIONS]
+
+But this delightful life was rudely cut short by the loss of his
+fortune and he was forced to earn his living by literature and
+journalism. Under various pseudonyms he soon gained a reputation as a
+satirist and humorist, his first success being _The Great Hoggarty
+Diamond_. Then years of work for PUNCH and other papers followed
+before he won enduring fame by _Vanity Fair_, which he styled "a novel
+without a hero."
+
+Charlotte Bront�, who gained a great reputation by _Jane Eyre_, added
+to Thackeray's vogue by dedicating to him in rarely eloquent words the
+second edition of her novel, against which preachers fulminated
+because of what they called its immoral tendencies. Then in rapid
+succession Thackeray wrote _Pendennis_, _Henry Esmond_, _The
+Newcomes_, _The Virginians_, _Lovel the Widower_ and _The Adventures
+of Philip_. All these are masterpieces of wit, satire and humor, cast
+in a perfect style that never offends the most fastidious taste, yet
+they are neglected to-day mainly because they do not furnish exciting
+incidents.
+
+Thackeray, like Dickens in his readings, made a fortune by his
+lectures, first on "The English Humorists," and later on "The Four
+Georges," and, like Dickens, he received the heartiest welcome and the
+largest money returns from this country.
+
+He died alone in his room on Christmas eve in the fine new home in
+London which he had recently made for himself and his three daughters.
+
+Thackeray was a giant physically, with a mind that worked easily, but
+he was indolent and always wrote under pressure, with the printer's
+devil waiting for his "copy." He was a thorough man of the world, yet
+full of the freshness of fancy and the tenderness of heart of a little
+child. All children were a delight to him, and he never could refrain
+from giving them extravagant tips. The ever-present grief that could
+not be forgotten by fame or success made him very tender to all
+suffering, especially the suffering of the weak and the helpless. Yet,
+like many a sensitive man, he concealed this kindness of heart under
+an affectation of cynicism, which led many unsympathetic critics to
+style him hard and ferocious in his satire.
+
+Like Dickens, Thackeray was one of the great reporters of his day,
+with an eye that took in unconsciously every detail of face, costume
+or scene and reproduced it with perfect accuracy. The reader of his
+novels is entertained by a series of pen pictures of men and women and
+scenes in high life and life below stairs that are photographic in
+their clearness and fidelity. Dickens always failed when he came to
+depict British aristocratic life; but Thackeray moved in drawing-rooms
+and brilliant assemblages with the ease of a man familiar from youth
+with good society, and hence free from all embarrassment, even in the
+presence of royalty.
+
+Thackeray's early works are written in the same perfect, easy,
+colloquial style, rich in natural literary allusions and frequently
+rhythmic with poetic feeling, which marked his latest novel. He also
+had perfect command of slang and the cockney dialect of the Londoner.
+No greater master of dialogue or narrative ever wrote than he who
+pictured the gradual degradation of Becky Sharp or the many
+self-sacrifices of Henry Esmond for the woman that he loved.
+
+Howells and other critics have censured Thackeray severely because of
+his tendency to preach, and also because he regarded his characters as
+puppets and himself as the showman who brought out their
+peculiarities. There is some ground for this criticism, if one regards
+the art of the novelist as centered wholly in realism; but such a hard
+and fast rule would condemn all old English novelists from Richardson
+to Thackeray.
+
+It ought not to disturb any reader that Defoe turns aside and gives
+reflections on the acts of his characters, for these remarks are the
+fruit of his own knowledge of the world. In the same way Thackeray
+keeps up a running comment on his men and women, and these bits of
+philosophy make his novels a storehouse of apothegms, which may be
+read again and again with great profit and pleasure. The modern novel,
+with its comparative lack of thought and feeling, its insistence
+upon the absolute effacement of the author, is seldom worth reading a
+second time. Not so with Thackeray. Every reading reveals new beauties
+of thought or style. An entire book has been made up of brief extracts
+from Thackeray's novels, and it is an ideal little volume for a pocket
+companion on walks, as Thackeray fits into any mood and always gives
+one material for thought.
+
+  [Illustration: WILLIAM MAKEPEACE THACKERAY A CARICATURE DRAWN BY
+  HIMSELF]
+
+Of all Thackeray's novels _Vanity Fair_ is the best known and most
+popular. It is a remarkable picture of a thoroughly hard, selfish
+woman whom even motherhood did not soften; but it is something more
+than the chronicle of Becky Sharp's fortunes. It is a panoramic sketch
+of many phases of London life; it is the free giving out by a great
+master of fiction of his impressions of life. Hence _Vanity Fair_
+alone is worth a hundred books filled merely with exciting adventures,
+which do not make the reader think. The problems that Thackeray
+presents in his masterpiece are those of love, duty, self-sacrifice;
+of high aims and many temptations to fall below those aspirations; of
+sordid, selfish life, and of fine, noble, generous souls who light up
+the world and make it richer by their presence.
+
+Thackeray, in _Vanity Fair_, has sixty characters, yet each is drawn
+sharply and clearly, and the whole story moves on with the ease of
+real life. Consummate art is shown in the painting of Becky's gradual
+rise to power and the great scene at the climax of her success, when
+Rawdon Crawley strikes down the Marquis of Steyne, is one of the
+finest in all fiction. Though Becky knows that this blow shatters her
+social edifice, she is still woman enough to admire her husband in the
+very act that marks the beginning of the decadence of her fortunes.
+_Vanity Fair_, read carefully a half-dozen times, is a liberal
+education in life and in the art of the novelist.
+
+Personally, I rank _Pendennis_ next to _Vanity Fair_ for the pleasure
+to be derived from it. From the time when the old Major receives the
+letter from his sister telling of young Arthur's infatuation for the
+cheap actress, Miss Fotheringay, the story carries one along in the
+leisurely way of the last century. All the people are a delight, from
+Captain Costigan to Fowker, and from the French chef, who went to the
+piano for stimulus in his culinary work, to Blanche Amory and her
+amazing French affectations. But _Pendennis_ is not popular.
+
+Nor is _Henry Esmond_ popular, although it is worthy to rank with _The
+Cloister and the Hearth_, _Adam Bede_ and _Tess of the D'Urbervilles_.
+There is little relief of humor in _Esmond_, but the story has a
+strong appeal to any sympathetic reader, and it is the one supreme
+achievement in all fiction in which the hero tells his own story.
+Thackeray's art is flawless in this tale, and it sometimes rises to
+great heights, as in the scenes following the death of Lord
+Castlewood, the exposure of the Prince's perfidy, the selfishness of
+Beatrice and the great sacrifice of Esmond.
+
+Space is lacking to take up Thackeray's other works, but it is safe to
+say if you read the three novels here hastily sketched you cannot go
+amiss among his minor works. Even his lighter sketches and his essays
+will be found full of material that is so far above the ordinary level
+that the similar work of to-day seems cheap and common. Happy is the
+boy or girl who has made Thackeray a chosen companion from childhood.
+Such a one has received unconsciously lessons in life and in culture
+that can be gained from few of the great authors of the world.
+
+
+
+
+CHARLOTTE BRONT� AND HER TWO GREAT NOVELS
+
+    "JANE EYRE" AND "VILLETTE" ARE TOUCHED WITH GENIUS--TRAGEDY OF
+    A WOMAN'S LIFE THAT RESULTED IN TWO STORIES OF PASSIONATE
+    REVOLT AGAINST FATE.
+
+
+Charlotte Bront� is always linked in my memory with Thackeray because
+of her visit to the author of _Vanity Fair_ and its humorous and
+pathetic features. She went to London from her lonely Yorkshire home,
+and the great world, with its many selfish and unlovely features, made
+a painful impression on her. Even Thackeray, her idol, was found to
+have feet of clay. But this "little Puritan," as the great man called
+her, was endowed with the divine genius which was forced to seek
+expression in fiction, and nowhere in all literature will one find an
+author who shows more completely the compelling force of a powerful
+creative imagination than this little, frail, self-educated woman,
+who had none of the advantages of her fellow writers, but who
+surpassed them all in a certain fierce, Celtic spirit which forces the
+reader to follow its bidding.
+
+  [Illustration: CHARLOTTE BRONT� FROM THE EXQUISITELY SYMPATHETIC
+  CRAYON PORTRAIT BY GEORGE RICHMOND, R.A. NOW IN THE NATIONAL
+  PORTRAIT GALLERY OF LONDON]
+
+He who would get a full realization of the importance of this Celtic
+element in English literature cannot afford to neglect _Jane Eyre_ and
+_Villette_, the best of Charlotte Bront�'s works. Old-fashioned these
+romances are in many ways, oversentimental, in parts poorly
+constructed, but in all English fiction there is nothing to surpass
+the opening chapters of _Jane Eyre_ for vividness and pathos, and few
+things to equal the greater part of _Villette_, the tragedy of an
+English woman's life in a Brussels boarding school.
+
+Who can explain the mystery of the flowering of a great literary style
+among the bleak and desolate moors of Yorkshire? Who can tell why
+among three daughters of an Irish curate of mediocre ability but
+tremendously passionate nature one should have developed an abnormal
+imagination that in _Wuthering Heights_ is as powerful as Poe's at his
+best, and another should have matured into the ablest woman novelist
+of her day and her generation? These are freaks of heredity which
+science utterly fails to explain.
+
+Charlotte Bront� was born in 1816 and died in 1855. She was one of six
+children who led a curiously forlorn life in the old Haworth parsonage
+in the midst of the desolate Yorkshire moors. The outlook on one side
+was upon a gloomy churchyard; on the other three sides the eye ranged
+to the horizon over rolling, dreary moorland that looked like a
+heaving ocean under a leaden sky. One brother these five sisters had,
+a brilliant but superficial boy, with no stable character, who became
+a drunkard and died after lingering on for years, a source of intense
+shame to his family. The girls were left motherless at an early age.
+Four were sent to a boarding school for clergymen's daughters, but two
+died from exposure and lack of nutritious food, and the others,
+starved mentally and physically, returned to their home. This was the
+school that Charlotte held up to infamy in _Jane Eyre_.
+
+The three sisters who were left, in the order of their ages, were
+Emily, Charlotte and Anne. They, with their brother, lived in a kind
+of dream world. Charlotte was the natural story-teller, and she wove
+endless romances in which figured the great men of history who were
+her heroes. She also told over and over many weird Yorkshire legends.
+These children devoured every bit of printed matter that came to the
+parsonage, and they were as thoroughly informed on all political
+questions as the average member of Parliament.
+
+At an age when normal girls were playing with their dolls these
+precocious children were writing poems and stories. Their father
+developed the ways of a recluse and never took his meals with his
+children. Living in this dream world of their own, these children
+could not understand normal girls. They were terribly unhappy at
+school and came near to death of homesickness. Finally Emily and
+Charlotte found a congenial school and in a few years they both made
+great strides in education. Charlotte tried teaching and also the work
+of governess, but finally both decided to open a girls' school of
+their own. To prepare themselves in French, Emily and Charlotte went
+to a boarding school in Brussels.
+
+This was the turning point in Charlotte's life. Intensely ambitious,
+she worked like a galley slave and soon mastered French so that she
+wrote it with ease and vigor. There is no question that she had a
+girlish love for her teacher, as passionate as it was brief, and that
+her whole outlook was broadened by this experience of a world so
+unlike the only one that she had known.
+
+The story of Charlotte's life is told beautifully by Mrs. Gaskell, the
+well-known author of _Cranford_. It is one of the finest biographies
+in the language, and also one of the most stimulating. The reader who
+follows Charlotte's stormy youth is made ashamed of his own lack of
+application when he reads of the girl's tireless work in self-culture
+in the face of much bodily weakness and great unhappiness.
+
+Read of her experiences in Brussels and you will get some idea of the
+tremendous vitality of this frail girl with the luminous eyes and the
+fiery spirit that no labor could tire. Mrs. Gaskell has drawn largely
+upon Charlotte's letters, which are as vivid and full of character as
+any of her fiction. Genius flashes from them; one feels drawn very
+close to this woman who raged against her physical infirmities, but
+overcame them bravely. When the spirit moved her she poured out her
+soul to her friend in words that grip the heart after all these
+years.
+
+The boarding-school project fell through, and for some years the three
+sisters lived at home and devoted themselves to literary work. The
+first fruits of their pen was a small volume of poems by Currer, Ellis
+and Acton Bell, the pseudonyms of Charlotte, Emily and Anne. This book
+fell practically stillborn from the press, but the sisters were
+undaunted and each began a novel. Without experience of life it is not
+strange that these stories lacked merit.
+
+Charlotte drew her novel from her Brussels experience and called it
+_The Professor_. Though it was far the best, it was rejected, but
+Emily's _Wuthering Heights_ and Anne's _Agnes Gray_ were published.
+Emily's novel revealed a powerful but ill-regulated imagination, with
+scenes of splendid imaginative force, yet morbid and unreal as an
+opium dream. It received some good notices, but Anne's was mediocre
+and fell flat. Nothing daunted by the refusal of the publishers to
+bring out her first book, Charlotte began _Jane Eyre_, largely
+autobiographical in the early chapters, and this book was promptly
+accepted and published in August, 1847.
+
+_Jane Eyre_ was a great success from the day it came from the press.
+It was an epoch-making novel because it dragged into the fierce light
+of publicity many questions which the English public of that day had
+decided to leave out of print. To us of today it contains nothing
+unusual, for modern women writers have gone far beyond Charlotte
+Bront� in their demands for freedom from many strict social
+conventions. What makes the book valuable is the glimpse which it
+gives of the wild revolt of a passionate nature against the coldness,
+the hypocrisy and the many shams of the social life of England in the
+middle of the last century.
+
+This novel is also noteworthy for its intense picture of the
+sufferings of a lonely, unappreciated girl, who felt in herself the
+stirrings of genius and who hungered and thirsted for appreciation.
+The terrible pictures of Lowood, the fiction name of the Cowan's
+Bridge School, where her two sisters contracted their fatal illness,
+are stamped upon the brain of every reader, as are those of the
+humiliations of the governess. The style of this book was a revelation
+in that period of formal writing. Like Stevenson, Charlotte Bront�
+wrought with words as a great artist works with his colors, and many
+of her descriptions in _Jane Eyre_ have never been surpassed. Hers was
+that brooding Celtic imagination which, when given full play, takes
+the reader by the hand and shows him the heights and depths of human
+love and suffering.
+
+  [Illustration: MRS. GASKELL FROM THE PORTRAIT BY GEORGE RICHMOND,
+  R.A. MRS. GASKELL'S "LIFE OF BRONT�" IS ONE OF THE FINEST
+  BIOGRAPHIES IN THE LANGUAGE]
+
+The success of _Jane Eyre_ opened wide the doors of London to the
+unknown author. For a time her identity was hidden, but when it was
+revealed she was induced to go up to London and see the great world.
+Thackeray was especially kind to her, but his efforts to entertain
+this Yorkshire recluse were dismal failures. Nothing is more amusing
+than his daughter's story of the great novelist, slipping out of the
+house one night, when he had asked several celebrities to meet
+Charlotte Bront�. The party was a terrible fiasco, and so he escaped,
+putting his finger to his lips as he opened the front door to warn his
+daughter that she must not reveal his flight. Charlotte's
+correspondence with her publisher is also full of pathos. It shows how
+keenly she felt her aloofness from the world, which she could not
+overcome.
+
+The story of _Villette_ is the real story of Charlotte's experiences
+in a Brussels boarding school, where she first tasted the delights of
+literary study and her genius first found adequate expression. The
+original draft of this novel was called _The Professor_. Charlotte
+knew that it contained good material. So, after the death of her
+sisters, she took up the subject, and with all her mature power
+produced _Villette_--one of those novels struck off at a white heat,
+like George Sand's _Indiana_ or Balzac's _Seraphita_. The story is
+largely autobiographical, but the episodes of Charlotte's life are
+touched with romance when they appear as the experiences of Lucy Snow,
+the forlorn English girl in the Continental school, among people of
+alien natures and strange speech.
+
+In _Shirley_, Charlotte Bront� revealed much genuine humor in the
+malicious portraits of the three curates, who were drawn from real
+life. In fact, throughout her books one will find most of the
+characters sketched from real people. Hence, if one reads the story of
+her life he can trace her from her return from her Continental life
+down through the cruel years almost to the end. Back she came to her
+gloomy home from Brussels only to watch in succession the lingering
+death of her brother and her two sisters. Think of these three
+sisters, two marked for sure and early death, laboring at literary
+work every day with the passion and intensity that come to few men.
+Think of Emily, the eldest, with fierce pride refusing help to climb
+the steep stairway of the parsonage home when her strength was almost
+spent and her racking cough struck cold on the hearts of her sisters.
+And think of Charlotte in her terrible grief turning to fiction as the
+only resource from unbearable woe and loneliness. It is one of the
+great tragedies of literature, but out of it came the flowering of a
+brilliant genius.
+
+
+
+
+GEORGE ELIOT AND HER TWO GREAT NOVELS
+
+    "ADAM BEDE" AND "THE MILL ON THE FLOSS"--HER EARLY STORIES ARE
+    RICH IN CHARACTER SKETCHES, WITH MUCH PATHOS AND HUMOR.
+
+
+George Eliot is a novelist in a class by herself. She never impressed
+me as a natural story-teller, save when she lived over again that
+happy girlhood which served to relieve the sadness of her mature life.
+In parts of _Adam Bede_ and throughout _The Mill on the Floss_ she
+seems to tell her stories as though she really enjoyed the work. All
+the scenes of her beautiful girlhood in the pleasant Warwickshire
+country, when she drove through the pleasant sweet-scented lanes and
+enjoyed the lovely views that she has made immortal in her
+books--these she dwelt upon, and with the touch of poetry that
+redeemed the austerity of her nature she makes them live again,
+even for us in an alien land. So, too, the English rustics live for
+us in her pages with the same deathless force as the villagers in
+Hardy's novels of Wessex life. And George Eliot and Thomas Hardy are
+the two English writers who have made these villagers, with their
+peculiar dialect and their insular prejudices, serve the purpose of
+the Greek chorus in warning the reader of the fate that hangs over
+their characters.
+
+  [Illustration: GEORGE ELIOT IN 1864 FROM THE ETCHING BY MR. PAUL
+  RAJON--DRAWN BY MR. FREDERICK BURTON--FROM THE FRONTISPIECE TO THE
+  FIRST EDITION OF "GEORGE ELIOT'S LIFE," BY HER HUSBAND, J.W.
+  CROSS]
+
+Of all English novelists, George Eliot was probably the best equipped
+in minute and accurate scholarship. Trained as few college graduates
+are trained, she was impelled for several years to take up the study
+of German metaphysics. Her mind, like her face, was masculine in its
+strength, and though she suffered in her youth from persistent
+ill-health, she conquered this in her maturity and wrought with
+passionate ardor at all her literary tasks. So keen was her conscience
+that she often defeated her own ends by undue labor, as in the
+preparation for _Romola_, whose historical background swamps the
+story.
+
+Above all she was a preacher of a stern morality. She laid down the
+moral law that selfishness, like sin, corrodes the best nature, and
+that the only happiness lies in absolute forgetfulness of self and in
+working to make others happy. Thus all her books are full of little
+sermons on life, preached with so much force that they cannot fail to
+make a profound impression even upon the careless reader.
+
+George Eliot impresses one as a very sad woman, with an eager desire
+to recapture the lost religious faith of her happy, unquestioning
+childhood and a still more passionate desire to believe in that
+immortality which her cold agnostic creed rejected as illogical. It
+was pitiful, this strong-minded woman reaching out for the things that
+less-endowed women accept without question. It was even more pitiful
+to see her, with her keen moral sense, violate all the conventions of
+English law and society in order to take up life with the man who
+stimulated her mind and actually made her one of the greatest of
+English novelists.
+
+Left alone, it is very doubtful whether George Eliot ever would have
+found herself, ever would have developed that mine of reminiscence
+which produced those perfect early stories of English country life. To
+George Henry Lewes, the man for whose love and companionship she
+incurred social ostracism, readers in all English-speaking countries
+owe a great debt of gratitude, for it was his wise counsel and his
+constant stimulus and encouragement which resulted in making George
+Eliot a writer of fine novels instead of an essayist on ethical and
+religious subjects. It detracts little from this debt that Lewes was
+also responsible for the stimulus of George Eliot's bent toward
+philosophical speculation and to that cold if clear scientific
+thought, which spoiled parts of _Middlemarch_ and ruined _Daniel
+Deronda_.
+
+Marian Evans was born at Ashbury farm in Warwickshire in 1819 and died
+in 1880. Her father was the agent for a large estate, and the happiest
+hours of her girlhood were spent in driving about the country with
+him. Those keen eyes which saw so deeply into human nature were early
+trained to observe all the traits of the English rustic, and those
+childish impressions gave vitality to her humorous characters. Before
+she was ten years old Marian had read Scott and Lamb, as well as
+_Pilgrim's Progress_ and _Rasselas_. When thirteen years old she
+revealed unusual musical gifts. She had the misfortune at seventeen to
+lose her mother, and for years after she managed her father's house.
+
+Evidently the old farmer, whom his daughter has sketched with loving
+hand in _Adam Bede_, took great pride in the mental superiority of his
+daughter, for he hired tutors for her in Latin, Greek, Italian and
+German. All four languages she mastered as few college men master
+them. She read everything, both old and new, and her intimacy with the
+wife of Charles Bray of Coventry led her to refuse to go to church.
+This free thinking angered her father and caused him to demand that
+she leave his house. After three weeks her love and her keen sense of
+duty led her to conform to her father's wishes and to resume the
+church-going, which in his eyes was a part of life that could not be
+dropped.
+
+But that early departure from the established religion carried her
+into the field of German skepticism. She translated Strauss' _Life of
+Jesus_. For three years her studies were interrupted by the serious
+illness of her father. When he died she went to Geneva and remained on
+the Continent a year. Then she came home and took up her residence
+with the Brays. The development of her mind was very rapid. She served
+for some time as editor of the WESTMINSTER REVIEW. She then formed
+a strong friendship with Herbert Spencer, and through Spencer she met
+George Henry Lewes, who made a special study of Goethe and the German
+philosophers, and who was the editor of the LEADER, the organ of the
+Free Thinkers.
+
+  [Illustration: GEORGE ELIOT'S BIRTHPLACE, SOUTH FARM, ARBURY,
+  NUNEATON]
+
+Lewes and Marian Evans soon became all the world to each other, but
+Lewes had an insane wife, and the foolish law of England forbade him
+to get a divorce or to marry again. So the two decided to live
+together and to be man and wife in everything except the sanction of
+the law. The result was disastrous for a time to the woman. There is
+no question that the social isolation that resulted hurt her deeply.
+Her close friends like Spencer remained loyal, and her husband was
+always the devoted lover as well as the ideal companion.
+
+Two years after this new connection Lewes induced his wife to try
+fiction. Her first story was _The Sad Adventures of the Rev. Amos
+Barton_ which was followed by _Janet's Repentance_. These stories
+appeared under the pen name of George Eliot, which she never
+relinquished. Gathered into book form under the title _Scenes From
+Clerical Life_, these stories in a minor key made a profound
+impression on Charles Dickens, who divined they were the work of a
+woman of unusual gifts.
+
+The praise of Lewes and the appreciation of Dickens and other experts
+gave great stimulus to her mind, and she produced _Adam Bede_, perhaps
+her best work, which had a great success. In the following year came
+_The Mill on the Floss_, an even greater success. Then in quick
+succession came the other early novels, _Silas Marner_, _Romola_ and
+_Felix Holt_. A break of six years follows, and then came
+_Middlemarch_ and _Daniel Deronda_.
+
+Lewes died in 1878, and two years later this woman, almost exhausted
+by her tremendous literary labors, married J.W. Cross, an old friend,
+but, like Charlotte Bront�, she had only short happiness, for she died
+in the following year. The nations praised her, but she never
+recovered from the shock of Lewes' death.
+
+Of George Eliot's work the things that impress one most are her fine
+descriptions of natural scenes, her keen analyses of character and her
+many little moral sermons on life and conduct. With an abnormal
+conscience and a keen sense of duty, life proved very hard for her.
+This is reflected in the somberness of her stories and in the dread
+atmosphere of fate that hangs over her characters. But over against
+this must be placed her joy in depicting the rustic character and
+humor and her delight in reproducing the scenes of her childhood in
+one of the most beautiful counties of England.
+
+Herbert Spencer, who was long associated with George Eliot, and for a
+time contemplated the possibility of a union with that remarkable
+woman, pays her a high tribute in _The Study of Sociology_. After
+explaining the origin in women of the ability to distinguish quickly
+the passing feelings of those around, he says: "Ordinarily, this
+feminine faculty, showing itself in an aptitude for guessing the state
+of mind through the external signs, ends simply in intuitions formed
+without assignable reasons; but when, as happens in rare cases, there
+is joined with it skill in psychological analysis, there results in
+extremely remarkable ability to interpret the mental states of others.
+Of this ability we have a living example (George Eliot) never hitherto
+paralleled among women, and in but few, if any, cases exceeded among
+men."
+
+Perhaps the reader who does not know George Eliot would do well to
+begin with _The Mill on the Floss_, her finest work, which is full of
+humor, lovely pictures of English rural life and an analysis of soul
+in Maggie Tolliver that has never been surpassed. Yet the end is cruel
+and unnatural, as hard and as unsatisfying as the author's own
+religious creed. Next read _Adam Bede_, one of the saddest books in
+all literature, with comic relief in Mrs. Poyser, one of the most
+humorous characters in English fiction.
+
+George Eliot drew Dinah Morris from her favorite aunt, who was a
+Methodist exhorter, and the power and spontaneity of this novel came
+from the sharpness and clearness of her early impressions, joined to
+her love of living over again her girlhood days, before doubt had
+clouded her sky. Also read _Silas Marner_ with its perfect picture of
+Raveloe, "an English village where many of the old echoes lingered,
+undrowned by new voices." These descriptions are instinct with poetry,
+and they affect one like Wordsworth's best poems or like Tennyson's
+vignettes of rural life. The pale weaver of Raveloe will always remain
+as one of the great characters in English fiction.
+
+Of George Eliot's more elaborate work it is impossible to speak in
+entire praise. If you have the leisure, and these books I have named
+please you, then by all means read _Romola_, which is a remarkable
+study of the degeneracy of a young Greek and of the noble strivings of
+a great-hearted woman. The pictures of Florence in the time of
+Savonarola are splendid, but they smell of the lamp. _Middlemarch_ is
+also worth careful study for its fine analysis of character and
+motive. In all George Eliot's books her characters develop before our
+eyes, and this is especially true in this elaborate study of the
+pathos and the tragedy of human life.
+
+George Eliot wrote little poetry, but one piece may be commended to
+careful attention, "The Choir Invisible." It sums up with impassioned
+force her ethical creed, which she put in these fine lines:
+
+    Oh, may I join the choir invisible
+    Of those immortal dead who live again
+    In minds made better by their presence: live
+    In pulses stirred to generosity,
+    In deeds of daring rectitude, in scorn
+    For miserable aims that end in self.
+           *       *       *       *       *
+                       This is life to come
+    Which martyred men have made more glorious
+    For us who strive to follow. May I reach
+    That purest heaven, be to other souls
+    The cup of strength in some great agony,
+    Enkindle generous ardor, feed pure love.
+    Beget the smiles that have no cruelty--
+    Be the sweet presence of a good diffused,
+    And in diffusion ever more intense.
+    So shall I join the choir invisible,
+    Whose music is the gladness of the world.
+
+This was the creed of George Eliot, which she preached in her books
+and which she followed in her life. This was the only hope of
+immortality that she cherished--to "live again" in minds that she
+stimulated.
+
+
+
+
+RUSKIN THE APOSTLE OF ART
+
+    HIS WORK AS ART CRITIC AND SOCIAL REFORMER--BEST BOOKS ARE
+    "MODERN PAINTERS," "THE SEVEN LAMPS" AND "THE STONES OF
+    VENICE."
+
+
+John Ruskin deserves a place among the great English writers of the
+last century, not only because of his superb style and the amount of
+his work, but because he was the first to encourage the study of art
+and nature among the people. So enormous have been the strides made in
+the last twenty years in popular knowledge of art and architecture,
+and so great the growth of interest in the beauties of nature that it
+is difficult to appreciate that a little over a half century ago, when
+Ruskin first came into prominence as a writer, the English public was
+densely ignorant of art, and was equally ignorant of the world of
+pleasure to be derived from beautiful scenery.
+
+It was Ruskin's great service to the world that he opened the eyes of
+the public to the glories of the art of all countries, and that he
+also revealed the wonders of architecture. Many critics have laid bare
+his infirmities as a critic, but a man of colder blood and less
+emotional nature would never have reached the large public to which
+Ruskin appealed. Like a great orator he was swayed by the passion of
+convincing his audience, and the very extravagance of his language and
+the ardor of his nature served to make a profound impression upon
+readers who are not usually affected by such appeals as his.
+
+Ruskin was one of the most impractical men that ever lived, but in the
+exuberance of his nature and in his rare unselfishness he started a
+dozen social reforms in England, any one of which should have given
+fame to its founder. He gave away a great fortune in gifts to the
+public and in private generosity. He founded museums, established
+scholarships, tried to put into practical working order his dream of a
+New Life founded on the union of manual labor and high intellectual
+aims, labored to induce the public to read the good old books that
+help one to make life worth living.
+
+  [Illustration: JOHN RUSKIN FROM A PHOTOGRAPH TAKEN ON JULY 20,
+  1882, BY MESSRS. ELLIOTT & FRY]
+
+That much of his good work was neutralized by his lack of common sense
+detracts nothing from the world's debt to Ruskin. The simple truth is
+that he was a reformer as well as a great writer, and the very fervor
+of his religious and social beliefs, his contempt of mere money
+getting, his hatred of falsehood, his boundless generosity and his
+childlike simplicity of mind--all these traits at which the world
+laughed lifted Ruskin above the other men of genius of his time and
+placed him among the world's great reformers.
+
+Among this small body of men whose spiritual force continues to live in
+their books or through the influence of their great self-sacrifices,
+Ruskin deserves a place, for he gave fortune, work and a splendid
+enthusiasm to the common people's cause.
+
+Ruskin's whole life was abnormal, and his early training served to
+accentuate those weaknesses of mind and will that made failures of so
+many schemes for the public good. If Ruskin had been trained in the
+English public schools he would have learned common sense in boyhood.
+As it was, his father and mother shielded the boy in every way from
+all contact with the world. Ruskin's father was a prosperous wine
+merchant with much culture; his mother was a religious fanatic, whose
+passion for the Bible imposed upon her boy the daily reading of the
+Scriptures and the daily memorizing of scores of verses.
+
+Such training in most cases causes a revolt against religion, but in
+Ruskin's case it resulted in training his boyish ear to the cadences
+of the Bible writers and in filling his mind with the sublime imagery
+of the prophets, with the result that when he began to write he had
+already formed a style, the richest and most varied of the last
+century.
+
+The boy was a mental prodigy, for he taught himself to read when four
+years old, and at five he had devoured hundreds of books and was
+already writing poems and plays. At ten, when he had his first tutor,
+his knowledge was wide and he had become a passionate lover of natural
+scenery, as well as no mean artist with pen and pencil. Scott's novels
+and Byron's _Childe Harold_ formed much of his reading at a time when
+most boys are content with the stories of Ballantyne or Mayne Reid.
+The range of his mental activity until he entered Oxford at eighteen
+was very wide. He was interested in mineralogy, meteorology,
+mathematics, drawing and painting. What probably expanded his mind
+more than all else was the education of travel. His father spent about
+half his time journeying through England and the Continent in an
+old-fashioned chaise and John always shared in these expeditions. At
+Oxford he competed for the Newdigate prize in poetry, and after being
+twice defeated won the coveted honor. He never gained any high
+scholarship, but he received valuable training in writing.
+
+There is no space here to chronicle more than a few of his many
+activities after leaving college. He first came into prominence by his
+passionate defense of the painter Turner against the art critics, and
+his study of Turner led him to adopt art criticism as his life work.
+At twenty-three years of age, when most youths are puzzled about their
+vocation, Ruskin had completed the first volume of _Modern Painters_,
+the publication of which gave him fame and made him a social lion in
+London. Other volumes of this great work followed swiftly and caused a
+great commotion in the world of art and letters because of the radical
+views of the author and the remarkable qualities of his style.
+
+This was followed by _The Seven Lamps of Architecture_, in which
+Ruskin expounded his radical views on this kindred art; _The Stones of
+Venice_, an eloquent book enforcing the argument that Gothic
+architecture sprang from a pure national faith and the domestic
+virtues; _King's Treasuries_, a noble plea for good books; _Fors
+Clavigera_, a series of ninety-six parts published in eight volumes,
+the record of his social experiments; _Preterita_, one of the most
+charming books of youthful reminiscences in any language, and many
+others. Ruskin's mental activity was enormous. He had to his credit in
+his fifty-five active years no less than seventy-two volumes and one
+hundred magazine articles, as well as thousands of lectures.
+
+This outline sketch of Ruskin's life would be incomplete without
+mention of the great sorrows that darkened his days but gave eloquence
+to his writings. The first was the desertion of his wife, who married
+the painter Millais, and the second was the loss by death of Rose La
+Touche, a beautiful Irish girl whom he had known from childhood. She
+refused to marry him because of their differences of religion; even
+refused to see him in her fatal illness unless he could say that he
+loved God better than he loved her. Her death brought bitter despair
+to Ruskin, but the world profited by it, for grief gave his work
+maturity and force. The last ten years of Ruskin's life were spent at
+his beautiful home at Brantwood, surrounded by the pictures that he
+loved and served faithfully by devoted relatives.
+
+  [Illustration: JOHN RUSKIN FROM THE SEMI-ROMANTIC PORTRAIT OF SIR
+  JOHN E. MILLAIS]
+
+Ruskin's books are not to be read continuously. Many dreary passages
+may be found in all of them, which the judicious reader skips. But his
+best works are more full of intellectual stimulus than those of any
+writer of his time with the single exception of Carlyle. _Modern
+Painters_ overflows with the enthusiasm of a lover of art and of
+nature who preaches the gospel of sincerity and truth. It is marked,
+like all his work, by eloquent digressions on human life and conduct,
+for Ruskin held that the finest art was simply the flowering of a
+great soul nurtured on all that was highest and best. _The Seven
+Lamps_ does for architecture what his first work did for painting. The
+book is written in more ornate style than any other, but he who loves
+impassioned prose will find many specimens here that can only by
+equaled in De Quincey's best work. Read the peroration of the "Lamp
+of Sacrifice" and you will not need to be told that this is the finest
+tribute to the work of the builders of the medi�val cathedral. Here is
+a part of this eloquent passage:
+
+    It is to far happier, far higher exaltation that we owe those
+    fair fronts of variegated mosaic, charged with wild fancies
+    and dark hosts of imagery, thicker and quainter than ever
+    filled the depth of midsummer dream; those vaulted gates,
+    trellised with close leaves; those window labyrinths of
+    twisted tracery and starry light; those misty masses of
+    multitudinous pinnacle and diademed tower; the only witnesses,
+    perhaps, that remain to us of the faith and fear of nations.
+    All else for which the builders sacrificed has passed away.
+    * * * But of them and their life and their toil upon earth,
+    one reward, one evidence, is left to us in those great heaps
+    of deep-wrought stone. They have taken with them to the grave
+    their powers, their honors and their errors; but they have
+    left us their adoration.
+
+No space is left here to mention in detail Ruskin's other works, but
+_Unto This Last_, _The Stones of Venice_, _Sesame and Lilies_ and _The
+Crown of Wild Olive_ may be commended as well worth careful reading.
+Also _Preterita_ is alive with noble passages, such as the pen-picture
+of the view from the Dale in the Alps, or of the Rhone below Geneva.
+Read also Ruskin's description of Turner's "Slave Ship" or the
+impressive passage on the mental slavery of the modern workman in the
+sixth chapter of the second volume of _The Stones of Venice_. Read
+these things and you will have no doubt of the genius of Ruskin or of
+his command of the finest impassioned prose in the English language.
+
+
+
+
+TENNYSON LEADS THE VICTORIAN WRITERS
+
+    THE POET WHO VOICED THE ASPIRATIONS OF HIS AGE--"LOCKSLEY
+    HALL," "IN MEMORIAM" AND "THE IDYLLS OF THE KING" AMONG HIS
+    BEST WORKS.
+
+
+Of all the great English writers of the Victorian age it is probable
+that the next century will give the foremost place to Tennyson. Better
+than any other poet of his day, he stands as a type of the English
+people in obedience to law, in strong religious faith, in splendid
+imaginative force and in a certain unyielding cast of mind that made
+him bide his time during the dark years when he was bitterly
+criticized or coldly neglected. Tennyson had to the full the poet's
+temperament, but he had also a superb physique, which carried him into
+his eighty-fourth year. From a boy he was a lover of nature, and in
+nearly every poem that he wrote are found many proofs of his close
+observation in English woods and fields. Through a period of general
+skepticism he kept unimpaired his strong faith in God and in
+immortality that lends so much force to his best verse.
+
+  [Illustration: ALFRED, LORD TENNYSON AFTER AN ENGRAVING BY G.J.
+  STODART FROM A PHOTOGRAPH BY J. MAYALL]
+
+Tennyson's genius found its natural expression in verse, and it is his
+distinction that while he explored many realms of thought he was
+always clear and always musical. Browning had more passion, but it was
+the misfortune of the author of _The Ring and the Book_ that he could
+not refrain from a cramped and obscure style of verse that makes much
+of his work very hard reading. Many Browning societies have been
+formed to study the works of the poet whom they are proud to call
+master; but Tennyson needs no societies, as the man in the street and
+the woman whose soul is troubled can understand every line he has
+written. Nor is Tennyson lacking in passion, as any one may see by
+reading _Locksley Hall_ or _Maud_.
+
+Tennyson summed up in his poetry all the spiritual aspiration and the
+eager search for knowledge of his time. He explored all domains of
+thought, and he enriched his verse with the fruit of his studies. All
+the great elemental forces are found in his poems: he is the laureate
+of love and sorrow, of grief and aspiration. Throughout his verse runs
+the great natural law that the man who is not pure in heart can never
+see the glory of the poet's vision.
+
+The purity of his own life was reflected in his verse, just as the mad
+license and the furious self-indulgence of Byron are mirrored in _Don
+Juan_, _Manfred_ and _Cain_. Even to extreme old age Tennyson
+preserved that high poetic faculty which he manifested in early youth.
+One of his latest poems, _Crossing the Bar_, is also one of the finest
+in the language, breathing the old man's assurance of a life beyond
+the grave and a reunion with the dear friend of his youth, whom he
+mourned and immortalized in _In Memoriam_.
+
+Alfred Tennyson had one of the finest lives in the roll of English
+authors. He was born in 1809 and lived to 1892. He spent his early
+years in one of the most beautiful parts of Lincolnshire. He enjoyed
+the personal training of his father, a very accomplished clergyman,
+and much of his boyhood and youth was spent in the open air. In this
+way he absorbed that knowledge of birds and animals, trees and flowers
+and all the aspects of nature which is reflected in his verse. As a
+youth he experimented in many styles of verse, and when only eighteen
+he issued, with his brother Charles, _Poems by Two Brothers_. The next
+year he and Charles entered Trinity College, Cambridge. There they
+received the greatest impulse toward culture in a society of
+undergraduates known as the "Apostles." Its membership included
+Thackeray, Trench, Spedding, Monckton Milnes and Alfred and Arthur
+Henry Hallam, sons of the famous author of _The Middle Ages_.
+
+In his second year at college Tennyson won the Chancellor's gold medal
+with his prize poem, _Timbuctoo_, and in the following year he
+published his first volume, _Poems, Chiefly Lyrical_. He left college
+without a degree, and in 1833 he issued another volume of poems which
+contained some of his best work--_The Lady of Shalott_, _The Lotos
+Eaters_, _The Palace of Art_ and _A Dream of Fair Women_. Any one of
+these poems if issued to-day would make the reputation of a poet, but
+this book made little impression on the Victorian public which had
+lost its taste for poetry and was devoted mainly to prose fiction. The
+world has yet to catch the note of this master singer.
+
+In 1837 Arthur Hallam, Tennyson's friend and other self, the one man
+who predicted that he would be the greatest poet of his age, died
+suddenly in Vienna while traveling abroad. The shock made a profound
+impression on Tennyson. For ten years he put forth no work. Finally,
+in 1842, he issued two volumes of poems that at once caught the public
+fancy. Among the poems that brought him fame were _Locksley Hall_,
+_Lady Godiva_, _Ulysses_, _The Two Voices_ and _Morte d' Arthur_. The
+latter was the seed of the splendid _Idylls of the King_. Five years
+later he published _The Princess_, with its beautiful songs, and three
+years after _In Memoriam_ the greatest elegiac poem in the language,
+in which he lamented the fate of Arthur Hallam and poured forth his
+own grief over this irreparable loss. In the same year he married Miss
+Emily Sellwood, who made his home a haven of rest and of whom he once
+said that with her "the peace of God came into my life."
+
+_Maud_, his most dramatic poem, was issued in 1855. As early as 1859
+he published the first part of _The Idylls of the King_, but it was
+not until 1872 that the complete sequence of the _Idylls_ was given
+to the public. These Arthurian legends are cast by Tennyson in his
+most musical blank verse, and he has given to them a tinge of
+mysticism that seems to lift them above the everyday world into a
+realm of pure romance and chivalry.
+
+  [Illustration: FACSIMILE OF TENNYSON'S ORIGINAL MANUSCRIPT OF
+  "CROSSING THE BAR" COPYRIGHT BY THE MACMILLAN COMPANY]
+
+_Enoch Arden_, a domestic idyll, written in 1864, made a great hit. It
+was followed by several plays--_Queen Mary_, _Harold_, _Becket_ and
+others--all finely written, but none appealing to the great public. Up
+to his last years Tennyson remained the real laureate of his people,
+his words always tinged with the fire of inspiration. Only three years
+before his death he wrote _Crossing the Bar_, a poem which met with
+instant response from the English-speaking world because of its signs
+of courage in the face of death and its proofs of steadfast faith in
+the life beyond the grave.
+
+No adequate estimate of Tennyson's work can be made in the small space
+allotted to this article. All that can be done is to mention a few of
+his best works and to quote a few of his stirring lines. If the reader
+will study these poems he will be pretty sure to read more of
+Tennyson. To my mind, _Locksley Hall_ is Tennyson's finest poem, as
+true to-day as when it was written seventy years ago. The long,
+rolling, trochaic verse, like the billows on the coast that it
+pictures, suits the thought. The poem is the passionate lament of a
+returned soldier from India over the mercenary marriage of the cousin
+whom he loved. Here are a few of the lines that will never die:
+
+    Many a night I saw the Pleiades, rising through the mellow shade,
+    Glitter like a swarm of fireflies tangled in a silver braid.
+    Love took up the harp of Life, and smote on all the chords with might;
+    Smote the chord of Self, that, trembling, pass'd in music out of sight.
+    Cursed be the sickly forms that err from honest Nature's rule!
+    Cursed be the gold that gilds the straiten'd forehead of a fool!
+    Comfort? Comfort scorn'd of devils! this is truth the poet sings,
+    That a sorrow's crown of sorrow is remembering happier things.
+    But the jingling of the guinea helps the hurt that Honor feels,
+    And the nations do but murmur, snarling at each other's heels.
+    Mated with a squalid savage--what to me were sun or clime?
+    I the heir of all the ages in the foremost files of time.
+    Not in vain the distance beacons. Forward, forward, let us range,
+    Let the great world spin forever down the ringing grooves of change.
+    Thro' the shadow of the globe we sweep into the younger day:
+    Better fifty years of Europe than a cycle of Cathay.
+
+It would be difficult among the poets of the last century to parallel
+these passages for their imaginative sweep and magnetic appeal to the
+reader. The new criticism that disparages Tennyson and raises Browning
+to the seventh heaven calls _Locksley Hall_ old-fashioned and
+sentimental, but to me it is the greatest poem of its age. Next to
+this I would place _In Memoriam_, which has never received its just
+recognition. Readers of Taine will recall his flippant Gaelic comment
+on Tennyson's conventional but cold words of lament. Nothing, it seems
+to me, is further from the truth. The many beautiful lines in the poem
+depict the changing moods of the man who mourned for his dead and
+finally found comfort in the words of the Bible--the only source of
+comfort in this world for the sorely wounded heart. The whole poem, as
+his son Hallam says, emphasizes the poet's belief "in an omnipotent
+and all-loving God, who has revealed himself through the highest
+self-sacrificing love in the freedom of the human will and in the
+immortality of the soul."
+
+The meter of _In Memoriam_ serves to fix the poem in the memory. It
+seems to fit the thought with perfect naturalness. It is not strange
+that Queen Victoria should have placed this poem next to the Bible as
+a means of comfort after the loss of her husband, whom she loved so
+dearly that all the attractions of power and wealth never made her
+forget him a single day.
+
+_The Idylls of the King_ are also unappreciated in these days, yet
+they contain a body of splendid poetry that cannot be duplicated. They
+represent the author's dreams from early youth, when his imagination
+was first fired by old Malory's chronicle of the good King Arthur.
+They breathe a chivalry as lofty as Sidney's, and they teach many
+ethical lessons that it would do the present-day world good to take to
+heart. These noble poems, cast in the most musical blank verse in our
+literature, were the work of thirty years, written only when the poet
+felt genuine inspiration. They represent, as the poet told his son,
+"the dream of a man coming into practical life and ruined by one sin.
+It is not the history of one man or of one generation, but of a whole
+cycle of generations." And the old poet added these fine words:
+"Poetry is like shot silk with many glancing colors. Every reader must
+find his own interpretation according to his ability and according to
+his sympathy with the poet."
+
+Other fine poems of Tennyson which one should read are the noble _Ode
+on the Death of the Duke of Wellington_, _Break, Break, Break_, the
+perfect songs in _The Princess_, and _Crossing the Bar_. If you read
+these aright you will wish to know more of Tennyson, the poet who
+reconciled science and religion and kept his old faith strong to the
+end.
+
+
+
+
+BROWNING GREATEST POET SINCE SHAKESPEARE
+
+    HOW TO GET THE BEST OF BROWNING'S POEMS--READ THE LYRICS FIRST
+    AND THEN TAKE UP THE LONGER AND THE MORE DIFFICULT WORKS.
+
+
+The greatest of English poets since Shakespeare, is the title given to
+Robert Browning by many admirers of recognized ability as critics. For
+his dramatic force and his insight into human nature there is no
+question that Browning deserves this high rank. In these two qualities
+he stands above Tennyson. But a large part of his work is written in a
+style so crabbed that it acts as a bar to one's enjoyment of many fine
+poems. Only the most resolute reader can go through _Sordello_ or _The
+Ring and the Book_, the latter, with its interminable discussions of
+motive and its curious descriptions of half-forgotten legal and church
+methods of the seventeenth century. If one-half this long poem of
+over twenty thousand lines had been cut out, it would have been vastly
+improved.
+
+  [Illustration: ROBERT BROWNING FROM A PHOTOGRAPH BY HOLLYER AFTER
+  THE PORTRAIT BY G.F. WATTS, R.A.]
+
+The advocates of Browning hold that the study of the poet's
+obscurities is good mental discipline, but I am of the belief that
+poetry, like music, should not demand too great exertion of the mind
+to appreciate its beauty. Wagner's "Seigfried" and "Parsifal" are
+altogether too long to be enjoyed thoroughly. The composer would have
+done well to eliminate a third of each, for as they are produced they
+strain the attention to the point of fatigue, and no work of art
+should ever tire its admirers.
+
+In the same way Browning offends against this primal canon of art. A
+man who was capable of writing the most melodious verse, as is shown
+in some of his lyrics, he refused to put his thoughts in simple form,
+and often clothed them in obscurity. The result is that the great
+public which would have enjoyed his studies of character and his
+powerful dramatic faculty is repelled at the outset by the
+difficulties of understanding his poems. Browning added to this
+obscurity by constant reference to little-known authors. This was not
+pedantry, any more than Milton's use of classic mythology was
+pedantry. Both men possessed unusual knowledge of rare books, and both
+were much given to quoting authors who are unknown to the general
+reading public.
+
+But with all these difficulties in the way, there still remains a body
+of verse in Browning's work which will richly repay any reader. The
+lyrics and short poems like _The Pied Piper of Hamelin_, _Pippa
+Passes_, _Prospice_, _O Lyric Love_, _The Last Ride_, _One Word More_,
+_How They Brought the Good News_, _Herve Riel_, the epilogue to
+_Asolando_, _The Lost Leader_, _Men and Women_, and _A Soul's Tragedy_
+will give any reader a taste of the real Browning. If you like these
+poems, then try the more ambitious poems like _A Blot in the
+'Scutcheon_, _The Inn Album_, _Fifine at the Fair_ and others.
+
+Browning, above all other English poets, seems to have had the power
+of seizing upon a character at a crucial hour in life and laying bare
+all the impulses that impel one to high achievement or great
+self-sacrifice. He seems always to have worked at the highest
+emotional stress, so that his words are surcharged with feeling. In
+many of his poems this emotional element is painful in its intensity.
+Character to him was the main feature, and his selections comprise
+some of the most picturesque in all history. That he was able to make
+these people live and move and impress us as real flesh-and-blood
+human beings shows the great creative power of the man, who ought to
+have written some of the world's finest plays.
+
+Robert Browning was born in 1812 and died in 1889. His father, though
+a clerk in the Bank of England, was a fine classical scholar and had
+dabbled in verse. His mother was an accomplished musician. Browning
+had every early advantage, and while still a lad he came under the
+spell of Byron and had his poetical faculty greatly stimulated by the
+"Napoleon of rhyme." Then came Shelley and Keats, and their influence
+set him upon the course which he followed for many years. His first
+poem was _Pauline_, which has passages of rare beauty set among dreary
+commonplaces. He followed this with _Paracelsus_ and _Strafford_,
+which opened to him the doors of all London salons and made his
+reputation. _Sordello_, one of his most difficult poems, came next,
+but he varied these dramatic tragedies with a series of short poems
+called _Bells and Pomegranates_. In this the finest thing was _Pippa
+Passes_, which was warmly praised by Elizabeth Barrett, who
+afterwards became his wife. Among the many poems that Browning
+produced in five years were _Colombe's Birthday_, _A Blot in the
+'Scutcheon_, _Dramatic Romances and Lyrics_ and _A Soul's Tragedy_.
+
+Browning, in 1846, married Elizabeth Barrett, the author of _Lady
+Geraldine's Courtship_ and other poems, a woman who had been an
+invalid, confined to her room for years. Love gave her strength to
+arise and walk, and love also gave her the courage to defy the foolish
+tyranny of her father and elope with Browning. What kind of man that
+father was may be seen in his comment after the marriage: "I've no
+objection to the young man, but my daughter should have been thinking
+of another world." They went to Italy, where for fifteen years they
+made an ideal home. Mrs. Browning's story of her love is seen in
+_Sonnets From the Portuguese_, and some of her finest work is in _Casa
+Guidi Windows_. Each stimulated the other, while there was a notable
+absence of that jealousy which has often served to turn the love of
+literary men and women into the fiercest hatred.
+
+Mrs. Browning died suddenly in 1861, and the poet for some time was
+stunned by this unlooked-for calamity. He spent two years in
+seclusion at work on poems, but then he gathered up his courage and
+once more took his old place in the social life of London. In
+_Prospice_ and _One Word More_, written in the autumn following his
+wife's death, he shows that he has overcome all doubts of the reality
+of immortality. These two poems alone would entitle Browning to the
+highest place among the world's great poets. In addition he wrote the
+memorial to his wife, _O Lyric Love_, that is the cry of the soul left
+here on this earth to the soul of the beloved in Paradise. To the
+sympathetic this poem, with its solemn rhythm, will appeal like
+splendid organ music.
+
+  [Illustration: ELIZABETH BARRETT BROWNING AFTER THE PORTRAIT BY
+  FIELD TALFOURD]
+
+Among Browning's other poems that are noteworthy are _Fifine at the
+Fair_, _Red Cotton Nightcap Country_, _The Inn Album_ and _Dramatic
+Idylls_. Browning's last poem, _Asolando_, appeared in London on the
+same day that its author died at Venice. As the great bell of San
+Marco struck ten in the evening, Browning, as he lay in bed, asked his
+son if there were any news of the new volume. A telegram was read
+saying the book was well received. The aged poet smiled and breathed
+his last.
+
+In beginning the reading of Browning it is well to understand that at
+least half or maybe two-thirds of his work should be discarded at the
+outset, as it is of interest only to scholars. My suggestion to one
+who would learn to love Browning is to get a little book, _Lyrical
+Poems of Robert Browning_, by Dr. A.J. George. The editor in a preface
+indicates the best work of Browning, and also brings out strongly the
+fact that readers, and especially young readers, must be given poems
+which interest them. His selections of lyrics have been made from this
+standpoint, and his notes will be found very helpful. He develops the
+point that Browning's great revelation to the world through his poems
+was his strong and abiding assurance that man has in him the principle
+of divinity, and that many of the experiences that the world calls
+failures are really the stepping stones of the ascent to that conquest
+of self and that development of the whole nature which means the
+highest life. He says also that Browning is one of the most eloquent
+expounders of the doctrine of the reality of a future life, in which
+those who live a noble and unselfish life will get their reward in an
+existence free from all physical ills.
+
+In this little book will be found _Pippa Passes_, a noble series of
+lyrics, which develops the idea of the silent influence of a little
+silk weaver of Asolo upon four sets of people in the great crises of
+their lives. In each episode Pippa sings a song that awakens remorse
+or kindles manhood or arouses patriotism or duty. It is a perfect
+poem. Among other lyrics given here are _Evelyn Hope_, which must be
+bracketed with Burns' _To Mary in Heaven_ or with Wordsworth's _Lucy_
+and _Prospice_, which sounds the note of deep personal love that is as
+sure of immortality as of life. It is as beautiful and as inspiring as
+Tennyson's _Crossing the Bar_. Other poems due to Browning's love for
+his wife are _My Star_ and _One Word More_.
+
+If these lyrics appeal to you, then take up some of Browning's longer
+poems, _A Blot in the 'Scutcheon_, _Colombe's Birthday_, _A Soul's
+Tragedy_, _Fra Lippo Lippi_ and _Rabbi Ben Ezra_. Very few readers in
+these days have time or patience to read _The Ring and the Book_, but
+it will repay your attention, as it is the most remarkable attempt in
+all literature to revive the tragedy of the great and innocent love of
+a woman and a priest.
+
+Among the many fine passages in Browning, I think there is nothing
+which equals these lines in _O Lyric Love_, the beautiful invocation
+to his wife:
+
+    O lyric Love, half angel and half bird
+    And all a wonder and a wild desire--
+    Boldest of hearts that ever braved the sun,
+    Took sanctuary within the holier blue
+    And sang a kindred soul out to his face--
+    Hail then, and hearken from the realms of help!
+    Never may I commence my song, my due
+    To God who best taught song by gift of thee,
+    Except with bent head and beseeching hand--
+    That shall despite the distance and the dark,
+    What was, again may be; some interchange
+    Of grace, some splendor once thy very thought,
+    Some benediction anciently thy smile.
+
+The songs in _Pippa Passes_ should be read, as they are as near
+perfect as Shakespeare's songs or the songs of Tennyson in _The
+Princess_.
+
+
+
+
+MEREDITH AND A FEW OF HIS BEST NOVELS
+
+    ONE OF THE GREATEST MASTERS OF FICTION OF LAST CENTURY--"THE
+    ORDEAL OF RICHARD FEVEREL," "DIANA OF THE CROSSWAYS" AND OTHER
+    NOVELS.
+
+
+George Meredith is acknowledged by the best critics to be among the
+greatest English novelists of the last century; yet to the general
+reader he is only a name. Like Henry James, he is barred off from
+popular appreciation by a style which is "caviare to the general."
+Thomas Hardy is recognized as the finest living English novelist, but
+there is very little comparison between himself and Meredith.
+Professor William Lyon Phelps, who is one of the best and sanest of
+American critics, says they are both pagans, but Meredith was an
+optimist, while Hardy is a pessimist. Then he adds this illuminating
+comment: "Mr. Hardy is a great novelist; whereas, to adapt a phrase
+that Arnold applied to Emerson, I should say that Mr. Meredith was not
+a great novelist; he was a great man who wrote novels."
+
+It is only within the last twenty-five years that Meredith has had any
+vogue in this country. At that time a good edition of his novels was
+issued, and critics gave the volumes generous mention in the leading
+magazines and newspapers. But the public did not respond with any
+cordiality. The novel with us has come to be looked upon mainly as a
+source of amusement, and a writer of fiction who demands too keen
+attention from his readers can never hope to be popular. Meredith, as
+Professor Phelps says, was a great man who, among other intellectual
+activities, wrote some good novels. Doubtless he did more real good to
+literature as the inspirer of other writers than he did with his
+books. For more than the ordinary working years of most men he was one
+of the chief "readers" for a large London publishing house. To him
+were submitted the manuscripts of new novels, and it was his privilege
+to recognize the genius of Thomas Hardy, of the author of _The Story
+of an African Farm_ and other now famous English novelists.
+
+Meredith was a singularly acute critic of the work of others, but when
+he came to write himself he cast his thoughts in a style that has been
+the despair of many admirers. In this he resembled Browning, who never
+would write verse that was easy reading. Meredith's thought is usually
+clear, yet his brilliant but erratic mind was impelled to clothe this
+thought in the most bizarre garments. Literary paradox he loved; his
+mind turned naturally to metaphor, and despite the protests of his
+closest friends he continued to puzzle and exasperate the public. He
+who could have written the greatest novels of his age merely wrote
+stories which serve to illustrate his theories of life and conduct. No
+man ever put more real thought into novels than he; none had a finer
+eye for the beauties of nature or the development of character. But he
+had no patience to develop his men and women in the clear, orthodox
+way. He imagined that the ordinary reader could follow his lightning
+flashes of illumination, his piling up of metaphor on metaphor, and
+the result is that many are discouraged by his methods, just as nine
+readers out of ten are wearied when they attempt to read Browning's
+longer poems. His kinship to Browning is strong in style and in
+method of thought, in his way of leaping from one conclusion to
+another, in his elimination of all the usual small connecting words
+and in his liberties with the language. He seemed to be writing for
+himself, not for the general public, and he never took into account
+the slower mental processes of those not endowed with his own vivid
+imagination.
+
+  [Illustration: GEORGE MEREDITH WITH HIS DAUGHTER AND
+  GRANDCHILDREN--FROM A PHOTOGRAPH TAKEN SHORTLY BEFORE HIS DEATH]
+
+Meredith's life was that of a scholar; it contained few exciting
+episodes. He was of Welsh and Irish stock. At an early age he was sent
+to Germany, where he remained at a Moravian school until he was
+fifteen. He then returned to England to study law, but he never
+practiced it. For a number of years he was a regular contributor to
+the London MORNING POST, and in 1866 he acted as correspondent during
+the Austro-Italian war. For many years he served as chief reader and
+literary adviser to Chapman & Hall, the English publishers, and in
+that capacity he showed an insight that led to the development of many
+authors whose first work was crude and unpromising. Meredith himself
+began his literary career with _The Shaving of Shagpat_, a series of
+Oriental tales the central idea of which is the overcoming of
+established evil. Shagpat stands for any evil or superstition, and
+Shibli Bagarag, the hero, is the reformer. This book, with its wealth
+of metaphor, opened the door for Meredith, but he did not score a
+success until he wrote _The Ordeal of Richard Feverel_, two years
+later. Despite its faults, this is his greatest book, and it is the
+one which readers should begin with. It is overloaded with aphorism in
+the famous "Pilgrim's Scrip," which is a diary kept by Sir Austin, the
+father of Richard. The boy is trained to cut women out of his life,
+and just when the father's theory seems to have succeeded Richard
+meets and falls in love with Lucy, and the whole towering structure
+founded on the "Pilgrim's Scrip" falls into ruin. The scene in which
+Richard and Lucy meet is one of the great scenes in English fiction,
+in which Meredith's passionate love of nature serves to bring out the
+natural love of the two young people. Earth was all greenness in the
+eyes of these two lovers, and nature served only to deepen the love
+that they saw in each other's gaze and felt with thrilling force in
+each other's kisses. But even stronger that this scene is that last
+terrible chapter, in which Richard returns to his home and refuses to
+stay with Lucy and her child. Stevenson declared that this parting
+scene was the strongest bit of English since Shakespeare. It certainly
+reaches great heights of exaltation, and in its simplicity it reveals
+what miracles Meredith could work when he allowed his creative
+imagination full play.
+
+Another story which is usually bracketed with this is _Diana of the
+Crossways_. This great novel was founded on a real incident in English
+history of Meredith's time. Diana Warwick was drawn from Caroline
+Norton, one of the three beautiful and brilliant granddaughters of
+Sheridan, author of _The School for Scandal_. Her marriage was
+disastrous, and her husband accused her of infidelity with Lord
+Melbourne, Prime Minister at the time. His divorce suit caused a great
+scandal, but it resulted in her vindication. Then later she was
+accused of betraying to a writer on the TIMES the secret that Sir
+Robert Peel had decided to repeal the corn laws. This secret had been
+confided to her by Sidney Herbert, one of her admirers. Meredith's
+novel, in which the results of Diana's treachery were brought out,
+resulted in a public inquiry into the charge against Caroline
+Norton, which found that she was innocent. But the fact that Meredith
+used such an incident as the climax of his story gave _Diana of the
+Crossways_ an enormous vogue, and did much to bring the novelist into
+public favor.
+
+  [Illustration: FLINT COTTAGE, BOXHILL, THE HOME OF GEORGE
+  MEREDITH--HIS WRITING WAS DONE IN A SMALL SWISS CHALET IN THE
+  GARDEN]
+
+No more brilliant woman than Diana has ever been drawn by Meredith,
+but despite the art of her creator it is impossible for the reader to
+imagine her selling for money a great party secret which had been
+whispered to her by the man she loved. She was too keen a woman to
+plead, as Diana pleaded, that she did not recognize the importance of
+this secret, for the defense is cut away by her admission that she was
+promised thousands of pounds by the newspaperman at the very time that
+her extravagances had loaded her with debts.
+
+Space is lacking here to do more than mention three or four of
+Meredith's other novels that are fine works of art. These are _Rhoda
+Fleming_, _Sandra Belloni_, _Evan Harrington_ and _The Egoist_. Each
+is a masterpiece in its way; each is full of human passion, yet tinged
+with a philosophy that lifts up the novels to what Meredith himself
+called "honorable fiction, a fount of life, an aid to life, quick with
+our blood." The novel to him was a means of showing man's spiritual
+nature, "a soul born active, wind-beaten, but ascending."
+
+A score of novels Meredith wrote in his long life. The work of his
+later years was not happy. _The Amazing Marriage_ and _Lord Ormont and
+His Aminta_ are mere shadows of his earlier work, with all his old
+mannerisms intensified. But if you like Richard and Diana, then you
+can enlarge your acquaintance with Meredith to your own exceeding
+profit, for he is one of the great masters of fiction, who used the
+novel merely to preach his doctrine of the richness and fulness of
+human life if we would but see it with his eyes.
+
+
+
+
+STEVENSON PRINCE OF MODERN STORY-TELLERS
+
+    HIS STORIES OF ADVENTURE AND HIS BRILLIANT ESSAYS--"TREASURE
+    ISLAND" AND "DR. JEKYLL AND MR. HYDE" HIS MOST POPULAR BOOKS.
+
+
+It is as difficult to criticise the work of Robert Louis Stevenson as
+it is to find faults in the friend that you love as a brother. For
+with all his faults, this young Scotchman with his appealing charm
+disarms criticism. Nowhere in all literature may one find his like for
+warming the heart unless it be Charles Lamb, of gracious memory, and
+the secret of this charm is that Stevenson remained a child to the end
+of his days, with all a child's eagerness for love and praise, and
+with all a child's passion for making believe that his puppets are
+real flesh and blood people. When such a nature is endowed with
+consummate skill in the use of words, then one gets the finest, if not
+the greatest, of creative artists.
+
+In sheer technical skill Stevenson stands head and shoulders above all
+the other literary craftsmen of his day; but this skill was not used
+to refine his meaning until it wearied the reader, as in the case of
+Henry James, nor was it used to bewilder him with the richness of his
+resources, as was too often the case with George Meredith. With
+Stevenson, style had actually become the man; he could not write the
+simplest article in any other than a highly finished literary way.
+Witness the amazingly eloquent defense of Father Damien which he
+dashed off in a few hours and read to his wife and his stepson before
+the ink was dry on the sheets.
+
+Above all other things Stevenson was a great natural story-teller.
+With him the story was the main consideration, yet in some of his
+short tales such as _Markheim_, or _A Lodging for the Night_, or _The
+Sire de Maletroit's Door_, the story itself merely serves as a thread
+upon which he has strung the most remarkable analysis of a man's soul.
+He has the distinction of having written in _Treasure Island_ the best
+piratical story of the last century. If he could have maintained the
+high level of the opening chapter he would have produced a work
+worthy to rank with _Robinson Crusoe_. As it is, he created two
+villains, the blind man Pew and John Silver, who are absolutely unique
+in literature. The blind pirate in his malevolent fury is a creature
+that chills the heart, while Silver is a cheerful villain who murders
+with a smile. In _Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde_ Stevenson has aroused that
+sense of mystery and horror which springs from the spectacle of the
+domination of an evil spirit over a nature essentially kind and good.
+
+Stevenson came of a race of Scotch men of affairs. His grandfather was
+the most distinguished lighthouse builder of his day and his father
+gained prominence in the same work that demands the highest
+engineering skill with great executive capacity. Stevenson himself
+would have been an explorer or a soldier of fortune had he been born
+with the physical strength to fit his mental endowments. His childhood
+was so full of sickness that it reads like a hospital report. His life
+was probably preserved by the assiduous care and rare devotion of an
+old Scotch nurse, Alison Cunningham, whom he has immortalized in his
+letters and in his _A Child's Garden of Verse_. The sickly boy was an
+eager reader of everything that fell in his way in romance and
+poetry. Later he devoted himself to systematic training of his powers
+of observation and his great capacity for expressing his thoughts.
+
+His youth was spent in migrations to the south in winter and in
+efforts to thrive in Scotland's dour climate in the summer. His school
+training was fitful and brief, but from the age of ten the boy had
+been training himself in the field which he felt was to be his own.
+His first literary work was essays and descriptive sketches for the
+magazines. Then came short stories in which he revealed great
+capacity. Recognition came very slowly. He was comparatively unknown
+after he had produced such charming work as _An Inland Voyage_ and
+_Travels With a Donkey_, not to mention the _New Arabian Nights_.
+Popularity came with _Treasure Island_, written as a story for boys,
+and the one work of Stevenson's in which his creative imagination does
+not flag toward the end; but fame came only after the writing of _The
+Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde_--the most remarkable story of
+a dual personality produced in the last century. After this he wrote a
+long succession of stories, not one of which can be called a
+masterpiece because of the author's inability to finish his novels as
+he planned them. Lack of patience or want of sustained creative power
+invariably made him cut short his novels or end them in a way that
+exasperates the reader.
+
+  [Illustration: ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON--THE AUTHOR'S INTIMATE
+  ASSOCIATES PRONOUNCE THIS PHOTOGRAPH A PERFECT PRESENTATION OF HIS
+  MOST TYPICAL EXPRESSION]
+
+Some months Stevenson spent in California, but this State, with its
+romantic history and its singular scenic beauty, appeared to have
+little influence on his genius. In fact, locality seemed not to color
+the work of his imagination. His closing years were spent in Somoa, a
+South Sea Island paradise, in which he reveled in the primitive
+conditions of life and recovered much of his early zest in physical
+life. Yet his best work in those last years dealt not with the
+palm-fringed atolls of the Pacific, but with the bleak Scotch moors
+which refused him a home. In his letters he dwells on the curious
+obsession of his imagination by old Scotch scenes and characters, and
+on the day of his death he dictated a chapter of _Weir of Hermiston_,
+a romance of the picturesque period of Scotland which had in it the
+elements of his best work.
+
+It is idle to deny that Stevenson appeals only to a limited audience.
+Despite his keen interest in all kinds of people, he lacked that
+sympathetic touch which brings large sales and wide circulation. About
+the time of his death his admirers declared he would supersede Scott
+or Dickens; but the seventeen years since his death have seen many
+changes in literary reputations. Stevenson has held his own remarkably
+well. As a man the interest in him is still keen, but of his works
+only a few are widely read.
+
+Among these the first place must be given to _Dr. Jekyll and Mr.
+Hyde_, partly because of the profound impression made upon the public
+mind by the dramatization of this tale, and partly because it appeals
+strongly to the sense of the mystery of conflicting personality. Next
+to this is _Treasure Island_, one of the best romances of adventure
+ever written. Readers who cannot feel a thrill of genuine terror when
+the blind pirate Pew comes tapping with his cane have missed a great
+pleasure. One-legged John Silver, in his cheerful lack of all the
+ordinary virtues, is a character that puts the fear of death upon the
+reader. The opening chapter of this story is one of the finest things
+in all the literature of adventure.
+
+Of Stevenson's other work the two Scotch stories, _Kidnaped_ and
+_David Balfour_, always seemed to me to be among his best. The
+chapter on the flight of David and Allan across the moor, the contest
+in playing the pipes and the adventures of David and Catriona in
+Holland--these are things to read many times and enjoy the more at
+every reading. Stevenson, like Jack London, is a writer for men; he
+could not draw women well, When he brings one in there is usually an
+end of stirring adventure, just as London spoiled _The Sea Wolf_ with
+his literary heroine.
+
+  [Illustration: STEVENSON'S HOME AT VALIMA, SAMOA, LOOKING TOWARD
+  VAEA]
+
+Of Stevenson's short stories the finest are _The Pavilion on the
+Links_, a tale of Sicilian vengeance and English love that is full of
+haunting mystery and the deadly fear of unknown assassins; _Markheim_,
+a brilliant example of this author's skill in laying bare the conflict
+of a soul with evil and its ultimate triumph; _The Sire de Maletroit's
+Door_, a vivid picture of the cruelty and the autocratic power of a
+great French noble of the fifteenth century, and _A Lodging for the
+Night_, a remarkable defense of his life by the vagabond poet, Villon.
+Other short stories by Stevenson are worth careful study, but if you
+like these I have mentioned you will need no guide to those which
+strike your fancy.
+
+The vogue of Stevenson's essays will last as long as that of his
+romances; for he excelled in this literary art of putting his
+personality into familiar talks with his reader. He ranks with Lamb
+and Thackeray, Washington Irving and Donald G. Mitchell. Read those
+fine short sermons, _Pulvis et Umbra_ and _Aes Triplex_, the latter
+with its eloquent picture of sudden death in the fulness of power
+which was realized in Stevenson's own fate. Read _Books Which Have
+Influenced Me_, _A Gossip on Romance_ and _Talk and Talkers_. They are
+unsurpassed for thought and feeling and for brilliancy of style.
+
+But above everything looms the man himself--a chronic invalid, who
+might well have pleaded his weakness and constant pains as an excuse
+for idleness and railings against fate. Stoic courage in the strong is
+a virtue, but how much greater the cheerful courage that laughs at
+sickness and pain! Stevenson writing in a sickbed stories and essays
+that help one to endure the blows of fate is a spectacle such as this
+world has few to offer. So the man's life and work have come to be a
+constant inspiration to those who are faint-hearted, a call to arms of
+all one's courage and devotion.
+
+
+
+
+THOMAS HARDY AND HIS TRAGIC TALES OF WESSEX
+
+    GREATEST LIVING WRITER OF ENGLISH FICTION--BECAUSE OF
+    RESENTMENT OF HARSH CRITICISMS THE PROSE MASTER TURNS TO
+    VERSE.
+
+
+No one will question the assertion that Thomas Hardy is the greatest
+living English writer of fiction, and the pity of it is that a man
+with so splendid an equipment for writing novels of the first rank
+should have failed for many years to give the world any work in the
+special field in which he is an acknowledged master. Hardy seems to
+have revolted from certain harsh criticism of his last novel, _Jude
+the Obscure_, and to have determined that he would write no more
+fiction for an unappreciative world. So he has turned to the writing
+of verse, in which he barely takes second rank. It is one of the
+tragedies of literature to think of a man of Hardy's rank as a
+novelist, who might give the world a second _Tess_ or _The Return of
+the Native_, contenting himself with a ponderous poem like _The
+Dynasts_, or wasting his powers on minor poems containing no real
+poetry.
+
+Hardy's best novels are among the few in English fiction that can be
+read again and again, and that reveal at every reading some fresh
+beauties of thought or style. The man is so big, so genuine and so
+unlike all other writers that his work must be set apart in a class by
+itself. Were he not so richly endowed his pessimism would be fatal,
+for the world does not favor the novelist who demands that his fiction
+should be governed by the same hard rules that govern real life. In
+the work of most novelists we know that whatever harsh fate may befall
+the leading characters the skies will be sunny before the story
+closes, and the worthy souls who have battled against malign destiny
+will receive their reward. Not so with Hardy. We know when we begin
+one of his tales that tragedy is in store for his people. The dark
+cloud of destiny soon obscures the heavens, and through the lowering
+storm the victims move on to the final scene in which the wreck of
+their fortunes is completed.
+
+  [Illustration: THOMAS HARDY--A PORTRAIT WHICH BRINGS OUT
+  STRIKINGLY THE MAN OF CREATIVE POWER, THE ARTIST, THE PHILOSOPHER
+  AND THE POET]
+
+Literary genius can work no greater miracle than this--to make the
+reader accept as a transcript of life stories in which generous,
+unselfish people are dealt heavy blows by fate, while the mean-souled,
+sordid men and women often escape their just deserts. Hardy is not
+unreligious; he is simply and frankly pagan. Yet he differs from the
+classical writers in the fact that he is keenly alive to all the
+strong influences of nature on a sympathetic mind, and he is also a
+believer in the power of romantic love.
+
+No one has ever equaled Hardy in making the reader feel the living
+power of trees and other objects of nature. You can not escape the
+influence of his scenic effects. These are never theatrical--in fact
+they seem to form a vital part of every story. The scenes of all his
+novels are laid in his native Dorsetshire, which he has thinly
+disguised under the old Saxon name of Wessex. In _Far From the Madding
+Crowd_ Hardy first demonstrated the tremendous possibilities of rural
+scenes as a vital background for a story, but in _The Return of the
+Native_ he actually makes Egdon heath the most absorbing feature of
+the book. All the characters seem to take life and coloring from this
+heath, which has in it the potency of transforming characters and of
+wrecking lives. And in _Tess_ the peaceful, rural scenes appear to
+accentuate the tragedy of the heroine's unavailing struggles against a
+fate that was worse than death.
+
+Hardy's parents intended him for the church, but the boy probably gave
+some indications of his pagan cast of mind, for they finally
+compromised by apprenticing him to an ecclesiastical architect. In
+this calling the youth worked with sympathy and ability; the results
+of this training may be seen in the perfection of his plots and in his
+fondness for graphic description of churches and other picturesque
+buildings. One curious feature of this training may be seen in Hardy's
+sympathy and reverence for any church building. As Professor William
+Lyon Phelps very aptly says of Hardy: "No man to-day has less respect
+for God and more devotion to his house."
+
+The antipathy of Hardy to any kind of publicity has kept the facts of
+his life in the background, but it is an open secret that much of the
+longing of Jude for a college education was drawn from his own
+boyhood. It is also a matter of record that as a boy he served as
+amanuensis for many servant maids, writing the love letters which
+they dictated. In this way, before he knew the real meaning of sex and
+the significance of life he had obtained a deep insight into the
+nature of women, which served him in good stead when he came to draw
+his heroines. All his women are made up of mingled tenderness and
+caprice, and though female critics of his work may claim that these
+traits are over-drawn, no man ever feels like dissecting Hardy's
+women, for the reason that they are so charmingly feminine.
+
+One may fancy that Hardy took great delight in his architectural work,
+for it required many excursions to old churches in Dorsetshire to see
+whether they were worth restoring. When he was thirty-one Hardy
+decided to abandon architecture for fiction. His first novel,
+_Desperate Remedies_, was crude, but it is interesting as showing the
+novelist in his first attempts to reveal real life and character. His
+second book, _Under the Greenwood Tree_, is a charming love story, and
+_A Pair of Blue Eyes_ was a forerunner of his first great story, _Far
+From the Madding Crowd_. It may have been the title, torn from a line
+of Gray's _Elegy_, or the novelty of the tale, in which English
+rustics were depicted as ably as in George Eliot's novels, that made
+it appeal to the great public. Whatever the cause, the book made a
+great popular hit. I can recall when Henry Holt brought it out in the
+pretty Leisure Hour series in 1875. Three years later Hardy produced
+his finest work, _The Return of the Native_. He followed this with
+more than a dozen novels, among which may be mentioned _The Mayor of
+Casterbridge_, _The Woodlanders_, _Tess of the d'Urbervilles_, and
+_Jude the Obscure_.
+
+In taking up Hardy one should begin with _Far From the Madding Crowd_.
+The story of Bathsheba Everdene's relations with her three lovers,
+Sergeant Troy, Boldwood and Gabriel Oak, moves one at times to some
+impatience with this charming woman's frequent change of mind, but she
+would not be so attractive or so natural if she were not so full of
+caprice. His women all have strong human passion, but they are
+destitute of religious faith. They adore with rare fervor the men whom
+they love. In this respect Bathsheba is like Eustacia, Tess, Marty
+South or Lady Constantine. Social rank, education or breeding does not
+change them. Evidently Hardy believes women are made to charm and
+comfort man, not to lead him to spiritual heights, where the air is
+thin and chill and kisses have no sweetness.
+
+In his first novel Hardy lightened the tragedy of life with rare
+comedy. These comic interludes are furnished by a choice collection of
+rustics, who discuss the affairs of the universe and of their own
+township with a humor that is infectious. In this work Hardy surpasses
+George Eliot and all other novelists of his day, just as he surpasses
+them all in such wholesome types of country life as Giles Winterbourne
+and Marty South of _The Woodlanders_. No pathos is finer than Marty's
+unselfish love for the man who cannot see her own rare spirit, and
+nothing that Hardy has written is more powerful than Marty's lament
+over the grave of Giles:
+
+    "Now, my own, my love," she whispered, "you are mine, and on'y
+    mine, for she has forgot 'ee at last, although for her you
+    died. But I--whenever I get up I'll think of 'ee, and whenever
+    I lie down I'll think of 'ee. Whenever I plant the young
+    larches I'll think none can plant as you planted; and whenever
+    I split a gad, and whenever I turn the cider-wring, I'll say
+    none could do it like you. If I forget your name, let me
+    forget home and heaven! But, no, no, my love, I never can
+    forget 'ee, for you was a good man and did good things!"
+
+_The Return of the Native_ is generally regarded as Hardy's finest
+work. Certainly in this novel of passion and despair he has conjured
+up elements that speak to the heart of every reader. The hand of fate
+clutches hold of all the characters. When Eustacia fails to go to the
+door and admit her husband's mother she sets in motion events that
+bring swift ruin upon her as well as upon others. At every turn of the
+story the somber Egdon heath looms in the background, more real than
+any character in the romance, a sinister force that seems to sweep the
+characters on to their doom. _Tess_ is more appealing than any other
+of Mr. Hardy's works, but it is hurt by his desire to prove that the
+heroine was a good woman in spite of her sins against the social code.
+What has also given this work a great vogue is the splendid acting of
+Mrs. Fiske in the play made from the novel.
+
+In _Jude the Obscure_ Hardy had a splendid conception, but he
+developed it in a morbid way, bringing out the animalism of the hero's
+wife and forcing upon the reader his curious ideas about marriage.
+
+But above and beyond everything else Thomas Hardy is one of the
+greatest story tellers the world has ever seen. You may take up any
+of his works and after reading a chapter you have a keen desire to
+follow the tale to the end, despite the fact that you feel sure the
+end will be tragic. Nothing is forced for effect; the whole story
+moves with the simplicity of fate itself, and the characters, good and
+bad, are swept on to their doom as though they were caught in the rush
+of waters that go over Niagara falls. Hardy's style is clear, simple,
+direct, and abounds in Biblical allusions and phrases. In nature study
+Hardy's novels are a liberal education, for beyond any other author of
+the last century he has brought out the beauty and the significance of
+tree and flower, heath and mountain. They may be read many times, and
+at each perusal new beauties will be discovered to reward the reader.
+
+
+
+
+KIPLING'S BEST SHORT STORIES AND POEMS
+
+    TALES OF EAST INDIAN LIFE AND CHARACTER--IDEAL TRAINING OF THE
+    GENIUS THAT HAS PRODUCED SOME OF THE BEST LITERARY WORK OF OUR
+    DAY.
+
+
+Rudyard Kipling cannot be classified with any writer of his own age or
+of any literary age in the past. His tremendous strength, his visual
+faculty, even his mannerisms, are his own. He has written too much for
+his own fame, but although the next century will discard nine-tenths
+of his work, it will hold fast to the other tenth as among the best
+short stories and poems that our age produced. Kipling is essentially
+a short-story writer; not one of his longer novels has any real plot
+or the power to hold the reader's interest to the end. _Kim_, the best
+of his long works, is merely a series of panoramic views of Indian
+life and character, which could be split up into a dozen short stories
+and sketches.
+
+  [Illustration: RUDYARD KIPLING A STRIKING LIKENESS OF THE AUTHOR
+  IN A CHARACTERISTIC POSE]
+
+But in the domain of the short story Kipling is easily the first great
+creative artist of his time. No one approaches him in vivid
+descriptive power, in keen character portraiture, in the faculty of
+making a strange and alien life as real to us as the life we have
+always known. And in some of his more recent work, as in the story of
+the two young Romans in _Puck of Pook's Hill_, Kipling reaches rare
+heights in reproducing the romance of a bygone age. In these tales of
+ancient Britain the poet in Kipling has full sway and his visual power
+moves with a freedom that stamps clearly and deeply every image upon
+the reader's mind.
+
+The first ten years of Kipling's literary activity were given over to
+a wonderful reproduction of East Indian life as seen through
+sympathetic English eyes. Yet the sympathy that is revealed in
+Kipling's best sketches of native life in India is never tinged with
+sentiment. The native is always drawn in his relations to the
+Englishman; always the traits of revenge or of gratitude or of
+dog-like devotion are brought out. Kipling knows the East Indian
+through and through, because in his childhood he had a rare
+opportunity to watch the native. The barrier of reserve, which was
+always maintained against the native Englishman, was let down in the
+case of this precocious child, who was a far keener observer than most
+adults. And these early impressions lend an extraordinary life and
+vitality to the sketches and stories on which Kipling's fame will
+ultimately rest.
+
+The early years of Kipling were spent in an ideal way for the
+development of the creative literary artist. Born at Bombay in
+December, 1865, he absorbed Hindustanee from his native nurse, and he
+saw the native as he really is, without the guard which is habitually
+put up in the presence of the Briton, even though this alien may be
+held in much esteem. The son of John Lockwood Kipling, professor of
+architectural sculpture in the British School of Art at Bombay, and of
+a sister of Edward Burne-Jones, it was not strange that this boy
+should have developed strong powers of imagination or that his mind
+should have sought relief in literary expression.
+
+The school days of Kipling were spent at Westward Ho, in Devon, where,
+though he failed to distinguish himself in his studies, he established
+a reputation as a clever writer of verse and prose. He also enjoyed
+in these formative years the friendship and counsel of Burne-Jones,
+and he had the use of several fine private libraries. His wide reading
+probably injured his school standing, but it was of enormous benefit
+to him in his future literary work. At seventeen young Kipling
+returned to India, where he secured a position on the CIVIL AND
+MILITARY GAZETTE of Lahore, where his father was principal of a large
+school of arts.
+
+The Anglo-Indian newspaper is not a model, but it afforded a splendid
+field for the development of Kipling's abilities. He was not only a
+reporter of the ordinary occurrences of his station, but he was
+constantly called upon to write short sketches and poems to fill
+certain corners in the paper, that varied in size according to the
+number and length of the advertisements. Some of the best of his short
+sketches and bits of verse were written hurriedly on the composing
+stone to satisfy such needs. These sketches and poems he published
+himself and sent them to subscribers in all parts of India, but though
+their cleverness was recognized by Anglo-Indians, they did not appeal
+to the general public. After five years' work at Lahore, Kipling was
+transferred to the ALLAHABAD PIONEER, one of the most important of the
+Anglo-Indian journals. For the weekly edition of this paper he wrote
+many verses and sketches and also served as special correspondent in
+various parts of India.
+
+It was in 1889 that the PIONEER sent him on a tour of the world and he
+wrote the series of letters afterwards reprinted under the title _From
+Sea to Sea_. Kipling, like Stevenson, had to have a story to tell to
+bring out all his powers; hence these letters are not among his best
+work.
+
+Vividly do I recall Kipling's visit to San Francisco. He came into the
+CHRONICLE office and was keenly interested in the fine collections
+which made this newspaper's library before the fire the most valuable
+on this Coast, if not in the country. He was also much impressed with
+the many devices for securing speed in typesetting and other
+mechanical work. The only feature of his swarthy face that impressed
+one was his brilliant black eyes, which behind his large glasses,
+seemed to note every detail. He talked very well, but although he made
+friends among local newspapermen, he was unsuccessful in selling any
+of his stories to the editors of the Sunday supplements. He soon
+went to New York, but there also he failed to dispose of his stories.
+
+  [Illustration: RUDYARD KIPLING FROM A CARTOON BY W. NICHOLSON]
+
+Finally Kipling reached London in September, 1889, and after several
+months of discouragement, he induced a large publishing house to bring
+out _Plain Tales From the Hills_. It scored an immediate success. Like
+Byron, the unknown young writer awoke to find himself famous; magazine
+editors clamored for his stories at fancy prices and publishers
+eagerly sought his work. It may be said to Kipling's credit that he
+did not utilize this opportunity to make money out of his sudden
+reputation. He doubtless worked over many old sketches, but he put his
+best into whatever he gave the public. He married the sister of
+Wolcott Balestier, a brilliant American who became very well known in
+London as a publishers' agent, and after Balestier's death Kipling
+moved to his wife's old home in Brattleboro, Vermont, where he built a
+fine country house; but constant trouble with a younger brother of his
+wife caused him to abandon this American home and go back to England,
+where he set up his lares at Rottingdean, in Surrey. There he has
+remained, averaging a book a year, until now he has over twenty-five
+large volumes to his credit. In 1907 Kipling was given the Nobel prize
+"for the best work of an idealist tendency."
+
+In reading Kipling it is best to begin with some of the tales written
+in his early life, for these he has never surpassed in vigor and
+interest. Take, for instance, _Without Benefit of Clergy_, _The Man
+Who Was_, _The Drums of the Fore and Aft_, _The Man Who Would Be King_
+and _Beyond the Pale_. These stories all deal with Anglo-Indian life,
+two with the British soldier and the other three with episodes in the
+lives of British officials and adventurers.
+
+_The Man Who Would Be King_, the finest of all Kipling's tales of
+Anglo-Indian life and adventure, is the story of the fatal ambition of
+Daniel Dravot, told by the man who accompanied him into the wildest
+part of Afghanistan. Daniel made the natives believe that he was a god
+and he could have ruled them as a king had he not foolishly become
+enamored of a native beauty. This girl was prompted by a native
+soothsayer to bite Dravot in order to decide whether he was a god or
+merely human. The blood that she drew on his neck was ample proof of
+his spurious claims and the two adventurers were chased for miles
+through a wild country. When captured Daniel is forced to walk upon a
+bridge, the ropes of which are then cut, and his body is hurled
+hundreds of feet down upon the rocks. The story of the survivor, who
+escaped after crucifixion, is one of the ghastliest tales in all
+literature.
+
+Other tales that Kipling has written of Indian life are scarcely
+inferior to these in strange, uncanny power. One of the weirdest
+relates the adventures of an army officer who fell into the place
+where those who have been legally declared dead, but who have
+recovered, pass their lives. As a picture of hell on earth it has
+never been surpassed. Another of Kipling's Indian tales that is worth
+reading is _William the Conqueror_, a love story that has a background
+of grim work during the famine year.
+
+One of Kipling's claims to fame is that he has drawn the British
+soldier in India as he actually lives. His _Soldiers Three_--Mulvaney,
+the Irishman, Ortheris, the cockney, and Learoyd, the Yorkshireman--are
+so full of real human nature that they delight all men and many women.
+Mulvaney is the finest creation of Kipling, and most of his stories
+are brimful of Irish wit. Of late years Kipling has written some fine
+imaginative stories, such as _The Brushwood Boy_, _They_ and _An
+Habitation Enforced_. He has also revealed his genius in such tales of
+the future as _With the Night Mail_, a remarkably graphic sketch of a
+voyage across the Atlantic in a single night in a great aeroplane.
+Another side of Kipling's genius is seen in his _Jungle Stories_, in
+which all the wild animals are endowed with speech. Mowgli, the boy who
+is suckled by a wolf, is a distinct creation, and his adventures are
+full of interest. Compare these stories with the work of Thompson-Seton
+and you get a good idea of the genius of Kipling in making real the
+savage struggle for life in the Indian jungle.
+
+Of Kipling's long novels _The Naulakha_ ranks first for interest of
+plot, but _Kim_ is the best because of its series of wonderful
+pictures of East Indian life and character. _Captains Courageous_ is a
+story of Cape Cod fishing life, with an improbable plot but much good
+description of the perils and hardships of the men who seek fortune on
+the fishing banks.
+
+As a poet Kipling appeals strongly to men who love the life of action
+and adventure in all parts of the world. In his _Departmental
+Ditties_ he has painted the life of the British soldier and the
+civilian in India, and his _Danny Dever_, his _Mandalay_ and others
+which sing themselves have passed into the memory of the great public
+that seldom reads any verse unless it be the words of a popular song.
+The range of his verse is very wide, whether it is the superb imagery
+in _The Last Chantey_ or the impressive Calvanism of _McAndrew's
+Hymn_. His _Recessional_, of course, is known to everyone. It is one
+of the finest bits of verse printed in the last twenty years.
+
+Kipling, in spite of his many volumes, is only forty-six years old,
+and he may be counted on to do much more good work.
+
+If he turns to historical fiction he may yet do for English history
+what the author of _Waverley_ has done for the history of Scotland.
+Certainly he has the finest creative imagination of his age; in
+whatever domain it may work it is sure to produce literature that will
+live.
+
+
+
+
+_Bibliography_
+
+    _Short Notes of Both Standard and Other Editions, With Lives,
+    Sketches and Reminiscences._
+
+
+_These bibliographical notes on the authors discussed in this volume
+are brief because the space allotted to them was limited. They are
+designed to mention the first complete editions--the standard
+editions--as well as the lives of authors, estimates of their works
+and sketches and personal reminiscences. A mass of good material on
+the great writers of the Victorian age is buried in the bound volumes
+of English and American reviews and magazines. The best guide to these
+articles is Poole's "Index."_
+
+_The most valuable single volumes to one who wishes to make a study of
+eighteenth and nineteenth century English writers are: "A Study of
+English Prose Writers" and "A Study of English and American Poets" by
+J. Scott Clark. (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons. Price, $2 net a
+volume.) These two volumes will give any one who wishes to make a
+study of the authors I have discussed the material for a mastery of
+their works. Under full biographical sketches the author gives
+estimates of the best critics, extracts from their works and a full
+bibliography, including the best magazine articles._
+
+
+MACAULAY
+
+    The editions of Macaulay are so numerous that it is useless to
+    attempt to enumerate them. A standard edition was collected in
+    1866 by his sister, Lady Trevelyan. Four volumes are devoted
+    to the history and three to the essays and lives of famous
+    authors which he wrote for the _Encyclopedia Britannica_.
+    Macaulay's essays, which have enjoyed the greatest popularity
+    in this country, may be found in many forms. A one-volume
+    edition, containing the principal essays, is issued by several
+    publishers. Sir George Otto Trevelyan's _The Life and Letters
+    of Lord Macaulay_ in two volumes (1876) is a more interesting
+    biography than Lockhart's _Scott_. The best single-volume
+    estimate of Macaulay is J. Cotter Morison's _Macaulay_ in the
+    English Men of Letters series. Good short critical sketches of
+    Macaulay and his work may be found in Sir Leslie Stephen's
+    _Hours in a Library_, volume 2, and in Lord Morley's _Critical
+    Miscellanies_, volume 2.
+
+
+SCOTT
+
+    The edition of Scott, which was his own favorite, was issued
+    in Edinburgh in forty-eight volumes, from 1829 to 1833. Scott
+    wrote new prefaces and notes for this edition. Another is the
+    Border edition, with introductory essays and notes by Andrew
+    Lang (forty-eight volumes, 1892-1894). The recent editions of
+    Scott are numerous for, despite all criticisms of his careless
+    style, he holds his own with the popular favorites of the day.
+    Of his poems a good edition was edited by William Minto in two
+    volumes, in 1888. _The Life of Scott_ by his son-in-law, J.G.
+    Lockhart, is the standard work. This was originally issued in
+    seven volumes but Lockhart was induced to condense it into one
+    volume, which gives about all that the ordinary reader cares
+    for. This may be found in Everyman's library. Scott's
+    _Journal_ and his _Familiar Letters_, both edited by David
+    Douglas, contain much interesting material. The best short
+    lives of Scott are by R.H. Hutton in the English Men of
+    Letters series and by George Saintsbury in the Famous Scots
+    series. Among the best sketches and estimates of Scott are by
+    Andrew Lang in _Letters to Dead Authors_; Sir Leslie Stephen
+    in _Hours in a Library_; Conan Doyle in _Through the Magic
+    Door_; Walter Bagehot in _Literary Studies_; Stevenson in
+    _Gossip on Romance_ and in _Memoirs and Portraits_, and S.R.
+    Crockett in _The Scott Country_. _Abbotsford_, by Washington
+    Irving, gives the best personal sketches of Scott at home.
+
+
+CARLYLE
+
+    Carlyle's _Essays_ and his _French Revolution_, upon which his
+    fame will chiefly rest, are issued in many editions. It would
+    be well if his longer works could be condensed into single
+    volumes by competent hands. A revised edition of his
+    _Frederick_ was issued in one short volume. For the facts of
+    Carlyle's life, the best book is his own _Reminiscences
+    issued_ in 1881 and edited by Froude, who was his literary
+    executor with the full power to publish or suppress. Froude
+    had so great an antipathy to what Carlyle himself called
+    "mealy-mouthed biography" that he erred on the side of extreme
+    frankness. In _Thomas Carlyle--The First Forty Tears of His
+    Life_, _Life in London_ and _Letters of Jane Welsh Carlyle_,
+    Froude permitted the publication of many malicious comments by
+    Carlyle on his famous contemporaries. These and morbid
+    expressions of remorse by Carlyle over imaginary neglect of
+    his wife caused a great revulsion of public sentiment and the
+    fame of Carlyle was clouded for ten years. Finally, after much
+    acrimonious controversy, the truth prevailed and Carlyle came
+    into his own again.
+
+    Among the best books on Carlyle are Lowell's _Essays_, volume
+    2; David Masson, _Carlyle Personally and in His Writings_;
+    E.P. Whipple, _Essays and Reviews_; Emerson, _English Traits_;
+    Lowell, _My Study Windows_; Morley, _English Literature in the
+    Reign of Victoria_; Greg, _Literary and Social Judgments_;
+    Moncure Conway, _Carlyle_, and Henley, _Views and Reviews_.
+
+    Among magazine and review articles may be mentioned George
+    Eliot in WESTMINSTER REVIEW, volume 57; John Burroughs in
+    ATLANTIC MONTHLY, volume 51; Emerson in SCRIBNER'S MAGAZINE,
+    volume 22; Froude in NINETEENTH CENTURY, volume 10, and Leslie
+    Stephen in CORNHILL, volume 44.
+
+
+DE QUINCEY
+
+    It is a curious fact that the first complete edition of De
+    Quincey's works was issued in Boston in twenty volumes
+    (1850-1855) by Ticknor & Fields. Much of the material was
+    gathered from English periodicals, as De Quincey was the
+    greatest magazine writer of his age. This was followed by the
+    Riverside edition in twelve volumes (Boston, 1877). The
+    standard English edition is _The Collected Writings of Thomas
+    De Quincey_, fourteen volumes, edited by David Masson
+    (1889-1890). A.H. Japp wrote the standard English _Life of De
+    Quincey_ (London, two volumes, 1879). The best short life is
+    Masson's in the English Men of Letters series. George
+    Saintsbury gives a good sketch of De Quincey in _Essays in
+    English Literature_. Other estimates may be found in the
+    following works: Leslie Stephen, _Hours in a Library_; H.A.
+    Page, _De Quincey, His Life and Writings_ and in Mrs.
+    Oliphant's _Literary History of England_.
+
+
+LAMB
+
+    Reprints of the _Essays of Elia_ have been very numerous. One
+    of the best editions of Lamb's complete works was edited by
+    E.V. Lucas in seven volumes, to which he added in 1905 _The
+    Life of Charles Lamb_ in two volumes. Another is _Complete
+    Works and Correspondence_, edited by Canon Ainger (London, six
+    volumes). Ainger also wrote an excellent short life of Lamb
+    for the English Men of Letters series. Hazlitt and Percy
+    Fitzgerald have revised Thomas Noon Talfourd's standard
+    _Letters of Charles Lamb, With a Sketch of His Life_. Among
+    sketches of the life of Charles and Mary Lamb may be noted
+    Barry Cornwall's _Charles Lamb--A Memoir_; Fitzgerald,
+    _Charles Lamb: His Friends, His Haunts and His Books_; Walter
+    Pater, _Appreciations_; R.H. Stoddard, _Personal
+    Recollections_; Augustine Birrell, _Res Judicat�_; Nicoll,
+    _Landmarks of English Literature_; Talfourd, _Final Memorials
+    of Charles Lamb_; Hutton, _Literary Landmarks of London_.
+
+
+DICKENS
+
+    The first collective edition of Dickens' works was issued in
+    1847. The standard edition is that of Chapman & Hall, London,
+    who were the original publishers of _Pickwick_. One of the
+    best of the many editions of Dickens is the Macmillan Pocket
+    edition with reproductions of the original covers of the
+    monthly parts of the novels as they appeared, the original
+    illustrations by Cruikshank, Leech, "Phiz" (Hablot Browne) and
+    others, and valuable and interesting introductions by Charles
+    Dickens the younger. Another good edition is in the World's
+    Classics, with brilliant introductions by G.K. Chesterton. In
+    buying an edition of Dickens it is well to get one with
+    reproductions of the original illustrations, as these add much
+    to the pleasure and interest of the novels.
+
+    For ready reference to Dickens' works there is a _Dickens
+    Dictionary_, giving the names of all characters and places in
+    the novels, by G.A. Pierce, and another similar work by A.J.
+    Philip. Mary Williams has also prepared a _Dickens
+    Concordance_.
+
+    Forster's _Life of Charles Dickens_, in three volumes, is the
+    standard work, as Forster was closely connected with the
+    novelist from the time he made his hit with _Pickwick_. George
+    Gissing, the novelist, made an abridgment of Forster's _Life_
+    in one volume, which is well done. Scores of shorter lives and
+    sketches have been written. Among the best of these are Dr.
+    A.W. Ward's _Charles Dickens_ in the English Men of Letters
+    series; Taine's chapter on Dickens in his _History of English
+    Literature_; Sir Leslie Stephen's article in the _Dictionary
+    of National Biography_; Mrs. Oliphant's _The Victorian Age in
+    English Literature_; F.G. Kitton's _Charles Dickens: His Life,
+    Writings and Personality_. _The Letters_, edited by Miss
+    Hogarth and Mary Dickens, are valuable for the light they
+    throw on the novelist's character and work.
+
+    In reminiscence of Dickens, the best books are Mary Dickens'
+    _My Father as I Recall Him_; J.T. Fields' _In and Out of Doors
+    With Charles Dickens_ and G. Dolby's _Charles Dickens as I
+    Knew Him_, the last devoted to the famous reading tours.
+    Edmund Yates, Anthony Trollope, James Payn, R.H. Haine and
+    many others have written readable reminiscences.
+
+    For the home life of Dickens and his haunts see F.G. Kitton's
+    _The Dickens Country_; Thomas Fort's _In Kent With Charles
+    Dickens_ and H.S. Ward's _The Real Dickens Land_. Of poems on
+    Dickens' death the very best is Bret Harte's _Dickens in
+    Camp_. _The Wisdom of Dickens_, compiled by Temple Scott, is a
+    good collection of extracts.
+
+
+THACKERAY
+
+    Almost as many editions of Thackeray's works have been
+    published as of Dickens' novels, and the reader in his
+    selection must be guided largely by his own taste. In choosing
+    an edition, however, always get one that contains Thackeray's
+    own illustrations, as, though the drawing is frequently crude,
+    the sketches are full of humor and help one to understand the
+    author's conception of the characters. The best general
+    edition is _The Biographical_, with introductions by his
+    daughter, Mrs. Richmond Ritchie (London, 1897-1900). The
+    Charterhouse edition of Thackeray in twenty-six volumes,
+    published in England by Smith, Elder & Co. and in this country
+    by Lippincott, is an excellent library set containing all the
+    original illustrations.
+
+    No regular biography of Thackeray has ever been written
+    because of his expressed wish, but his daughter, Mrs. Richmond
+    Ritchie, has supplied this lack with many sketches and
+    introductions to various editions of her father's works.
+    Anthony Trollope in his autobiography gives many charming
+    glimpses of Thackeray but his sketch of Thackeray in the
+    English Men of Letters series is not warmly appreciative.
+
+    One of the best short estimates of Thackeray is Charles
+    Whibley's _Thackeray_ (1905). Also valuable are sketches by
+    Frederic Harrison in _Early Victorian Literature_; Brownell,
+    _Early Victorian Masters_; Whipple, _Character and
+    Characteristic Men_; R.H. Stoddard, _Anecdote Biography of
+    Thackeray_; Andrew Lang, _Letters to Dead Authors_; G.T.
+    Fields, _Yesterdays With Authors_; Jeaffreson, _Novels and
+    Novelists_ and W.B. Jerrold, _The Best of All Good Company_.
+
+    The reviews and magazines, especially in the last ten years,
+    have abounded in articles on Thackeray. Among these the best
+    have appeared in SCRIBNER'S MAGAZINE. A small volume, _The
+    Sense and Sentiment of Thackeray_ (Harper's, 1909), gives
+    numerous good extracts from the novels as well as from the
+    essays.
+
+
+CHARLOTTE BRONT�
+
+    Smith, Elder & Co. of London were the publishers of _Jane
+    Eyre_ and they also issued the first collected edition of
+    Charlotte Bront�'s works. This firm still publishes the
+    standard English edition, the Haworth edition, with admirable
+    introductions by Mrs. Humphrey Ward and with many
+    illustrations from photographs of the places and people made
+    memorable in Charlotte's novels. A good American edition is
+    the Shirley edition, with excellent illustrations, many of
+    them reproductions of rare daguerreotypes.
+
+    The standard life of Charlotte Bront� until fifteen years ago
+    was Mrs. Gaskell's, one of the most appealing stories in all
+    literature. Clement K. Shorter's _Charlotte Bront� and Her
+    Circle_ is now indispensable because of the mass of facts that
+    the author has gathered in regard to the life of the sisters
+    in the lonely parsonage and their remarkable literary
+    development. Augustine Birrell has written a good short life
+    of Charlotte, while A.M.F. Robinson (Mme. Duclaux) has a
+    volume on Emily Bront� in the Famous Women series.
+
+    T. Wemyss Reid was the first writer to make original research
+    among the Bront� material and his book, _Charlotte Bront�--A
+    Monograph_, paved the way for the exhaustive study of this
+    strange family of genius by Clement Shorter. Other books that
+    give much original material are _The Bront�s in Ireland_, by
+    Rev. Dr. William Wright, and _Charlotte Bront� and Her
+    Sisters_, by Clement Shorter. Mr. Shorter also in _The
+    Bront�s--Life and Letters_ gives all of Charlotte's letters in
+    the order of their dates.
+
+
+GEORGE ELIOT
+
+    The first collected edition of George Eliot's works was
+    brought out in 1878-1880 in London and Edinburgh. Many
+    editions have since appeared in England and in this country,
+    the best one being the English Cabinet edition, published by
+    A. & C. Black.
+
+    The standard life of George Eliot is _George Eliot's Life as
+    Related in Her Letters and Journals_, edited by her husband,
+    J.W. Cross, who served for ten years as curate of Haworth.
+    Leslie Stephen has written a remarkably good short life of
+    George Eliot in the English Men of Letters series.
+
+    Among critical articles on George Eliot may be mentioned Henry
+    James in _Partial Portraits_; Mathilde Blind, _George Eliot_;
+    Oscar Browning, _Life of George Eliot_ in Great Writers
+    series; Dowden, _Studies in Literature_; Oscar Browning,
+    _Great Writers_; Mayo W. Hazeltine, _Chats About Books_; R.H.
+    Hutton, _Modern Guides of Religious Thought_; R.E. Cleveland,
+    _George Eliot's Poetry_; Frederic Harrison, _The Choice of
+    Books_ and Sydney Lanier, _The Development of the English
+    Novel_.
+
+
+RUSKIN
+
+    The great edition of Ruskin is the Library edition by E.T.
+    Cook and A. Wedderburn, begun in 1903. It is splendidly
+    illustrated and is a superb specimen of book-making. English
+    and American editors of Ruskin are numerous.
+
+    The standard life of Ruskin is by W.G. Collingwood, his
+    secretary and ardent disciple. One of his pupils, E.T. Cook,
+    published _Studies in Ruskin_, which throws much light on his
+    methods of teaching art. J.A. Hobson in _John Ruskin, Social
+    Reformer_ discusses his economic and social teaching. Dr.
+    Charles Waldstein of Cambridge in _The Work of John Ruskin_
+    develops his art theories. Good critical studies may also be
+    found in W.M. Rossetti's _Ruskin_ and Frederic Harrison's
+    _Tennyson, Ruskin, Mill and Other Literary Estimates_; Justin
+    McCarthy, _Modern Leaders_; Mary R. Mitford, _Recollections of
+    a Literary Life_ and R.H. Hutton, _Contemporary Thought and
+    Thinkers_.
+
+    Among magazine articles may be noted W.J. Stillman in the
+    CENTURY, volume 13; Charles Waldstein in HARPER'S, volume 18;
+    Justin McCarthy in the GALAXY, volume 13, and Leslie Stephen
+    in FRAZER'S, volumes 9 and 49.
+
+
+TENNYSON
+
+    The best edition of Tennyson is the Eversley in six volumes,
+    published by the Macmillans and edited by his son Hallam,
+    which contains a mass of notes left by the poet and many
+    explanations of peculiar words and metaphors which the father
+    gave to the son in discussing his work. This edition also
+    gives the changes made by the poet in his constant revision of
+    his works, some of which were not improvements.
+
+    A mass of critical commentary and reminiscence has been
+    published on Tennyson and his poetical work. Among the best of
+    these volumes are _Tennyson, Ruskin and Mill_, by Frederic
+    Harrison; _Tennyson and His Friends_, by Mrs. Richmond
+    Ritchie; _The Homes and Haunts of Tennyson_, by Napier;
+    _Tennyson, His Art and Relation to Modern Life_, by Stopford
+    A. Brooke; _The Poetry of Tennyson_, by Henry Van Dyke; the
+    chapter on Tennyson in Stedman's _Victorian Poets_; a
+    commentary on Tennyson's _In Memoriam_ by Prof. A.C. Bradley;
+    _Alfred Tennyson_, by Andrew Lang; _Views and Reviews_, by
+    W.E. Henley; _Yesterdays With Authors_, by J.T. Fields; _The
+    Victorian Age_, by Mrs. Oliphant. Dr. Henry Van Dyke
+    contributed five articles on Tennyson to SCRIBNER'S MAGAZINE,
+    volume 6.
+
+
+BROWNING
+
+    An enormous literature of comment, appreciation and
+    interpretation has grown up around Browning, largely due to
+    the work of various Browning societies in this country and in
+    Europe. The London Browning Society especially has brought out
+    many papers that will be of interest to Browning students.
+    Other works are Arthur Symons, _Introduction to the Study of
+    Browning_ (London, 1886); G.W. Cooke, _Browning Guide Book_
+    (New York, 1901); Fotheringham, _Studies_ (London, 1898);
+    Stedman, _Victorian Poets_; Prof. Hiram Corson, _Introduction
+    to Browning_; George E. Woodberry, _Studies in Literature and
+    Life_; Hamilton W. Mabie, _Essays in Literary
+    Interpretation_; A. Birrell, _Obiter Dicta_; George
+    Saintsbury, _Corrected Impressions_.
+
+    The first edition of Browning's poems appeared in two volumes
+    in 1849, a second in three volumes in 1863 and a third in six
+    volumes in 1868. A revised edition containing all the poems
+    was issued in sixteen volumes in 1888-1889. A fine complete
+    edition in two volumes, edited by Augustine Birrell and F.G.
+    Kenyon, was issued in 1896, and Smith, Elder & Co., London,
+    brought out a two-volume edition in 1900. In this country the
+    Riverside edition of _Browning's Poetical Works_ in six
+    volumes, issued by Houghton, Mifflin & Co., and the Camberwell
+    edition in twelve handy volumes, with notes by Charlotte
+    Porter and Helen A. Clarke, published by Crowell, are valuable
+    for Browning students.
+
+    The standard life is _The Life and Letters of Robert
+    Browning_, by Mrs. Sutherland Orr, but valuable are _The Love
+    Letters of Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Browning_,
+    issued by Browning's son in 1899. For Edmund Gosse's _Robert
+    Browning--Personalia_ the poet supplied much of the material
+    in notes. Good short sketches and estimates are Chesterton's
+    _Browning_ in the English Men of Letters series and Waugh's
+    _Robert Browning_.
+
+
+GEORGE MEREDITH
+
+    The standard edition of Meredith's works is the Boxhill
+    edition in seventeen volumes, with photogravure frontispieces,
+    issued in this country by the Scribners. The same text is used
+    in the Pocket Edition in sixteen volumes, which does not
+    include the unfinished novel, _Celt and Saxon_. A mass of
+    comment on Meredith may be found in the English and American
+    reviews and magazines, to which Poole's _Index_ furnishes the
+    best guide.
+
+    Mrs. M.S. Henderson, _George Meredith: Novelist, Poet,
+    Reformer_; George Macaulay Trevelyan, _The Poetry and
+    Philosophy of George Meredith_; John Lane, _Biography of
+    George Meredith_, and R. Le Gallienne, _Characteristics of
+    George Meredith_.
+
+
+STEVENSON
+
+    Robert Louis Stevenson's early work appeared in fugitive form
+    in magazines and reviews and even after he had written _The
+    New Arabian Nights_ and _Travels With a Donkey_ he was forced
+    to see such excellent matter as _The Silverado Squatters_ cut
+    up into magazine articles and more than half of it discarded.
+    The vogue of Stevenson was greater in this country than in
+    England until he had fully established his reputation. In 1878
+    _An Inland Voyage_ appeared and in 1879 _Travels With a
+    Donkey_, but it was not until 1883 that _Treasure Island_ made
+    him well known. The standard edition of Stevenson is the
+    Thistle edition, beautifully printed and illustrated, and
+    issued at Edinburgh and New York, 1894-1898. _The Letters of
+    Stevenson to His Family_, originally issued in 1899, have now
+    been incorporated with _Vailima Letters_ and issued in four
+    volumes. They are arranged chronologically, with admirable
+    biographical commentary by Sydney Colvin, to whom a great part
+    of them was written. Stevenson's personality was so attractive
+    that a mass of reminiscence and comment has been produced
+    since his death in 1894. The best books are Graham Balfour,
+    _Life of Robert Louis Stevenson_; Walter Raleigh, _R.L.
+    Stevenson_; Simpson, _Stevenson's Edinburgh Days_, and
+    _Memoirs of Vailima_, by Isobel Strong and Lloyd Osbourne, the
+    novelist's stepchildren. Henry James in _Partial Portraits_
+    has a fine appreciation of Stevenson and _Robert Louis
+    Stevenson in California_, by Katharine D. Osbourne is rich in
+    reminiscence.
+
+
+THOMAS HARDY
+
+    Since 1895, Thomas Hardy has written no fiction. The standard
+    edition of his works is published in this country by the
+    Harpers. Recently this firm has issued Hardy in a convenient
+    thin paper edition which may be slipped into the coat pocket.
+    His first novel, _Desperate Remedies_, appeared in 1871 but it
+    was not until the issue of _Far From the Madding Crowd_ in
+    1874 that he gained popular fame. Many magazine articles have
+    been written on the "corner of Dorsetshire" which Hardy calls
+    Wessex. Good books on the Hardy country are _The Wessex of
+    Romance_, by W. Sherren, and _The Wessex of Thomas Hardy_, by
+    Windle.
+
+
+KIPLING
+
+    The standard edition of Kipling is the Outward Bound edition,
+    published in this country by the Scribners. It contains a
+    general introduction by the author and special prefaces to
+    each volume, with illustrations from bas reliefs made by the
+    novelist's father. Doubleday, Page & Co. are issuing a pocket
+    edition of Kipling, on thin paper with flexible leather
+    binding, which is very convenient. Any additional books will
+    be added to each of these editions. Kipling has told of his
+    early life in India and of his precocious literary activity in
+    _My First Book_ (1894). Richard Le Gallienne made a study of
+    the novelist in _Rudyard Kipling--A Criticism_ and Edmund
+    Gosse in _Questions at Issue_ discusses his short stories.
+    Prof. William Lyon Phelps in _Essays on Modern Novelists_ has
+    a fine chapter on Kipling. Andrew Lang in _Essays in Little_
+    treats of "Mr. Kipling's Stories" and Barrie has an
+    appreciation in CONTEMPORARY REVIEW for March, 1891. A useful
+    _Kipling Index_ is issued by Doubleday, Page & Co. All titles
+    are indexed so that one may locate any story or character.
+
+
+
+
+_Index_
+
+
+A Blot on the 'Scutcheon, 108, 110, 113.
+
+A Child's Garden of Verse, 125.
+
+Adam Bede, 65, 76, 82, 84.
+
+Addison, 58.
+
+A Dissertation on Roast Pig, 41, 71.
+
+A Dream of Fair Women, 99.
+
+Adventures of Philip, The, 60.
+
+Aes Triplex, 130.
+
+Agnes Gray, 71.
+
+A Gossip on Romance, 130.
+
+A Lodging for the Night, 124, 129.
+
+Alison Cunningham, 125.
+
+Allahabad Pioneer, 144.
+
+Amazing Marriage, The, 122.
+
+An English Mail Coach, 31.
+
+An Habitation Enforced, 148.
+
+An Inland Voyage, 126.
+
+Anglo-Indian Life, 146.
+
+Antiquary, The, 18.
+
+A Pair of Blue Eyes, 135.
+
+Apostles, 99.
+
+Arnold, 116.
+
+Arthurian Legends, 101.
+
+Ashburton, Lady, 25.
+
+Ashby de la Zouch, 17.
+
+Asolando, 108, 111.
+
+A Soldier of France, 12.
+
+Asolo, 113.
+
+A Soul's Tragedy, 108, 110, 113.
+
+A Tale of Two Cities, 53.
+
+Austro-Italian War, 118.
+
+A Window in Thrums, 39.
+
+
+Balestier, Wolcott, 145.
+
+Ballantyne, 16, 90.
+
+Balzac, 12.
+
+Balzac's Seraphita, 74.
+
+Bank of England, 109.
+
+Barrett, Elizabeth, 110.
+
+Barrie, 39.
+
+Bathsheba Everdene, 136.
+
+Becket, 101.
+
+Bells and Pomegranates, 109.
+
+Beyond the Pale, 146.
+
+Biblical Allusions, 139.
+
+Bleak House, 54.
+
+Blue Coat School, 44.
+
+Boldwood, 136.
+
+Boswell, 4.
+
+Bray, Charles, of Coventry, 80.
+
+Brantwood, 93.
+
+Break, Break, Break, 105.
+
+Bront�, Charlotte, XII, 66 to 72.
+
+Bront�, Emily, 68.
+
+Browning, Robert, XII, 97, 103, 106 to 115, 117, 118.
+
+Browning, Mrs., 110.
+
+Brushwood Boy, The, 148.
+
+Bunyan, 28.
+
+Burne-Jones, 142, 143.
+
+Burns, 113.
+
+Byron, 7, 98, 109, 145.
+
+
+Cain, 98.
+
+California, 127.
+
+Calvanism, 149.
+
+Cape Cod, 148.
+
+Captains Courageous, 148.
+
+Carlyle, Thomas, XII, XIII, 3, 4, 8, 20 to 30, 43, 52, 53, 93.
+
+Casa Guidi Windows, 110.
+
+Cervantes, 11.
+
+Chapman & Hall, 118.
+
+Charlotte, 68.
+
+Child Angel, The, 45.
+
+Childe Harold, 7, 90.
+
+Choir Invisible, The, 85.
+
+Christmas Carol, 51.
+
+Christmas Story, 51.
+
+Chronicle, 144.
+
+Clive, 4, 9.
+
+Cloister and the Hearth, The, 65.
+
+Coleridge, 35, 42, 43.
+
+Colombe's Birthday, 110, 113.
+
+Colonel Newcome, 58.
+
+Confessions of an English Opium Eater, 36.
+
+Count Robert of Paris, 18.
+
+Court of Chancery, 54.
+
+Cricket on the Hearth, The, 51.
+
+Croker, 4.
+
+Cromwell, 24.
+
+Cross, J.W., 82.
+
+Crossing the Bar, 98, 101, 105, 113.
+
+Crown of Wild Olives, The, 94.
+
+
+Dale in the Alps, 94.
+
+Daniel Deronda, 79, 82.
+
+Daniel Dravot, 146.
+
+Danny Dever, 149.
+
+David and Allan, 129.
+
+David and Catriona in Holland, 129.
+
+David Balfour, 128.
+
+David Copperfield, 53, 128.
+
+David Warwick, 120.
+
+Defoe, 62.
+
+Departmental Ditties, 149.
+
+De Quincey, Thomas, XII, 30 to 38, 45, 93.
+  Autobiography, 31.
+  Confessions, 31, 32.
+
+Desperate Remedies, 135.
+
+Dickens, Charles, XII, 13, 44, 47 to 55, 61, 128.
+
+Dinah Morris, 84.
+
+Diana of the Crossways, 115, 120, 121, 122.
+
+Dombey and Son, 54.
+
+Don Juan, 98.
+
+Doyle, Conan, 12.
+
+Dramatic Idylls, 111.
+
+Dramatic Romances and Lyrics, 110.
+
+Dream Children, XIV, 41, 45.
+
+Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, 125, 126, 128.
+
+Drums of the Fore and Aft, The, 146.
+
+Dynasts, The, 132.
+
+
+East India Life, 141.
+
+Edinburgh Review, 4, 23.
+
+Egdon Heath, 133, 138.
+
+Egoist, The, 121.
+
+Eliot, George, XII, 52, 76 to 86, 136, 137.
+
+Emerson, 27, 116.
+
+English History, 120.
+
+English Humorists, The, 60.
+
+Enoch Arden, 101.
+
+Esmond, 56.
+
+Essays of Elia, 40, 43.
+
+Eugenie Grandet, 12.
+
+Eustacia, 136, 138.
+
+Evan Harrington, 121.
+
+Evelyn Hope, 113.
+
+
+Far From the Madding Crowd, 133, 135, 136.
+
+Father Damien, 124.
+
+Felix Holt, 82.
+
+Fifine at the Fair, 108, 111.
+
+Fiske, Mrs., in Becky Sharp, 58, 138.
+
+Flight of the Tartar Tribe, The, 31.
+
+Fors Clavigera, 92.
+
+Four Georges, The, 60.
+
+Fra Lippo Lippi, 113.
+
+Fraser's Magazine, 23.
+
+Frederick the Great, 24.
+
+French Revolution, The, 23, 27.
+
+From Sea to Sea, 144.
+
+Froude, 24.
+
+
+Gabriel Oak, 136.
+
+Gaelic Comment, 103.
+
+Gaskell, Mrs., 70.
+
+Gethsemane, XIV.
+
+Giles Winterbourne, 137.
+
+Goethe, 23, 26.
+
+Goldsmith, 3.
+
+Gray's Elegy, 135.
+
+Great Hoggarty Diamond, The, 59.
+
+
+Hallam, Alfred, 99.
+
+Hallam, Arthur, 99, 100, 103.
+
+Hardy, Thomas, XIII, 77, 115, 116, 131 to 140.
+
+Harold, 101.
+
+Hastings, Warren, 4, 9.
+
+Heart of the Midlothian, The, 17, 18.
+
+Henry Esmond, 60.
+
+Herbert, Sidney, 120.
+
+Heroes and Hero Worship, 22.
+
+Herve Riel, 108.
+
+History of England, 7.
+
+Holt, Henry, 136.
+
+Household Words and All the Year Round, 51.
+
+Howells' Criticism of Thackeray, 62.
+
+How They Brought the Good News, 108.
+
+
+Idylls of the King, The, 96, 100, 104.
+
+India, 102.
+
+Indian Life, 140.
+
+In Memoriam, 96, 98, 100, 103, 104.
+
+Inn Album, The, 108, 111.
+
+Irving, Washington, 130.
+
+Ivanhoe, 17.
+
+
+James, Henry, 115, 124.
+
+Jane Eyre, 59, 66, 68, 71, 73.
+
+Janet's Repentance, 81.
+
+John Silver, 125, 128.
+
+Johnson, 3.
+
+Jude the Obscure, 131, 134, 136, 138.
+
+Jungle Stories, 148.
+
+
+Keats, 109.
+
+Kidnaped, 128.
+
+King Arthur, 104.
+
+King's Treasures, 92.
+
+Kim, 140, 148.
+
+Kipling, John Lockwood, 142.
+
+Kipling, Rudyard, XIII, 140 to 149.
+
+
+Labor, 26.
+
+Lacy, 113.
+
+Lady Constantine, 136.
+
+Lady Geraldine's Courtship, 110.
+
+Lady Godiva, 100.
+
+Lady of Shalott, The, 99.
+
+Lady of the Lake, The, 7, 15.
+
+Lahore, 144.
+
+Lamb, Mary, 41, 42.
+
+Lamb, Charles, XII, 35, 38 to 46, 123, 130.
+
+Lamp of Sacrifice, 94.
+
+Last Chantey, The, 149.
+
+Last Essays of Elia, The, 45.
+
+Last Ride, The, 108.
+
+Lay of the Last Minstrel, The, 15.
+
+Lays of Ancient Rome, 7.
+
+Leader, Organ of the Free Thinkers, 81.
+
+Learoyd, 147.
+
+Leisure Hour Series, 136.
+
+Lewes, George Henry, 78, 81, 82.
+
+Lincolnshire, 98.
+
+Lockhart, 16.
+
+Locksley Hall, 96, 97, 100, 101, 103.
+
+London, Jack, 129.
+
+London Magazine, 43.
+
+Lord Ormont and His Aminta, 122.
+
+Lotus Eaters, The, 99.
+
+Lovel, the Widower, 60.
+
+Lucy, 119, 120.
+
+Lyrical Poems of Robert Browning, by Dr. A.J. George, 112.
+
+
+Macaulay, Thomas Babington, 3 to 11, 20.
+
+Malory's Chronicle, 104.
+
+Manchester Grammar School, 34.
+
+Mandalay, 149.
+
+Manfred, 98.
+
+Man Who Was, The, 146.
+
+Man Who Would be King, The, 146.
+
+Margaret Ogilvie, 39.
+
+Marion Evans, 79.
+
+Markheim, 124, 129.
+
+Marmion, 15.
+
+Marty South, 136, 137.
+
+Mason's Song, 26.
+
+Maud, 97, 100.
+
+Mayor of Casterbridge, The, 136.
+
+McAndrew's Hymn, 149.
+
+Melbourne, Lord, 120.
+
+Men and Women, 108.
+
+Meredith, George, XII, 115 to 123, 124.
+
+Micah Clarke, 12.
+
+Middle Ages, The, 99.
+
+Middlemarch, 79, 82, 85.
+
+Millais, 92.
+
+Miller, Henry, in The Only Way, 53.
+
+Mill on the Floss, The, 76, 82, 84.
+
+Milnes, 99.
+
+Milton, 9, 107.
+
+Mitchell, 130.
+
+Modern Painters, 87, 91, 93.
+
+Monckton, 99.
+
+Monte Cristo, 12.
+
+Moravian School, 118.
+
+Morning Post, London, 118.
+
+Morte d' Arthur, 100.
+
+Mowgli, 148.
+
+Mrs. Battle's Opinion on Whist, 41, 45.
+
+Mulvaney, the Irishman, 147.
+
+Murder As One of the Fine Arts, 31, 35.
+
+My Star, 113.
+
+Mystery of Edwin Drood, The, 50.
+
+
+Napoleon of Rhyme, 109.
+
+Naulakha, The, 148.
+
+New Arabian Nights, 126.
+
+Newcomes, The, 60.
+
+Newdigate Prize, 91.
+
+Niagara Falls, 139.
+
+Nicholas Nickleby, 50, 54.
+
+Nobel Prize, 146.
+
+Norton, Caroline, 120.
+
+
+Ode on the Death of the Duke of Wellington, 105.
+
+Old Curiosity Shop, 50.
+
+Old Mortality, 18.
+
+Oliver Twist, 50.
+
+O Lyric Love, 108, 111, 114.
+
+One Word More, 108, 111, 113.
+
+Ordeal of Richard Feverel, The, 115, 119.
+
+Our Mutual Friend, 54.
+
+Oxford, 90.
+
+
+Palace of Art, The, 99.
+
+Past and Present, 22, 26, 27.
+
+Paracelsus, 109.
+
+Parsifal, 107.
+
+Pauline, 109.
+
+Pavilion on the Links, The, 129.
+
+Payn, James, 17.
+
+Peel, Sir Robert, 120.
+
+Pendennis, 60, 64.
+
+Pew, 125, 128.
+
+Pickwick Papers, 50, 52.
+
+Pied Piper of Hamelin, The, 108.
+
+Pilgrim's Progress, 79.
+
+Pilgrim's Scrip, 119.
+
+Pippa Passes, 108, 109, 113, 114.
+
+Phelps, Prof. William Lyon, 115, 116, 134.
+
+Plain Tales from the Hills, 145.
+
+Poems by Two Brothers, 99.
+
+Poems, Chiefly Lyrical, 99.
+
+Preterita, 92, 94.
+
+Princess, The, 100, 105, 114.
+
+Professor, The, 71.
+
+Prospice, 108, 111, 113.
+
+Puck of Pook's Hill, 141.
+
+Pulvis et Umbra, 130.
+
+Punch, 59.
+
+
+Queen Mary, 101.
+
+Queen Victoria, 104.
+
+Quentin Durward, 17, 18.
+
+
+Rabbi Ben Ezra, 113.
+
+Rasselas, 79.
+
+Recessional, 149.
+
+Red Cotton Nightcap Country, 111.
+
+Reid, Mayne, 90.
+
+Return of the Native, The, 132, 133, 136, 138.
+
+Rhoda Fleming, 121.
+
+Rhone below Geneva, 94.
+
+Richardson, 62.
+
+Richard the Lion-Hearted, 17.
+
+Ring and the Book, The, 97, 106, 113.
+
+Robinson Crusoe, 125.
+
+Rob Roy, 18.
+
+Romola, 77, 82, 85.
+
+Rose La Touche, 92.
+
+Rottingdean, 145.
+
+Ruskin, John, XII, 17, 30, 87 to 95.
+
+
+Sad Adventures of the Rev. Amos Barton, The, 81.
+
+Sandra Belloni, 121.
+
+Sands, George, 74.
+
+San Marco, 111.
+
+Sartor Resartus, 21, 23, 28.
+
+Scenes From Clerical Life, 81.
+
+School of Scandal, The, 120.
+
+Scotch Moors, 127.
+
+Scotch Scenes, 127.
+
+Scotch Stories, 128.
+
+Scott, Sir Walter, 11 to 19, 47, 52, 90, 128.
+
+Sea Wolf, The, 129.
+
+Seigfried, Wagner's, 107.
+
+Sellwood, Miss Emily, 100.
+
+Sesame and Lilies, 94.
+
+Seven Lamps, The, 87, 92, 93.
+
+Seymour, 50.
+
+Shakespeare, 47, 106, 114, 120.
+
+Shaving of Shagpat, The, 118.
+
+Shelley, 109.
+
+Sheridan, 120.
+
+Shibli Bagarag, 119.
+
+Shirley, 74.
+
+Sicilian vengeance, 129.
+
+Sidney, 104.
+
+Silas Marner, 82, 84.
+
+Sir Austin, 119.
+
+Sire de Maletroit's Door, The, 124, 129.
+
+Sketches by Boz, 50.
+
+Soldiers Three, 147.
+
+Somoa, 127.
+
+Sonnets From the Portuguese, 110.
+
+Sordello, 106, 109.
+
+Southey, 43.
+
+South Sea Islands, 127.
+
+Spectator, 58.
+
+Spedding, 99.
+
+Spencer, Herbert, 81, 83.
+
+Steele, 58.
+
+Stevenson, XII, 11, 39, 40, 72, 120, 123 to 130.
+
+Stones of Venice, The, 87, 92, 94, 95.
+
+Story of an African Farm, The, 116.
+
+Strafford, 109.
+
+Strauss--Life of Jesus, 80.
+
+Study of Sociology, The, 83.
+
+Supernatural Man, The, 45
+
+Suspira, 36.
+
+Swift, 3.
+
+
+Taine, 103.
+
+Tales From Shakespeare, 43.
+
+Tales of East India Life, 140.
+
+Talisman, The, 18.
+
+Talk and Talkers, 130.
+
+Tennyson, Alfred, XII, 96 to 106, 113, 114.
+
+Tennyson, Charles, 99.
+
+Tess of the d'Urbervilles, 65, 132, 134, 136, 138.
+
+Thackeray, William Makepeace, XII, XIV, 13, 48, 52, 56 to 66, 73, 99.
+
+They, 148.
+
+Thompson-Seton, 148.
+
+Three Guardsmen, The, 12.
+
+Three Ladies of Sorrow, 37.
+
+Timbuctoo, 99.
+
+Times, London, 21, 120.
+
+Tolstoi, 13.
+
+To Mary in Heaven, 113.
+
+Travels With a Donkey, 126.
+
+Treasure Island, 123, 124, 126, 128.
+
+Trench, 99.
+
+Trevelyan, G.O., 5.
+
+Trinity College, Cambridge, 99.
+
+Turgeneff, 13.
+
+Turner, 91, 94.
+
+Two Voices, The, 100.
+
+
+Ulysses, 100.
+
+Under the Greenwood Tree, 135.
+
+Unto This Last, 94.
+
+Vanity Fair, 56, 58, 59, 63.
+
+Victorian Age, 96.
+
+Villette, 66, 73.
+
+Villon, 129.
+
+Virginians, The, 60.
+
+Virginibus Puerisque, 40.
+
+Vision of Sudden Death, The, 31.
+
+
+Waverley, 15, 19, 149.
+
+Weir of Hermiston, 127.
+
+Westminster Review, 80.
+
+Wessex, 133.
+
+Westward Ho, 142.
+
+Weyman, 12.
+
+White Company, The, 12.
+
+Wilhelm Meister, 23.
+
+William the Conqueror, 147.
+
+Without Benefit of Clergy, 146.
+
+With the Night Mail, 148.
+
+Woodlanders, The, 136, 137.
+
+Wordsworth, 35, 113.
+
+Wuthering Heights, 67, 71.
+
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+    +--------------------------------------------------------------+
+    | Typographical errors corrected in text:                      |
+    |                                                              |
+    | Page  50: Curosity replaced with Curiosity                   |
+    | Page  57: "her mind give way" replaced with                  |
+    |           "her mind gave way"                                |
+    | Page 101: idyl replaced with idyll                           |
+    | Page 111: "Dramatic Idyls" replaced with "Dramatic Idylls"   |
+    | Page 152: "English Men of Letter's" replaced with            |
+    |           "English Men of Letters"                           |
+    | Page 152: Brittanica replaced with Britannica                |
+    | Page 168: Shalot replaced with Shalott                       |
+    | Page 170: Mowglie replaced with Mowgli                       |
+    |                                                              |
+    +--------------------------------------------------------------+
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Modern English Books of Power, by 
+George Hamlin Fitch
+
+*** END OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK MODERN ENGLISH BOOKS OF POWER ***
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+                            font-weight: normal;
+                            color: silver; background-color: inherit;
+                            font-variant: normal;} /* page numbers in poems */
+
+
+    // -->
+    /* XML end  ]]>*/
+    </style>
+   </head>
+<body>
+
+
+<pre>
+
+Project Gutenberg's Modern English Books of Power, by George Hamlin Fitch
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Modern English Books of Power
+
+Author: George Hamlin Fitch
+
+Release Date: September 9, 2006 [EBook #19222]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK MODERN ENGLISH BOOKS OF POWER ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Juliet Sutherland, Jeannie Howse and the Online
+Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net
+
+
+
+
+
+
+</pre>
+
+
+<br />
+<hr />
+<br />
+
+
+<div class="tr">
+<p class="cen" style="font-weight: bold;">Transcriber's Note:</p>
+<br />
+<p class="noin">A number of obvious typographical errors have been corrected in this text.<br />
+For a complete list, please see the <a href="#TN">end of this document</a>.</p>
+</div>
+
+<br />
+<hr />
+<br />
+
+<div class="img"><a name="frontis" id="frontis"></a>
+<a href="images/frontis.jpg">
+<img border="0" src="images/frontis.jpg" width="100%" alt="Charles Dickens Reading &quot;The Chimes&quot; at 58 Lincoln's Inn Fields on the Second of December, 1844. From a Sketch by Daniel Maclise, R.A." /></a><br />
+<p class="cen sc" style="margin-top: .2em; margin-left: 20%; margin-right: 20%;">Charles Dickens Reading "The Chimes" at 58
+Lincoln's Inn Fields on the Second of December, 1844. From a Sketch by
+Daniel Maclise, R.A.<span class="totoi"><a href="#toi">ToList</a></span></p>
+</div>
+
+<br />
+<hr />
+<br />
+
+<h1>MODERN<br />
+ENGLISH BOOKS<br />
+OF POWER</h1>
+
+<br />
+
+<h2><span class="sc2">By</span> GEORGE HAMLIN FITCH</h2>
+
+<br />
+<br />
+
+<h5 class="sc2">"A Good Book Is the Precious<br />
+Life-Blood of a Master Spirit, Embalmed and Treasured<br />
+Up on Purpose to a Life Beyond Life."<br />
+Milton: Areopagitica</h5>
+
+<br />
+<br />
+<br />
+
+<h4>ILLUSTRATED</h4>
+
+<br />
+<br />
+<br />
+<br />
+
+<h5>BARSE &amp; HOPKINS<br />
+NEW YORK &nbsp; &nbsp; NEWARK<br />
+N.Y. &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; N.J.</h5>
+
+<br />
+<hr />
+<br />
+<br />
+<br />
+<br />
+
+<h5><i>Copyright</i>, 1912<br />
+by <span class="sc">Barse &amp; Hopkins</span></h5>
+
+<br />
+<br />
+
+<h5>The articles in this<br />
+book appeared originally in the<br />
+Sunday book-page of the San Francisco <i>Chronicle</i>.<br />
+The privilege of reproducing them<br />
+here is due to the courtesy of<br />
+M.H. de Young, Esq.</h5>
+
+<br />
+<br />
+<br />
+<br />
+<hr />
+<br />
+<br />
+<br />
+<br />
+
+
+<h4>TO AMERIQUE<br />
+WHOSE<br />
+LOVE AND ENCOURAGEMENT<br />
+HELPED ME TO WRITE<br />
+THIS BOOK</h4>
+
+<br />
+<br />
+<br />
+<br />
+<a name="toc" id="toc"></a><hr />
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_v" id="Page_v">[v]</a></span><br />
+
+<h2 class="sc2">Contents</h2>
+<br />
+
+<div class="centered">
+<table border="0" cellpadding="2" cellspacing="0" width="80%" summary="Table of Contents">
+  <tr>
+  <td width="5%">&nbsp;</td>
+  <td width="80%">&nbsp;</td>
+  <td class="tdrsc" width="15%"><span style="font-size: 90%;">Page</span></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+  <td class="tdlsc" colspan="2"><a href="#Introduction">Introduction</a></td>
+  <td class="tdr">ix</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+  <td>&nbsp;</td>
+  <td class="tdl">To Get the Spiritual Essence of a Great Book One Must
+   Study the Man Who Wrote It&mdash;The Man Is the Best
+   Epitome of His Message.</td>
+  <td class="tdr">&nbsp;</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+  <td class="tdlsc" colspan="2"><a href="#Macaulays_Essays">Macaulay's Essays in European History</a></td>
+  <td class="tdr">3</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+  <td>&nbsp;</td>
+  <td class="tdl">Foremost English Essayist&mdash;His Style and Learning
+   Have Made Macaulay a Favorite for Over a Half
+   Century.</td>
+  <td class="tdr">&nbsp;</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+  <td class="tdlsc" colspan="2"><a href="#Waverley_Novels">Scott and His Waverley Novels</a></td>
+  <td class="tdr">11</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+  <td>&nbsp;</td>
+  <td class="tdl">Greatest Novelist the World Has Known&mdash;Made History
+   Real and Created Characters That Will Never Die.</td>
+  <td class="tdr">&nbsp;</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+  <td class="tdlsc" colspan="2"><a href="#Inspirer_of_Youth">Carlyle as an Inspirer of Youth</a></td>
+  <td class="tdr">20</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+  <td>&nbsp;</td>
+  <td class="tdl">Finest English Prose Writer&mdash;His Best Books, <i>Past
+   and Present</i>, <i>Sartor Resartus</i> and the <i>French
+   Revolution</i>.</td>
+  <td class="tdr">&nbsp;</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+  <td class="tdlsc" colspan="2"><a href="#Master_of_Style">De Quincey as a Master of Style</a></td>
+  <td class="tdr">30</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+  <td>&nbsp;</td>
+  <td class="tdl">He Wrote the <i>Confessions of an English
+   Opium-Eater</i>&mdash;Dreamed Dreams and Saw Visions and
+   Pictured Them in Poetic Prose.</td>
+  <td class="tdr">&nbsp;</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+  <td class="tdlsc" colspan="2"><a href="#Essays_of_Elia">Charles Lamb and the Essays of Elia</a></td>
+  <td class="tdr">38</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+  <td>&nbsp;</td>
+  <td class="tdl">Best Beloved of All the English Writers&mdash;Quaintest
+   and Tenderest Essayist Whose Work Appeals to All
+   Hearts.</td>
+  <td class="tdr">&nbsp;</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+  <td class="tdlsc" colspan="2"><a href="#Foremost_of_Novelists">Dickens, the Foremost of Novelists</a></td>
+  <td class="tdr">47</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+  <td>&nbsp;</td>
+  <td class="tdl">More Widely Read Than Any Other Story-Teller&mdash;The
+   Greatest of the Modern Humorists Appeals to the
+   Readers of All Ages and Classes.</td>
+  <td class="tdr">&nbsp;</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+  <td class="tdlsc" colspan="2"><a href="#Greatest_Master">Thackeray, Greatest Master of Fiction</a></td>
+  <td class="tdr">56</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+  <td>&nbsp;</td>
+  <td class="tdl">The Most Accomplished Writer of His Century&mdash;Tender
+   Pathos Under an Affectation of Cynicism and Great Art
+   in Style and Characters.</td>
+  <td class="tdr">&nbsp;</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+  <td class="tdlsc" colspan="2"><a href="#Charlotte_Bronte">Charlotte Bront&euml;; Her Two Great Novels</a><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_vi" id="Page_vi">[vi]</a></span></td>
+  <td class="tdr">66</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+  <td>&nbsp;</td>
+  <td class="tdl"><i>Jane Eyre</i> and <i>Villette</i> are Touched With
+   Genius&mdash;The Tragedy of a Woman's Life That Resulted
+   in Two Stories of Passionate Revolt Against Fate.</td>
+  <td class="tdr">&nbsp;</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+  <td class="tdlsc" colspan="2"><a href="#George_Eliot">George Eliot and Her Two Great Novels</a></td>
+  <td class="tdr">76</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+  <td>&nbsp;</td>
+  <td class="tdl"><i>Adam Bede</i> and <i>The Mill on the Floss</i>&mdash;Her Early
+   Stories Are Rich in Character Sketches, With Much
+   Humor and Pathos.</td>
+  <td class="tdr">&nbsp;</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+  <td class="tdlsc" colspan="2"><a href="#Apostle_of_Art">Ruskin, the Apostle of Art</a></td>
+  <td class="tdr">87</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+  <td>&nbsp;</td>
+  <td class="tdl">Art Critic and Social Reformer&mdash;Best Books Are
+   <i>Modern Painters</i>, <i>The Seven Lamps</i> and <i>The Stones
+   of Venice</i>.</td>
+  <td class="tdr">&nbsp;</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+  <td class="tdlsc" colspan="2"><a href="#Victorian_Writers">Tennyson Leads the Victorian Writers</a></td>
+  <td class="tdr">96</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+  <td>&nbsp;</td>
+  <td class="tdl">A Poet Who Voiced the Aspirations of His
+   Age&mdash;<i>Locksley Hall</i>, <i>In Memoriam</i> and <i>The Idylls
+   of the King</i> Among His Best Works.</td>
+  <td class="tdr">&nbsp;</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+  <td class="tdlsc" colspan="2"><a href="#Greatest_Poet">Browning, Greatest Poet Since Shakespeare</a></td>
+  <td class="tdr">106</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+  <td>&nbsp;</td>
+  <td class="tdl">How to Get the Best of Browning's Poems&mdash;Read the
+   Lyrics First and Then Take Up the Longer and the More
+   Difficult Works.</td>
+  <td class="tdr">&nbsp;</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+  <td class="tdlsc" colspan="2"><a href="#Meredith_Best_Novels">Meredith and a Few of His Best Novels</a></td>
+  <td class="tdr">115</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+  <td>&nbsp;</td>
+  <td class="tdl">One of the Greatest Masters of Fiction of the Last
+   Century&mdash;<i>The Ordeal of Richard Feverel</i>, <i>Diana of
+   the Crossways</i> and Other Novels.</td>
+  <td class="tdr">&nbsp;</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+  <td class="tdlsc" colspan="2"><a href="#Modern_Story-Tellers">Stevenson, Prince of Modern Story-Tellers</a></td>
+  <td class="tdr">123</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+  <td>&nbsp;</td>
+  <td class="tdl">His Stories of Adventure and Brilliant
+   Essays&mdash;<i>Treasure Island</i> and <i>Dr. Jekyll and Mr.
+   Hyde</i> His Most Popular Books.</td>
+  <td class="tdr">&nbsp;</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+  <td class="tdlsc" colspan="2"><a href="#Thomas_Hardy">Thomas Hardy; His Tragic Tales of Wessex</a></td>
+  <td class="tdr">131</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+  <td>&nbsp;</td>
+  <td class="tdl">Greatest Living Writer of English Fiction&mdash;Resenting
+   Harsh Criticisms, the Prose Master Turns to Verse.</td>
+  <td class="tdr">&nbsp;</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+  <td class="tdlsc" colspan="2"><a href="#Kiplings_Best">Kipling's Best Short Stories and Poems</a></td>
+  <td class="tdr">140</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+  <td>&nbsp;</td>
+  <td class="tdl">Tales of East Indian Life and Character&mdash;Ideal
+   Training of the Genius That Has Produced Some of the
+   Best Literary Work of Our Day.</td>
+  <td class="tdr">&nbsp;</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+  <td class="tdlsc" colspan="2"><a href="#Bibliography">Bibliography</a></td>
+  <td class="tdr">151</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+  <td>&nbsp;</td>
+  <td class="tdl">Short Notes of Both Standard and Other Editions, With
+   Lives, Sketches and Reminiscences.</td>
+  <td class="tdr">&nbsp;</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+  <td class="tdlsc" colspan="2"><a href="#Index">Index</a></td>
+  <td class="tdr">165</td>
+  </tr>
+</table>
+</div>
+
+<br />
+<br />
+<br />
+<br />
+<a name="toi" id="toi"></a><hr />
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_vii" id="Page_vii">[vii]</a></span><br />
+
+<h2 class="sc2">Illustrations</h2>
+<br />
+
+<div class="centered">
+<table border="0" cellpadding="2" cellspacing="0" width="80%" summary="List of Illustrations">
+  <tr>
+  <td width="85%">&nbsp;</td>
+  <td class="tdrsc" width="15%"><span style="font-size: 90%;">Facing<br />Page</span></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+  <td class="tdlp hang">Charles Dickens Reading <i>The Chimes</i> at 58 Lincoln's Inn
+  Fields on the Second of December, 1844. From a Sketch
+  by Daniel Maclise, R.A.</td>
+  <td class="tdr"><a href="#frontis"><i>Title</i></a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+  <td class="tdlp hang">Thomas Babington Macaulay at the Age of Forty-nine&mdash;After
+  an Engraving by W. Holl, from a Drawing by George
+  Richmond, A.R.A.</td>
+  <td class="tdr"><a href="#imagep006">6</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+  <td class="tdlp hang">Sir Walter Scott&mdash;This Portrait is taken from Chantrey's
+  Bust now at Abbotsford, which, according to Lockhart,
+  "Alone Preserves for Posterity the Expression most
+  fondly Remembered by All who Ever Mingled in his
+  Domestic Circle."</td>
+  <td class="tdr"><a href="#imagep012">12</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+  <td class="tdlp hang">White Horse Inn&mdash;From an Illustration to <i>Waverley</i>,
+  Drawn by G. Cattermole and Engraved by E. Finden</td>
+  <td class="tdr"><a href="#imagep014">14</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+  <td class="tdlp hang">Thomas Carlyle&mdash;From the World-Famed Masterpiece of
+  Portraiture by James McNeill Whistler</td>
+  <td class="tdr"><a href="#imagep020">20</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+  <td class="tdlp hang">Archhouse, Ecclefechan, Dumfriesshire, the Birthplace of
+  Thomas Carlyle&mdash;From a Photograph in the Possession of
+  Alexander Carlyle, M.A., on which Carlyle has Written
+  a Memorandum to Show in which Room he was Born</td>
+  <td class="tdr"><a href="#imagep026">26</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+  <td class="tdlp hang">Thomas De Quincey&mdash;From an old Engraving</td>
+  <td class="tdr"><a href="#imagep030">30</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+  <td class="tdlp hang">De Quincey with Two Daughters and Grandchild&mdash;From a
+  Chalk Drawing by James Archer, R.S.A., made in 1855</td>
+  <td class="tdr"><a href="#imagep034">34</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+  <td class="tdlp hang">Charles Lamb&mdash;From the Portrait by William Hazlitt</td>
+  <td class="tdr"><a href="#imagep038">38</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+  <td class="tdlp hang">Mary and Charles Lamb&mdash;From the Painting by F.S. Cary
+  made in 1834</td>
+  <td class="tdr"><a href="#imagep044">44</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+  <td class="tdlp hang">Charles Dickens at the Age of Twenty-seven&mdash;From the
+  Portrait by Daniel Maclise, R.A.</td>
+  <td class="tdr"><a href="#imagep048">48</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+  <td class="tdlp hang">Original Pickwick Cover Issued in 1837 with Dickens'
+  Autograph&mdash;Most of Dickens' Novels were Issued in
+  Shilling Installments before being Published in the
+  Complete Volume</td>
+  <td class="tdr"><a href="#imagep052">52</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+  <td class="tdlp hang">William Makepeace Thackeray&mdash;From a Drawing by Samuel
+  Laurence, Engraved by J.C. Armytage</td>
+  <td class="tdr"><a href="#imagep056">56</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+  <td class="tdlp hang">Title-page to <i>Vanity Fair</i>, Drawn by Thackeray, who
+  Furnished the Illustrations for Many of his Earlier
+  Editions</td>
+  <td class="tdr"><a href="#imagep058">58</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+  <td class="tdlp hang"><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_viii" id="Page_viii">[viii]</a></span>William Makepeace Thackeray&mdash;A Caricature Drawn by
+  Himself</td>
+  <td class="tdr"><a href="#imagep062">62</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+  <td class="tdlp hang">Charlotte Bront&euml;&mdash;From the Exquisitely Sympathetic Crayon
+  Portrait by George Richmond, R.A., now in the National
+  Portrait Gallery of London</td>
+  <td class="tdr"><a href="#imagep066">66</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+  <td class="tdlp hang">Mrs. Gaskell&mdash;From the Portrait by George Richmond, R.A.
+  Mrs. Gaskell's <i>Life of Bront&euml;</i> is one of the Finest
+  Biographies in the Language</td>
+  <td class="tdr"><a href="#imagep072">72</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+  <td class="tdlp hang">George Eliot in 1864&mdash;From the Etching by Mr. Paul
+  Rajon&mdash;Drawn by Mr. Frederick Burton&mdash;From the
+  Frontispiece to the First Edition of <i>George Eliot's
+  Life</i>, by Her Husband, J.W. Cross</td>
+  <td class="tdr"><a href="#imagep076">76</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+  <td class="tdlp hang">George Eliot's Birthplace, South Farm, Arbury, Nuneaton</td>
+  <td class="tdr"><a href="#imagep080">80</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+  <td class="tdlp hang">John Ruskin&mdash;From a Photograph Taken on July 20, 1882, by
+  Messrs. Elliott &amp; Fry</td>
+  <td class="tdr"><a href="#imagep088">88</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+  <td class="tdlp hang">John Ruskin&mdash;From the Semi-Romantic Portrait by Sir John
+  E. Millais</td>
+  <td class="tdr"><a href="#imagep092">92</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+  <td class="tdlp hang">Lord Alfred Tennyson&mdash;After an Engraving by G.J. Stodart
+  From a Photograph by J. Mayall</td>
+  <td class="tdr"><a href="#imagep096">96</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+  <td class="tdlp hang">Facsimile of Tennyson's Original Manuscript of <i>Crossing
+  the Bar</i>. (Copyright by the Macmillan Company)</td>
+  <td class="tdr"><a href="#imagep100">100</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+  <td class="tdlp hang">Robert Browning&mdash;From a Photograph by Hollyer after the
+  Portrait by G.F. Watts, R.A.</td>
+  <td class="tdr"><a href="#imagep106">106</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+  <td class="tdlp hang">Elizabeth Barrett Browning&mdash;After the Portrait by Field
+  Talfourd</td>
+  <td class="tdr"><a href="#imagep110">110</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+  <td class="tdlp hang">George Meredith with His Daughter and Grandchildren&mdash;From
+  a Photograph Taken Shortly Before His Death</td>
+  <td class="tdr"><a href="#imagep118">118</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+  <td class="tdlp hang">Flint Cottage, Boxhill, the Home of George Meredith&mdash;His
+  Writing was done in a Small Swiss Chalet in the Garden</td>
+  <td class="tdr"><a href="#imagep120">120</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+  <td class="tdlp hang">Robert Louis Stevenson&mdash;The Author's Intimate Associates
+  Pronounce this Photograph a Perfect Presentation of His
+  Most Typical Expression</td>
+  <td class="tdr"><a href="#imagep126">126</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+  <td class="tdlp hang">Stevenson's Home at Valima, Samoa, Looking Toward Vaea</td>
+  <td class="tdr"><a href="#imagep128">128</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+  <td class="tdlp hang">Thomas Hardy&mdash;A Portrait Which Brings Out Strikingly the
+  Man of Creative Power, the Artist, the Philosopher and
+  the Poet</td>
+  <td class="tdr"><a href="#imagep132">132</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+  <td class="tdlp hang">Rudyard Kipling&mdash;A Striking Likeness of the Author in a
+  Characteristic Pose</td>
+  <td class="tdr"><a href="#imagep140">140</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+  <td class="tdlp hang">Rudyard Kipling&mdash;From a Cartoon by W. Nicholson</td>
+  <td class="tdr"><a href="#imagep144">144</a></td>
+  </tr>
+</table>
+</div>
+
+<br />
+<br />
+<br />
+<br />
+<a name="Introduction" id="Introduction"></a><hr />
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_ix" id="Page_ix">[ix]</a></span><br />
+
+<h2><i>Introduction</i><span class="totoc"><a href="#toc">ToC</a></span></h2>
+<br />
+
+<p><i>My aim in this little book has been to give short sketches and
+estimates of the greatest modern English writers from Macaulay to
+Stevenson and Kipling. Omissions there are, but my effort has been to
+give the most characteristic writers a place and to try to stimulate
+the reader's interest in the man behind the book as well as in the
+best works of each author. Too much space is devoted in most literary
+criticism to the bare facts of biography and the details of essays or
+novels or histories written by authors. My plan has been to arouse
+interest both in the men and their books so that any reader of this
+volume may be stimulated to extend his knowledge of the modern English
+classics.</i></p>
+
+<p><i>These chapters include the greatest English writers during the last
+one hundred and fifty years and they have been prepared mainly for
+those who have no thorough knowledge of modern English books or
+authors. They are of limited scope so that few quotations have been
+possible. But they have been written with an eager desire to help
+those who care to know the best works of modern English <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_x" id="Page_x">[x]</a></span>authors. In
+the same spirit the most appropriate illustrations have been secured
+and a helpful bibliography has been added. If this book helps readers
+to secure one lasting friend among these authors it will have done
+good missionary work; for to make the books of one man or woman of
+genius a part of our mental possessions is to be set on the broad
+highway to literary culture.</i></p>
+
+<br />
+<br />
+<br />
+<br />
+<a name="Vital_Quality" id="Vital_Quality"></a><hr />
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_xi" id="Page_xi">[xi]</a></span><br />
+
+<h2><i>The Vital Quality in Literature</i><span class="totoc"><a href="#toc">ToC</a></span></h2>
+<br />
+
+<div class="block2">
+<p class="hang"><i>To Get the Spiritual Essence of a Great Book One Must Study
+the Man Who Wrote It&mdash;The Man Is the Best Epitome His
+Message.</i></p></div>
+<br />
+
+<p><i>In this volume as in its predecessor, "Comfort Found in Good Old
+Books," my aim has been to enforce the theory that behind every great
+book is a man, greater than the best book that he ever wrote. This
+strong spiritual quality which every one of the great authors puts
+into his best books is what we should strive to secure when we read
+these great classics. Unless we get this spiritual part we miss the
+essence of the book.</i></p>
+
+<p><i>Hence it has been my aim in this volume to make clear what manner of
+men wrote these books which serve as the landmarks of modern English
+literature.</i></p>
+
+<p><i>The scope of this book is limited, but from Macaulay to Kipling the
+effort has been to <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_xii" id="Page_xii">[xii]</a></span>include those representative modern English
+authors who both in prose and verse best reflect the spiritual
+tendencies of their age. Whether essayists, historians, novelists or
+poets each of these writers has furnished something distinctive; each
+has caught some salient feature of his age and fixed it for all time
+in the amber of his thought.</i></p>
+
+<p><i>And what a bead-roll is this of great English worthies: Macaulay, the
+most brilliant and learned of all English essayists; Scott, the finest
+story-teller of his own or any other age; Carlyle, the inspirer of
+ambitious youth; De Quincey, the greatest artist in style, whose words
+are as music to the sensitive ear; Dickens, the master painter of
+sorrows and joys of the common people; Thackeray, the best interpreter
+of human life and character; Charlotte Bront&euml;, the brooding Celtic
+genius who laid bare the hearts of women; George Eliot, the greatest
+artist of her sex in mastery of human emotion; Ruskin, the first to
+teach the common people appreciation of art and architecture;
+Tennyson, the melodious singer who voiced the highest aspiration of
+his time; Browning, the greatest dramatic poet since Shakespeare;
+Charles Lamb, one of the tenderest of essayists; George Meredith, the
+most brilliant and suggestive novelist <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_xiii" id="Page_xiii">[xiii]</a></span>of the Victorian age;
+Stevenson, the best beloved and most artistic story-teller of his day;
+Hardy, the master painter of tragedies of rural life; and Kipling, the
+interpreter of Anglo-Indian life, the singer of the new age of science
+and discovery, the laureate of the gospel of blood and iron.</i></p>
+
+<p><i>The work of each of these men and women who make up the splendid roll
+of English immortals varies in quality, in style, in capacity to touch
+the heart and inspire the thought of the reader of to-day. But great
+as are their differences, all meet on the common ground of a
+warm-hearted, sympathetic humanity that knows no distinctions of race
+or creed, no limitations of time or place. The splendid sermons on the
+gospel of work that Carlyle preached after long wrestlings of the
+spirit are as full of inspiration to the youth of to-day as they were
+when they came out from the mind of the man who actually lived the
+laborious life that he commended; the little lay discourses that may
+be found scattered through Thackeray's novels and essays are born of
+agony of spirit, and it is their spiritual power which keeps them
+fresh and full of inspiration in this age of doubt and materialism.</i></p>
+
+<p><i>And so we might go down through the whole list. Each of these great
+writers had <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_xiv" id="Page_xiv">[xiv]</a></span>his Gethsemane, from which he emerged with the power of
+moving the hearts of men. So when we read that most beautiful essay of
+Lamb's on "Dream Children," our hearts ache for the lonely man who
+sacrificed the best things in life for the sake of the sister whom he
+loved better than his own happiness. And when we read Thackeray's
+eloquent words on family love we know that he wrote in his heart's
+blood, for the dearest woman in the world to him was lost forever in
+this world, when the light of her reason was clouded.</i></p>
+
+<p><i>And so I have tried in these essays to show how bitter waters of
+sorrow have strengthened the spirit of all these masters of English
+thought and style, until they have poured out their hearts in eloquent
+words that can never die. Far across the gulf of years their sonorous
+voices reach our ears. Pregnant are they with the passionate
+earnestness of these men and women of genius, these bearers of the
+torch of spiritual inspiration passed from hand to hand down the
+centuries.</i></p>
+
+<p><i>When our souls are moved by some great bereavement then the words of
+these inspired writers soothe our griefs. When we are beaten down in
+the dust of conflict they come with the refreshment of water from
+springs in the everlasting hills. When we are bitter over <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_xv" id="Page_xv">[xv]</a></span>great
+losses or sore over hope deferred or stricken because friends have
+proved faithless, then they soften our hearts and give us courage to
+take up once more the battle of life.</i></p>
+
+<br />
+<br />
+<br />
+<br />
+<hr />
+<br />
+<br />
+<br />
+<br />
+
+<h1>MODERN<br />
+ENGLISH BOOKS OF<br />
+POWER</h1>
+
+<br />
+<br />
+<br />
+<br />
+<a name="Macaulays_Essays" id="Macaulays_Essays"></a><hr />
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_3" id="Page_3">[3]</a></span><br />
+
+<h2 class="sc2">Macaulay's Essays in European History<span class="totoc"><a href="#toc">ToC</a></span></h2>
+
+<div class="block2">
+<p class="hang sc">The Foremost Essayist in English Literature&mdash;His Style and
+Learning Have Made Macaulay a Favorite For Over a Half
+Century.</p></div>
+<br />
+
+<p>Macaulay belonged to the nineteenth century, as he was born in 1800,
+but in his cast of mind, in his literary tastes and in his intense
+partisanship he belonged to the century that includes Swift, Johnson
+and Goldsmith. He stands alone among famous English authors by reason
+of his prodigious memory, his wide reading, his oratorical style and
+his singular ascendancy over the minds of young students. The only
+writers of modern times who can be classed with him as great personal
+forces in the development of young minds are Carlyle and Emerson, and
+of the three Macaulay must be given first place because of a certain
+dynamic quality in the man <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_4" id="Page_4">[4]</a></span>and his style which forces conviction on
+the mind of the immature reader. The same thing to a less extent is
+true of Carlyle, who suffers in his influence as one grows older.
+Emerson is in a class by himself. His appeal is that of pure reason
+and of high enthusiasm&mdash;an appeal that never loses its force with
+those who love the intellectual life.</p>
+
+<p>Many famous men have testified to the mental stimulus which they
+received from Macaulay's essays. Upon these essays, contributed to the
+<span class="sc">Edinburgh Review</span> in its prime, Macaulay lavished all the
+resources of his vast scholarship, his discursive reading in the
+ancient and modern classics, his immense enthusiasm and his strong
+desire to prove his case. He was a great advocate before he was a
+great writer, and he never loses sight of the jury of his readers. He
+blackens the shadows and heightens the lights in order to make heroes
+out of Clive and Warren Hastings; he hammers Boswell and Boswell's
+editor, Croker, over the sacred head of old Dr. Johnson; he lampoons
+every eminent Tory, as he idealizes every prominent Whig in English
+political history. Macaulay's style is declamatory; he wrote as though
+he were <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_5" id="Page_5">[5]</a></span>to deliver his essays from the rostrum; he abounds in
+antithesis; he works up your interest in the course of a long
+paragraph until he reaches his smashing climax, in which he fixes
+indelibly in your mind the impression which he desires to create. It
+is all like a great piece of legerdemain; your eyes cannot follow the
+processes, but your mind is amazed and then convinced by the
+triumphant proof of the conjuror's skill.</p>
+
+<p>Macaulay had one of the most successful of lives. His early advantages
+were ample. He had a memory which made everything he read his own,
+ready to be drawn upon at a moment's notice. He was famous as an
+author at the early age of twenty-five; he was already a distinguished
+Parliamentary orator at thirty; at thirty-three he had gained a place
+in the East Indian Council. He never married, but he had an ideal
+domestic life in the home of his sister, and one of his nephews,
+George Otto Trevelyan, wrote his biography, one of the best in the
+language, which reveals the sweetness of nature that lay under the
+hard surface of Macaulay's character. He made a fortune out of his
+books, and in ten years' service in India he gained another fortune,
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_6" id="Page_6">[6]</a></span>with the leisure for wide reading, which he utilized in writing his
+history of England. He died at the height of his fame, before his
+great mental powers had shown any sign of decay. Take it all in all,
+his was a happy life, brimful of work and enjoyment.</p>
+
+<p>Thomas Babington Macaulay was born October 25, 1800, the son of a
+wealthy merchant who was active in securing the abolition of the slave
+trade. His precocity is almost beyond belief. He read at three years
+of age, gave signs of his marvelous memory at four, and when only
+eight years old wrote a theological discourse. He entered Trinity
+College, Cambridge, at eighteen, but his aversion to mathematics cost
+him college honors. He showed at Cambridge great fondness for Latin
+declamation and for poetry. At twenty-four he became a fellow of
+Trinity. He studied law, but did not practice. Literature and politics
+absorbed his attention. At twenty-five he made his first hit with his
+essay on Milton in the <span class="sc">Edinburgh Review</span>.</p>
+
+<p>This was followed in rapid succession by the series of essays on which
+his fame mainly rests. In 1830 he was elected to Parliament, and in
+the following year he established his reputation as an orator by <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_7" id="Page_7">[7]</a></span>a
+great speech on the reform bill. But financial reverses came when he
+lost the lucrative post of Commissioner in Bankruptcy and his
+fellowship at Trinity lapsed. To gain an income he accepted the
+position of secretary of the Board of Control of Indian Affairs, and
+soon after was offered a seat in the Supreme Council of India at
+Calcutta at $50,000 a year. He lived in India four years, and it was
+mainly in these years that he did the reading which afterward bore
+fruit in his <i>History of England</i>.</p>
+
+<div class="img"><a name="imagep006" id="imagep006"></a>
+<a href="images/imagep006.jpg">
+<img border="0" src="images/imagep006.jpg" width="52%" alt="Thomas Babington Macaulay at the Age of Forty-nine&mdash;After an Engraving by W. Holl, from a Drawing by George Richmond, A.R.A." /></a><br />
+<p class="cen sc" style="margin-top: .2em; margin-left: 20%; margin-right: 20%;">Thomas Babington Macaulay at the Age of
+Forty-nine&mdash;After an Engraving by W. Holl, from a Drawing by George
+Richmond, A.R.A.<span class="totoi"><a href="#toi">ToList</a></span></p>
+</div>
+
+<p>At thirty-nine Macaulay began his <i>History of England</i>, which
+continued to absorb most of his time for the next twenty years. While
+he was working on his history he published <i>Lays of Ancient Rome</i>,
+that had a success scarcely inferior to that of Scott's <i>Lady of the
+Lake</i> or Byron's <i>Childe Harold</i>. He also published his essays, which
+had a remarkable sale. His history, the first two volumes of which
+appeared in 1848, scored a success that astounded all the critics.
+When the third volume appeared in 1855, no less than twenty-six
+thousand, five hundred copies were sold in ten weeks, which broke all
+records of that day. Macaulay received royalties of over $150,000 on
+history, a sum which would have been <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_8" id="Page_8">[8]</a></span>trebled had he secured payment
+on editions issued in the United States, where his works were more
+popular than in his own country. His last years were crowded with
+honors. He accepted a peerage two years before his death. When the end
+came he was given a public funeral and a place in Westminster Abbey.</p>
+
+<p>With Carlyle, Macaulay shares the honor of being the greatest of
+English essayists. While he cannot compare with Carlyle in insight
+into character and in splendor of imagination, he appeals to the wider
+audience because of his attractive style, his wealth of ornament and
+illustration and his great clearness. Carlyle's appeal is mainly to
+students, but Macaulay appeals to all classes of readers.</p>
+
+<p>Macaulay's style has been imitated by many hands, but no one has ever
+worked such miracles as he wrought with apparent ease. In the first
+place, his learning was so much a part of his mind that he drew on its
+stores without effort. Scarcely a paragraph can be found in all his
+essays which is not packed with allusions, yet all seem to illustrate
+his subject so naturally that one never looks upon them as used to
+display his remarkable knowledge.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_9" id="Page_9">[9]</a></span>Macaulay is a master of all the literary arts. Especially does he love
+to use antithesis and to make his effects by violent contrasts. Add to
+this the art of skilful climax, clever alliteration, happy
+illustration and great narrative power and you have the chief features
+of Macaulay's style. The reader is carried along on this flood of
+oratorical style, and so great is the author's descriptive power that
+one actually beholds the scenes and the personages which he depicts.</p>
+
+<p>Of all his essays Macaulay shows his great powers most conspicuously
+in those on Milton, Clive, Warren Hastings and Croker's edition of
+Boswell's Johnson. In these he is always the advocate laboring to
+convince his hearers; always the orator filled with that passion of
+enthusiasm which makes one accept his words for the time, just as
+one's mind is unconsciously swayed by the voice of an eloquent
+speaker. It is this intense earnestness, this fierce desire to
+convince, joined to this prodigal display of learning, which stamps
+Macaulay's words on the brain of the receptive reader. Only when in
+cold blood we analyze his essays do we escape from this literary
+hypnotism which he exerts upon every reader.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_10" id="Page_10">[10]</a></span>The essays of Macaulay are full of meat and all are worth reading,
+but, of course, every reader will differ in his estimate of them
+according to his own tastes and sympathies. It is fine practice to
+take one of these essays and look up the literary and historical
+allusions. No more attractive work than this can be set before a
+reading club. It will give rich returns in knowledge as well as in
+methods of literary study. Macaulay's <i>History</i> is not read to-day as
+it was twenty years ago, mainly because historical writing in these
+days has suffered a great change, due to the growth of religious and
+political toleration. Macaulay is a partisan and a bigot, but if one
+can discount much of his bias and bitterness it will be found
+profitable to read portions of this history. Macaulay's verse is not
+of a high order, but his <i>Lays</i> are full of poetic fire, and they
+appeal to a wider audience than more finished verse.</p>
+
+<p>Of all the English writers of the last century Macaulay has preserved
+the strongest hold on the reading public, and whatever changes time
+may make in literary fashions, one may rest assured that Macaulay will
+always retain his grip on readers of English blood.</p>
+
+<br />
+<br />
+<br />
+<br />
+<a name="Waverley_Novels" id="Waverley_Novels"></a><hr />
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_11" id="Page_11">[11]</a></span><br />
+
+<h2 class="sc2">Scott and His Waverley Novels<span class="totoc"><a href="#toc">ToC</a></span></h2>
+
+<div class="block2">
+<p class="hang sc">The Greatest Novelist the World Has Known&mdash;He Made History
+Real and Created Characters That Will Never Die.</p></div>
+<br />
+
+<p>It is as difficult to sum up in a brief article the work and the
+influence of Sir Walter Scott as it is to make an estimate of
+Shakespeare, for Scott holds the same position in English prose
+fiction that Shakespeare holds in English poetry. In neither
+department is there any rival. In sheer creative force Scott stands
+head and shoulders above every other English novelist, and he has no
+superior among the novelists of any other nation. He has made Scotland
+and the Scotch people known to the world as Cervantes made Spain and
+the Spaniards a reality for all times.</p>
+
+<p>But he did more than Cervantes, for his creative mind reached over the
+border into <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_12" id="Page_12">[12]</a></span>England and across the channel to France and Germany, and
+even to the Holy Land, and found there historical types which he made
+as real and as immortal as his own highland clansmen. His was the
+great creative brain of the nineteenth century, and his work has made
+the world his debtor. His work stimulated the best story teller of
+France and gave the world <i>Monte Cristo</i> and <i>The Three Guardsmen</i>. It
+fired the imaginations of a score of English historical novelists; it
+was the progenitor of Weyman's <i>A Soldier of France</i> and Conan Doyle's
+<i>Micah Clarke</i> and <i>The White Company</i>.</p>
+
+<p>Scott's mind was Shakespearean in its capacity for creating characters
+of real flesh and blood; for making great historical personages as
+real and vital as our next-door neighbors, and for bursts of sustained
+story telling that carry the reader on for scores of pages without an
+instant's drop in interest. Only the supreme masters in creative art
+can accomplish these things. And the wonder of it is that Scott did
+all these things without effort and without any self-consciousness. We
+can not imagine Scott bragging about any of his books or his
+characters, as Balzac did about Eugenie <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_13" id="Page_13">[13]</a></span>Grandet and others of his
+French types. He was too big a man for any small vanities. But he was
+as human as Shakespeare in his love of money, his desire to gather his
+friends about him and his hearty enjoyment of good food and drink.</p>
+
+<div class="img"><a name="imagep012" id="imagep012"></a>
+<a href="images/imagep012.jpg">
+<img border="0" src="images/imagep012.jpg" width="50%" alt="" /></a><br />
+<p class="cen sc" style="margin-top: .2em; margin-left: 15%; margin-right: 15%;">Sir Walter Scott<br /> This Portrait is Taken from
+Chantrey's Bust now at Abbotsford, which, According to Lockhart,
+"Alone Preserves for Posterity the Expression most fondly Remembered
+by All who Ever Mingled in his Domestic Circle"<span class="totoi"><a href="#toi">ToList</a></span></p>
+</div>
+
+<p>It has become the fashion among some of our hair-splitting critics to
+decry Scott because of his carelessness in literary style, his
+tendency to long introductions, and his fondness for description.
+These critics will tell you that Turgeneff and Tolstoi are greater
+literary artists than Scott, just as they tell you that Thackeray and
+Dickens do not deserve a place among the foremost of English
+novelists. This petty, finical criticism, which would measure
+everything by its own rigid rule of literary art, loses sight of the
+great primal fact that Scott created more real characters and told
+more good stories than any other novelist, and that his work will
+outlive that of all his detractors. It ignores the fact that
+Thackeray's wit, pathos, tenderness and knowledge of human nature make
+him immortal in spite of many defects. It forgets that Dickens' humor,
+joy of living and keen desire to help his fellow man will bring him
+thousands of readers after all the <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_14" id="Page_14">[14]</a></span>apostles of realism are buried
+under the dust of oblivion.</p>
+
+<p>Scott had the ideal training for a great historical novelist. Yet his
+literary successes in verse and prose were the result of accident. It
+is needless here to review his life. The son of a mediocre Scotch
+lawyer, he inherited from his father his capacity for work and his
+passion for system and order. From his mother he drew his love of
+reading and his fondness for old tales of the Scotch border. Like so
+many famous writers, his early education was desultory, but he had the
+free run of a fine library, and when he was a mere schoolboy his
+reading of the best English classics had been wider and more thorough
+than that of his teachers.</p>
+
+<p>Forced by boyish illness to live in the country, he early developed a
+great love for the Scotch ballads and the tales of the romantic past
+of his native land. These he gathered mainly by word of mouth. Later
+he was a diligent student and collector of all the old ballads. In
+this way his mind was steeped in historical lore, while by many
+walking tours through the highlands he came to know the common people
+as very few have ever known them.</p>
+
+<div class="img"><a name="imagep014" id="imagep014"></a>
+<a href="images/imagep014.jpg">
+<img border="0" src="images/imagep014.jpg" width="90%" alt="White Horse Inn From an Illustration to &quot;Waverley&quot; Drawn by G. Cattermole and Engraved by E. Finden" /></a><br />
+<p class="cen sc" style="margin-top: .2em; margin-left: 20%; margin-right: 20%;">White Horse Inn From an Illustration to "Waverley"
+Drawn by G. Cattermole and Engraved by E. Finden<span class="totoi"><a href="#toi">ToList</a></span></p>
+</div>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_15" id="Page_15">[15]</a></span>Thus for forty years, while he was a working lawyer and a sheriff of
+his county, he was really laying up stores of material upon which he
+drew for his many novels. His literary tastes were first developed by
+study of German and by the translation of German ballads and plays.
+This practice led him to write <i>The Lay of the Last Minstrel</i>, and its
+success was responsible for <i>Marmion</i>, and <i>The Lady of the Lake</i>. But
+great as was his triumph in verse, he dropped the writing of poems
+when Byron's work eclipsed his own.</p>
+
+<p>Then, in his forty-third year, he turned to prose and began with
+<i>Waverley</i>; that series of novels which is the greatest ever produced
+by one man. The success of his first story proved a great stimulus to
+his imagination, and for years he continued to produce these novels,
+three of which may be ranked as the best in English literature. The
+element of mystery in regard to the authorship added to Scott's
+literary success. It was his habit to crowd his literary work into the
+early hours from four to eight o'clock in the morning; the remainder
+of the day was given up to legal duties and the evening to society.
+His tremendous energy and his power of <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_16" id="Page_16">[16]</a></span>concentration made these four
+hours equal to an ordinary man's working day. His mind was so full of
+material that the labor was mainly that of selection. Creative work,
+when once seated at his desk, was as natural as breathing. Scott came
+to his desk with the zest of a boy starting on a holiday, and this
+pleasure is reflected in the ease and spontaneity of his stories.</p>
+
+<p>But much as he liked his literary work, Scott would not have produced
+so great a number of fine novels had he not been impelled by the
+desire to retrieve large money losses. His old school friend,
+Ballantyne, forced into bankruptcy the printing firm in which Scott
+was a secret partner. The novelist was not morally responsible for
+these debts, but his keen sense of honor made him accept all the
+responsibility, and it drove him to that unceasing work which
+shortened his life. He paid off nearly all the great debt, and he gave
+in this task an example of high courage and power of work that has
+never been surpassed and seldom equaled. You may read the record of
+those last years in Lockhart's fine <i>Life of Scott</i>. Get the one
+volume edition, for the full work is too long for these busy days, and
+follow the <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_17" id="Page_17">[17]</a></span>old author in his heroic struggle. It will bring tears to
+your eyes, but it will make you a lover of Scott, the man, who was as
+great as Scott, the poet and novelist.</p>
+
+<p>Ruskin, when he was making up a list of great authors, put opposite
+Scott's name, "Every line." That bit of advice cannot be followed in
+these strenuous times, but one must make a selection of the best, and
+then, if he have time and inclination, add to this number. To my mind,
+the four great novels of Scott are <i>Ivanhoe</i>, <i>Quentin Durward</i>, <i>The
+Talisman</i> and <i>The Heart of Midlothian</i>. The first gives you feudal
+England as no one else has painted it, with a picture of Richard the
+Lion-Hearted which no historian has ever approached. It contains some
+of the most thrilling scenes in all fiction.</p>
+
+<p>James Payn, who was a very clever novelist, relates the story that he
+and two literary friends agreed to name the scene in all fiction that
+they regarded as the most dramatic. When they came to compare notes
+they found that all three had chosen the same&mdash;the entry of the
+unknown knight at Ashby de la Zouch, who passes by the tents of the
+other contestants and strikes with a resounding clash the shield <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_18" id="Page_18">[18]</a></span>of
+the haughty Templar. This romance also contains one of Scott's finest
+women, the Jewess Rebecca, who atones for the novelist's many insipid
+female characters. Scott was much like Stevenson&mdash;he preferred to draw
+men, and he was happiest when in the clash of arms or about to
+undertake a desperate adventure.</p>
+
+<p><i>Quentin Durward</i> is memorable for its splendid picture of Louis XI,
+one of the ablest as well as one of the meanest men who ever sat on a
+throne. The early chapters of this novel, which describe the
+adventures of the young Scotch soldier at the court of France, have
+never been surpassed in romantic interest. <i>The Talisman</i> gives the
+glory and the romance of the Crusades as no other imaginative work has
+done. It stands in a class by itself and is only approached by Scott's
+last novel, <i>Count Robert of Paris</i>, which gives flashes of the same
+spirit.</p>
+
+<p>Of the Scotch novels it is difficult to make a choice, but it seems to
+me <i>The Heart of Midlothian</i> has the widest appeal, although many
+would cast their votes for <i>Old Mortality</i>, <i>The Antiquary</i> or <i>Rob
+Roy</i> because of the rich humor of those romances. Scott's dialect,
+although true to nature, is <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_19" id="Page_19">[19]</a></span>not difficult, as he did not consider it
+necessary to give all the colloquial terms, like the modern "kailyard"
+writers.</p>
+
+<p>If you read three or four of Scott's novels you are pretty apt to read
+more. It is an easy matter to skip the prolix passages and the
+unnecessary introductions. This done, you have a body of romance that
+is far richer than any present-day fiction. And their great merit is
+that, though written in a coarse age, the <i>Waverley</i> novels are sweet
+and wholesome. One misses a great source of enjoyment and culture who
+fails to read the best of Scott's novels. Take them all in all, they
+are the finest fiction that has ever been written, and their continued
+popularity, despite their many faults, is the best proof of their
+sterling merit.</p>
+
+<br />
+<br />
+<br />
+<br />
+<a name="Inspirer_of_Youth" id="Inspirer_of_Youth"></a><hr />
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_20" id="Page_20">[20]</a></span><br />
+
+<h2 class="sc2">Carlyle As an Inspirer of Youth<span class="totoc"><a href="#toc">ToC</a></span></h2>
+
+<div class="block2">
+<p class="hang sc">The Finest English Prose Writer Of The Last Century&mdash;His
+Best Books, "Past and Present," "Sartor Resartus" And the
+"French Revolution."</p></div>
+<br />
+
+<p>As an influence in stimulating school and college students, Macaulay
+must be given a foremost place, but greater than Macaulay, because of
+his spiritual fervor and his moral force, stands Thomas Carlyle, the
+great prophet and preacher of the nineteenth century, whose influence
+will outlast that of all other writers of his time. And this spiritual
+potency, which resides in his best work, is not weakened by his love
+of the Strong Man in History or his fear of the rising tide of popular
+democracy, in which he saw a dreadful repetition of the horrors of the
+French Revolution. It was the Puritan element in his granite
+character <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_21" id="Page_21">[21]</a></span>which gave most of the flaming spiritual ardor to
+Carlyle's work. It was this which made him the greatest preacher of
+his day, although he had left behind him all the old articles of faith
+for which his forefathers went cheerfully to death on many a bloody
+field.</p>
+
+<div class="img"><a name="imagep020" id="imagep020"></a>
+<a href="images/imagep020.jpg">
+<img border="0" src="images/imagep020.jpg" width="56%" alt="Thomas Carlyle From the World-Famed Masterpiece Of Portraiture by James McNeill Whistler" /></a><br />
+<p class="cen sc" style="margin-top: .2em; margin-left: 20%; margin-right: 20%;">Thomas Carlyle From the World-Famed Masterpiece Of
+Portraiture by James McNeill Whistler<span class="totoi"><a href="#toi">ToList</a></span></p>
+</div>
+
+<p>Carlyle believed a strong religious faith was vital to any real and
+lasting work in this world, and from the day he gave out <i>Sartor
+Resartus</i> he preached this doctrine in all his books. He was born into
+a generation that was content to accept the forms of religion, so long
+as it could enjoy the good things of this world, and much of Carlyle's
+speech sounded to the people of his day like the warnings of the
+prophet Isaiah to the Israelites of old. But Carlyle was never daunted
+by lack of appreciation or by any ridicule or abuse. These only made
+him more confident in his belief that the spiritual life is the
+greatest thing in this world. And he actually lived the life that he
+preached.</p>
+
+<p>For years Carlyle failed to make enough to support himself and his
+wife, yet he refused a large income, offered by the <span class="sc">London
+Times</span> for editorial work, on the ground that he could not write
+to order nor bend <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_22" id="Page_22">[22]</a></span>his opinions to those of others. He put behind him
+the temptation to take advantage of great fame when it suddenly came
+to him. When publishers were eager for his work he spent the same time
+in preparing his books as when he was poor and unsought. He labored at
+the smallest task to give the best that was in him; he wrote much of
+his work in his heart's blood. Hence it is that through all of his
+books, but especially through <i>Past and Present</i> and <i>Heroes and Hero
+Worship</i>, one feels the strong beat of the heart of this great man,
+who yearned to make others follow the spiritual life that he had found
+so full of strength and comfort.</p>
+
+<p>Carlyle's life was largely one of work and self-denial. He was born of
+poor parents at the little village of Ecclefechan, in Dumfriesshire,
+Scotland. His father, though an uneducated stone-mason, was a man of
+great mental force and originality, while his mother was a woman of
+fine imagination, with a large gift of story telling. The boy received
+the groundwork of a good education and then walked eighty miles to
+Edinburgh University. Born in 1795, Carlyle went to Edinburgh in 1809.
+His painful economy at college laid the <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_23" id="Page_23">[23]</a></span>foundation of the dyspepsia
+which troubled him all his days, hampered his work and made him take a
+gloomy view of life. At Edinburgh he made a specialty of mathematics
+and German. He remained at the university five years.</p>
+
+<p>The next fifteen years were spent in tutoring, hack writing for the
+publishers and translation from the German. His first remunerative
+work was the translation of Goethe's <i>Wilhelm Meister</i>, a version
+which still remains the best in English. After his marriage to Jane
+Welsh he was driven by poverty to take refuge on his wife's lonely
+farm at Craigenputtock, where he did much reading and wrote the early
+essays which contain some of his best work. The <span class="sc">Edinburgh
+Review</span> and <span class="sc">Fraser's</span> were opened to him.</p>
+
+<p>Finally, in 1833, when he was nearly forty years old, he made his
+first literary hit with <i>Sartor Resartus</i> which called out a storm of
+caustic criticism. The Germanic style, the elephantine humor, the
+strange conceits and the sledge-hammer blows at all which the smug
+English public regarded with reverence&mdash;all these features aroused
+irritation. Four years later came <i>The French Revolution</i>, which
+established Carlyle's fame <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_24" id="Page_24">[24]</a></span>as one of the greatest of English writers.
+From this time on he was freed from the fear of poverty, but it was
+only in his last years, when he needed little, that he enjoyed an
+income worthy of his labors.</p>
+
+<p>Carlyle's great books, beside those I have mentioned, are the lives of
+<i>Cromwell</i> and of <i>Frederick the Great</i>. These are too long for
+general reading, but a single volume condensation of the <i>Frederick</i>
+gives a good idea of Carlyle's method of combining biography and
+history. Carlyle outlived all his contemporaries&mdash;a lonely old man,
+full of bitter remorse over imaginary neglect of his wife, and full
+also of despair over the democratic tendencies of the age, which he
+regarded as the outward signs of national degeneracy.</p>
+
+<p>Carlyle's fame was clouded thirty years ago by the unwise publication
+of reminiscences and letters which he never intended for print. Froude
+was chosen as his biographer. One of the great masters of English,
+Froude was a bachelor who idealized Mrs. Carlyle and who regarded as
+the simple truth an old man's bitter regrets over opportunities
+neglected to make his wife happier. Everyone who has studied Carlyle's
+life knows that he was dogmatic, <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_25" id="Page_25">[25]</a></span>dyspeptic, irritable, and given to
+sharp speech even against those he loved the best. But over against
+these failings must be placed his tenderness, his unfaltering
+affection, his self-denial, his tremendous labors, his small rewards.</p>
+
+<p>When separated from his wife Carlyle wrote her letters that are like
+those of a young lover, an infinite tenderness in every line. One of
+her great crosses was the belief that her husband was in love with the
+brilliant Lady Ashburton. Her jealousy was absurd, as this great lady
+invited Carlyle to her dinners because he was the most brilliant
+talker in all England, and he accepted because the opportunity to
+indulge in monologue to appreciative hearers was a keener pleasure to
+him than to write eloquent warnings to his day and generation.
+Froude's unhappy book, with a small library of commentary that it
+called forth, is practically forgotten, but Carlyle's fame and his
+books endure because they are real and not founded on illusion.</p>
+
+<p>Carlyle opens a new world to the college student or the ambitious
+youth who may be gaining an education by his own efforts. He sounds a
+note that is found in no other author of our time. Doubtless <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_26" id="Page_26">[26]</a></span>some of
+this attraction is due to his singular style, formed on a long study
+of the German, but most of it is due to the tremendous earnestness of
+the man, which lays hold of the young reader. Never shall I forget
+when in college preparatory days I devoured <i>Past and Present</i> and was
+stirred to extra effort by its trumpet calls that work is worship and
+that the night soon cometh when no man can work.</p>
+
+<p>His fine chapter on <i>Labor</i> with its splendid version of the <i>Mason's
+Song</i> of Goethe has stimulated thousands to take up heavy burdens and
+go on with the struggle for that culture of the mind and the soul
+which is the more precious the harder the fight to secure it. I
+remember copying in a commonplace book some of Carlyle's sonorous
+passages that stir the blood of the young like a bugle call to arms.
+Reading them over years after, I am glad to say that they still
+appealed to me, for it seems to me that the saddest thing in this
+world is to lose one's youthful enthusiasms. When you can keep these
+fresh and strong, after years of contact with a selfish world, age
+cannot touch you.</p>
+
+<div class="img"><a name="imagep026" id="imagep026"></a>
+<a href="images/imagep026.jpg">
+<img border="0" src="images/imagep026.jpg" width="62%" alt="Archhouse, Ecclefechan, Dumfriesshire The Birthplace of Thomas Carlyle" /></a><br />
+<p class="cen sc" style="margin-top: .2em; margin-left: 18%; margin-right: 18%;">Archhouse, Ecclefechan, Dumfriesshire The
+Birthplace of Thomas Carlyle&mdash;From a Photograph in the Possession of
+Alexander Carlyle, M.A. on which Carlyle has Written a Memorandum to
+Show in which Room He was Born<span class="totoi"><a href="#toi">ToList</a></span></p>
+</div>
+
+<p>In this appeal to all that is best and noblest in youth, Carlyle
+stands unrivaled. <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_27" id="Page_27">[27]</a></span>He has far more heart, force and real warm blood
+than Emerson, who saw just as clearly, but who could not make his
+thought reach the reader. A course in Carlyle should be compulsory in
+the freshman year at every college. If the lecturer were a man still
+full of his early enthusiasms it could not fail to have rich results.
+Take, for instance, those two chapters in <i>Past and Present</i> that are
+entitled "Happy" and "Labor." In a dozen pages are summed up all
+Carlyle's creed. In these pages he declares that the only enduring
+happiness is found in good, honest work, done with all a man's heart
+and soul. And after caustic words on the modern craving for happiness
+he ends a noble diatribe with these words, which are worth framing and
+hanging on the wall, where they may be studied day by day:</p>
+
+<div class="block"><p>Brief brawling Day, with its noisy phantasms, its poor
+paper-crown's tinsel-gilt, is gone; and divine everlasting
+Night, with her star-diadems, with her silences and her
+veracities, is come! What hast thou done, and how? Happiness,
+unhappiness; all that was but wages thou hadst; thou hast
+spent all that, in sustaining thyself hitherward; not a coin
+of it remains with thee; it is all spent, eaten; and now thy
+work, where is thy work? Swift, out with it; let us see thy
+work!</p></div>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_28" id="Page_28">[28]</a></span><i>Sartor Resartus</i> is very hard reading, but if you make up your mind
+to go through it you will be repaid by many fine thoughts and many
+noble passages of impassioned prose. Under the guise of Herr Diogenes
+Teufelsdrockh, Carlyle tells the story of his early religious doubts,
+his painful struggles that recall Bunyan's wrestlings with despair,
+and his final entry upon a new spiritual life. He wrote to let others
+know how he had emerged from the Valley of the Shadow of Pessimism
+into the delectable Mountains of Faith. Carlyle was the first of his
+day to proclaim the great truth that the spiritual life is far more
+important than the material life, and this he showed by the humorous
+philosophy of clothes, which he unfolded in the style of the German
+pedants. Carlyle evidently took great pleasure in developing this
+satire on German philosophy, which is full of broad humor.</p>
+
+<p><i>The French Revolution</i> has been aptly called "history by lightning
+flashes." One needs to have a good general idea of the period before
+reading Carlyle's work. Then he can enjoy this series of splendid
+pictures of the upheaval of the nether world and the strange moral
+monsters that sated their <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_29" id="Page_29">[29]</a></span>lust for blood and power in those evil
+days, which witnessed the terrible payment of debts of selfish
+monarchy. Carlyle reaches the height of his power in this book, which
+may be read many times with profit.</p>
+
+<p>The sources of Carlyle's strength as a writer are his moral and
+spiritual fervor and his power of making the reader see what he sees.
+The first insures him enduring fame, as it makes what he wrote eighty
+years ago as fresh and as full of fine stimulus as though it were
+written yesterday. The other faculty was born in him. He had an eye
+for pictures; he described what he saw down to the minutest detail; he
+made the men of the French Revolution as real as the people he met on
+his tour of Ireland. He made Cromwell and Frederick men of blood and
+iron, not mere historical lay figures. And over all he cast the
+glamour of his own indomitable spirit, which makes life look good even
+to the man who feels the pinch of poverty and whose outlook is dreary.
+You can't keep down the boy who makes Carlyle his daily companion; he
+will rise by very force of fighting spirit of this dour old
+Scotchman.</p>
+
+<br />
+<br />
+<br />
+<br />
+<a name="Master_of_Style" id="Master_of_Style"></a><hr />
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_30" id="Page_30">[30]</a></span><br />
+
+<h2 class="sc2">De Quincey As a Master of Style<span class="totoc"><a href="#toc">ToC</a></span></h2>
+
+<div class="block2">
+<p class="hang sc">He Wrote "Confessions of an English Opium-Eater"&mdash;Dreamed
+Dreams and Saw Visions and Pictured Them in Poetic Prose.</p></div>
+<br />
+
+<p>Of all the English writers Thomas De Quincey must be given the palm
+for rhythmical prose. He is as stately as Milton, with more than
+Milton's command of rhythm. If you read aloud his best passages, which
+are written in what he calls his bravura style, you have a near
+approach to the music of the organ. De Quincey was so nice a judge of
+words, he knew so well how to balance his periods, that one of his
+sentences gives to the appreciative ear the same delight as a stanza
+of perfect verse.</p>
+
+<p>Ruskin had much of De Quincey's command of impassioned prose, but he
+never rose to the same sustained heights as the <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_31" id="Page_31">[31]</a></span>older author. In
+fact, De Quincey stands alone in these traits: the mass and accuracy
+of his accumulated knowledge; the power of making the finest
+distinctions clear to any reader, and the gorgeous style, thick with
+the embroidery of poetical figures, yet never giving the impression of
+over-adornment. And above all these merits is the supreme charm of
+melodious, rhythmical sentences, which give the same enjoyment as fine
+music.</p>
+
+<div class="img"><a name="imagep030" id="imagep030"></a>
+<a href="images/imagep030.jpg">
+<img border="0" src="images/imagep030.jpg" width="65%" alt="Thomas De Quincey From an Old Engraving" /></a><br />
+<p class="cen sc" style="margin-top: .2em; margin-left: 20%; margin-right: 20%;">Thomas De Quincey From an Old Engraving<span class="totoi"><a href="#toi">ToList</a></span></p>
+</div>
+
+<p>Forty years ago De Quincey's <i>Confessions of an English Opium-Eater</i>
+was read by everyone who professed any knowledge of the masters of
+English literature. To-day it is voted old-fashioned, and few are
+familiar with its splendid imagery. His other works, which fill over a
+dozen volumes, are practically forgotten, mainly because his style is
+very diffuse and his constant digressions weary the reader who has
+small leisure for books.</p>
+
+<p>No one, however, should miss reading the <i>Confessions</i>, the
+<i>Autobiography</i> and some one essay, such, for instance, as "Murder as
+One of the Fine Arts," or "The Flight of a Tartar Tribe," or "The
+Vision of Sudden Death" in <i>An English Mail Coach</i>. All these contain
+passages of the greatest beauty <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_32" id="Page_32">[32]</a></span>buried in prolix descriptions. The
+reader must be warned not to drop De Quincey because of his
+digressions. With a little practice you may skip those which do not
+appeal to you, and there is ample sweetness at the heart of his work
+to repay one for removing a large amount of husk.</p>
+
+<p>De Quincey has always impressed me as a fine example of the defects of
+the English school and college training. Although he could write and
+speak Greek fluently at thirteen, and although he had equally perfect
+command of Latin and German, he was absolutely untrained in the use of
+his knowledge and he knew no more about real life when he came out of
+college than the average American boy of ten. With a splendid
+scholarly equipment at seventeen, when thrown upon his own resources
+in London, he came to the verge of starvation, and laid the seeds of
+disease of the stomach, which afterward drove him to the use of opium.</p>
+
+<p>All his training was purely theoretical; in the practical affairs of
+life he remained to the day of his death a mere child. As he says in
+his <i>Confessions</i>, he could have earned a good living as a corrector
+of Greek proofs in any big London <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_33" id="Page_33">[33]</a></span>publishing house, but it never
+occurred to his schoolboy mind that his mastery of this difficult
+classical language was of any practical value. In our day De Quincey
+would have been the greatest magazinist of the age, because his best
+work was in the short essay; but it is to be feared that the
+publishers of his time fattened on the good things which he produced
+and gave small sums to the man who turned out these masterpieces with
+so little effort.</p>
+
+<p>De Quincey was born in 1785 and died in 1859. His life was peculiar
+and its facts became very well known even in his own time because in
+his <i>Autobiography</i> and his <i>Confessions</i> he disclosed its details
+with the frankness of a child. These works are surcharged with some
+exaggeration, but in the main they ring true. As precocious as
+Macaulay, he had much of that author's fondness for books, and when he
+first went to public school at eleven years of age he had read as much
+as most men when they take a college degree. His mind absorbed
+languages without effort. At fifteen he could write Greek verse, and
+his tutor once remarked, "That boy could harangue an Athenian mob
+better than you or I could address an English one."</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_34" id="Page_34">[34]</a></span>He lost his father at the age of seven, and his mother seems to have
+given little personal attention to him. He was in nominal charge of
+four guardians, and at seventeen, when his health had been seriously
+reduced by lack of exercise and overdosing of medicines, the sensitive
+boy ran away from the Manchester Grammar school and wandered for
+several months in Wales. He was allowed a pound a week by one of his
+guardians, and he made shift with this for months; but finally the
+hunger for books, which he had no money to buy, sent him to London.
+There he undertook to get advances from money-lenders on his
+expectations. This would have been easy, as he was left a substantial
+income in his father's will, but these Shylocks kept the boy waiting.</p>
+
+<p>In his <i>Confessions</i> he tells of his sufferings from want of food, of
+his nights in an unfurnished house in Soho with a little girl who was
+the "slavey" of a disreputable lawyer, of his wanderings in the
+streets, of the saving of his life by an outcast woman whom he has
+immortalized in the most eloquent passages of the book. Finally, he
+was restored to his friends and went to Oxford. His mental
+independence prevented him <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_35" id="Page_35">[35]</a></span>from taking a degree, and chronic
+neuralgia of the face and teeth led him to form the habit of taking
+opium, which clung to him for life.</p>
+
+<div class="img"><a name="imagep034" id="imagep034"></a>
+<a href="images/imagep034.jpg">
+<img border="0" src="images/imagep034.jpg" width="60%" alt="De Quincey with Two Daughters and Grandchild" /></a><br />
+<p class="cen sc" style="margin-top: .2em; margin-left: 20%; margin-right: 20%;">De Quincey with Two Daughters and Grandchild&mdash;From
+a Chalk Drawing by James Archer, R.S.A. made in 1855.<span class="totoi"><a href="#toi">ToList</a></span></p>
+</div>
+
+<p>De Quincey was a close associate of Coleridge, Wordsworth, Southey,
+Lamb and others. He was a brilliant talker, especially when stimulated
+with opium, but he was incapable of sustained intellectual work. Hence
+all his essays and other work first appeared in periodicals and were
+then published in book form. It is noteworthy that an American
+publisher was the first to gather his essays in book form, and that
+his first appreciation, like that of Carlyle, came from this country.</p>
+
+<p>Much of De Quincey's work is now unreadable because it deals with
+political economy and allied subjects, in which he fancied he was an
+expert. He is a master only when he deals with pure literature, but he
+has a large vein of satiric humor that found its best expression in
+the grotesque irony of "Murder as One of the Fine Arts." In this essay
+he descants on the greatest crime as though it were an accomplishment,
+and his freakish wit makes this paper as enjoyable as Charles Lamb's
+essay on the origin of roast pig.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_36" id="Page_36">[36]</a></span>De Quincey's fame, however, rests upon <i>The Confessions of an English
+Opium-Eater</i>. This is a record unique in English literature. It tells
+in De Quincey's usual style, with many tedious digressions, the story
+of his neglected boyhood, his revolt at school discipline and monotony
+that had shattered his health, his wanderings in Wales, his life as a
+common vagrant in London, his college life, his introduction to opium
+and the dreams that came with indulgence in the drug. The gorgeous
+beauty of De Quincey's pictures of these opium visions has probably
+induced many susceptible readers to make a trial of the drug, with
+deep disappointment as the result. No common mind can hope to have
+such visions as De Quincey records.</p>
+
+<p>His imagination has well been called Druidic; it played about the
+great facts and personages of history and it invested these with a
+background of the most solemn and imposing natural features. These
+dreams came to have with him the very semblance of reality. Read the
+terrible passages in the <i>Confessions</i> in which the Malay figures;
+read the dream fugues in "Suspira," the visions seen by the boy when
+he looked on his dead sister's face, or the noble <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_37" id="Page_37">[37]</a></span>passages that
+picture the three Ladies of Sorrow. Here is a passage on the vision of
+eternity at his sister's death bier, which gives a good idea of De
+Quincey's style:</p>
+
+<div class="block"><p>Whilst I stood, a solemn wind began to blow&mdash;the saddest that
+ear ever heard. It was a wind that might have swept the fields
+of mortality for a thousand centuries. Many times since upon
+summer days, when the sun is about the hottest, I have
+remarked the same wind arising and uttering the same hollow,
+solemn, Memnonian, but saintly swell; it is in this world the
+one great audible symbol of eternity.</p></div>
+
+<p>It is a great temptation to quote some of De Quincey's fine passages,
+but most of them are so interwoven with the context that the most
+eloquent bits cannot be taken out without the loss of their beauty. De
+Quincey was a dreamer before he became a slave to opium. This drug
+intensified a natural tendency until he became a visionary without an
+equal in English literature. And these visions, evoked by his splendid
+imagination, are worth reading in these days as an antidote to the
+materialism of present-day life; they demonstrate the power of the
+spiritual life, which is the potent and abiding force in all
+literature.</p>
+
+<br />
+<br />
+<br />
+<br />
+<a name="Essays_of_Elia" id="Essays_of_Elia"></a><hr />
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_38" id="Page_38">[38]</a></span><br />
+
+<h2 class="sc2">Charles Lamb And The Essays of Elia<span class="totoc"><a href="#toc">ToC</a></span></h2>
+
+<div class="block2">
+<p class="hang sc">The Best Beloved of All the English Writers&mdash;Quaintest and
+Tenderest Essayist Whose Work Appeals to All Hearts.</p></div>
+<br />
+
+<p>Of all the English writers of the last century none is so well beloved
+as Charles Lamb. Thirty years ago his <i>Essays of Elia</i> was a book
+which every one with any claim to culture had not only read, but read
+many times. It was the traveling companion and the familiar friend,
+the unfailing resource in periods of depression, the comforter in time
+of trouble. It touched many experiences of life, and it ranged from
+sunny, spontaneous humor to that pathos which is too deep for tears.
+Into it Lamb put all that was rarest and best in his nature, all that
+he had gleaned from a life of self-sacrifice and spiritual culture.</p>
+
+<div class="img"><a name="imagep038" id="imagep038"></a>
+<a href="images/imagep038.jpg">
+<img border="0" src="images/imagep038.jpg" width="57%" alt="Charles Lamb From the Portrait by William Hazlitt" /></a><br />
+<p class="cen sc" style="margin-top: .2em; margin-left: 20%; margin-right: 20%;">Charles Lamb From the Portrait by William
+Hazlitt<span class="totoi"><a href="#toi">ToList</a></span></p>
+</div>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_39" id="Page_39">[39]</a></span>Such men as he were rare in his day, and not understood by the
+literary men of harder nature who criticised his peculiarities and
+failed to appreciate the delicacy of his genius. Only one such has
+appeared in our time&mdash;he who has given us a look into his heart in <i>A
+Window in Thrums</i> and in that beautiful tribute to his mother,
+<i>Margaret Ogilvie</i>. Barrie, in his insight into the mind of a child
+and in his freakish fancy that seems brought over from the world of
+fairyland to lend its glamour to prosaic life, is the only successor
+to Lamb.</p>
+
+<p>Lamb can endure this neglect, for were he able to revisit this earth
+no one would touch more whimsically than he upon the fads and the
+foibles of contemporary life; but it's a great pity that in the
+popular craze about the new writers, all redolent with the varnish of
+novelty, we should consign to the dust of unused shelves the works of
+Charles Lamb. All that he wrote which the world remembers is in Elia
+and his many letters&mdash;those incomparable epistles in which he quizzed
+his friends and revealed the tenderness of his nature and the delicacy
+of his fancy.</p>
+
+<p>Robert Louis Stevenson is justly regarded as the greatest essayist of
+our time, <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_40" id="Page_40">[40]</a></span>but I would not exchange the <i>Essays of Elia</i> for the best
+things of the author of <i>Virginibus Puerisque</i>. Stevenson always,
+except in his familiar early letters, suggests the literary artist who
+has revised his first draft, with an eye fixed on the world of readers
+who will follow him when he is gone. But Lamb always wrote with that
+charming spontaneous grace that comes from a mind saturated with the
+best reading and mellow with much thought. You fancy him jotting down
+his thoughts, with his quizzical smile at the effect of his quips and
+cranks. You cannot figure him as laboriously searching for the right
+word or painfully recasting the same sentence many times until he
+reached the form which suited his finical taste. This was Stevenson's
+method, and it leaves much of his work with the smell of the lamp upon
+it. Lamb apparently wrote for the mere pleasure of putting his
+thoughts in form, just as he talked when his stammering tongue had
+been eased with a little good old wine.</p>
+
+<p>It is idle to expect another Lamb in our strenuous modern life, so we
+should make the most of this quaint Englishman of the early part of
+the last century, who seemed to bring over into an artificial age all
+the <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_41" id="Page_41">[41]</a></span>dewy freshness of fancy of the old Elizabethan worthies. Can
+anything be more perfect in its pathos than his essay on "Dream
+Children," the tender fancy of a bachelor whom hard fate robbed of the
+domestic joys that would have made life beautiful for him? Can
+anything be more full of fun than his "Dissertation on Roast Pig," or
+his "Mrs. Battle's Opinion on Whist"? His style fitted his thought
+like a glove; about it is the aroma of an earlier age when men and
+women opened their hearts like children. Lamb lays a spell upon us
+such as no other writer can work; he plays upon the strings of our
+hearts, now surprising us into wholesome laughter, now melting us to
+tears. You may know his essays by heart, but you can't define their
+elusive charm.</p>
+
+<p>Lamb had one of the saddest of lives, yet he remained sweet and
+wholesome through trials that would have embittered a nature less fine
+and noble. He came of poor people and he and his sister Mary inherited
+from their mother a strain of mental unsoundness. Lamb spent seven
+years in Christ's Hospital as a "Blue Coat" boy, and the chief result,
+aside from the foundations of a good classical scholarship, was a
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_42" id="Page_42">[42]</a></span>friendship for Coleridge which endured through life. From this school
+he was forced to go into a clerkship in the South Sea house, but after
+three years he secured a desk in the East India house, where he
+remained for thirty years.</p>
+
+<p>Four years later his first great sorrow fell upon Lamb. His sister
+Mary suddenly developed insanity, attacked a maid servant, and when
+the mother interfered the insane girl fatally wounded her with a
+knife. In this crisis Lamb showed the fineness of his nature. Instead
+of permitting poor Mary to be consigned to a public insane asylum, he
+gave bonds that he would care for her, and he did care for her during
+the remainder of her life. Although in love with a girl, he resolutely
+put aside all thoughts of marriage and domestic happiness and devoted
+himself to his unfortunate sister, who in her lucid periods repaid his
+devotion with the tenderest affection.</p>
+
+<p>Lamb's letters to Coleridge in those trying days are among the most
+pathetic in the language. To Coleridge he turned for stimulus in his
+reading and study, and he never failed to get help and comfort from
+this great, ill-balanced man of genius. Later <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_43" id="Page_43">[43]</a></span>he began a
+correspondence with Southey, in which he betrayed much humor and great
+fancy. In his leisure he saturated his mind with the Elizabethan poets
+and dramatists; practically he lived in the sixteenth century, for his
+only real life was a student's dream life. He contributed to the
+London newspapers, but his first published work to score any success
+was his <i>Tales From Shakespeare</i>, in which his sister aided him. Then
+followed <i>Poets Contemporary With Shakespeare</i>, selections with
+critical comment, which at once gave Lamb rank among the best critics
+of his time. He wrote, when the mood seized him, recollections of his
+youth, essays and criticisms which he afterward issued in two volumes.</p>
+
+<p>Twenty-five essays that he contributed to the <span class="sc">London Magazine</span>
+over the signature of Elia were reprinted in a book, the <i>Essays of
+Elia</i>, and established Lamb's reputation as one of the great masters
+of English. Another volume of <i>Essays of Elia</i> was published in 1833.
+In 1834 Lamb sorrowed over the death of Coleridge, and in November of
+the same year death came to him. Of all English critics Carlyle is the
+only one who had hard words for Lamb, and the Sage of Chelsea
+probably <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_44" id="Page_44">[44]</a></span>wrote his scornful comment because of some playful jest of
+Elia.</p>
+
+<p>Charles Lamb's taste was for the writers of the Elizabethan age, and
+even in his time he found that this taste had become old-fashioned. He
+complained, when only twenty-one years old, in a letter to Coleridge,
+that all his friends "read nothing but reviews and new books." His
+letters, like his essays, reflect the reading of little-known books;
+they show abundant traces of his loiterings in the byways of
+literature.</p>
+
+<p>Here there is space only to dwell on some of the best of the <i>Essays
+of Elia</i>. In these we find the most pathetic deal with the sufferings
+of children. Lamb himself had known loneliness and suffering and lack
+of appreciation when a boy in the great Blue Coat School. Far more
+vividly than Dickens he brings before us his neglected childhood and
+all that it represented in lonely helplessness. Then he deals with
+later things, with his love of old books, his passion for the play,
+his delight in London and its various aspects, his joy in all strange
+characters like the old benchers of the Inner Temple.</p>
+
+<div class="img"><a name="imagep044" id="imagep044"></a>
+<a href="images/imagep044.jpg">
+<img border="0" src="images/imagep044.jpg" width="54%" alt="Mary and Charles Lamb From the Painting by F.S. Cary Made in 1834" /></a><br />
+<p class="cen sc" style="margin-top: .2em; margin-left: 20%; margin-right: 20%;">Mary and Charles Lamb From the Painting by F.S.
+Cary Made in 1834<span class="totoi"><a href="#toi">ToList</a></span></p>
+</div>
+
+<p>The essay opens with that alluring picture of the South Sea house, and
+is followed <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_45" id="Page_45">[45]</a></span>by the reminiscences of Christ's Hospital, where Lamb
+was a schoolboy for seven years. These show one side of Lamb's
+nature&mdash;the quaintly reminiscent. Another side is revealed in "Mrs.
+Battle's Opinions on Whist," with its delicate irony and its playful
+humor, while still another phase is seen in the exquisite phantasy of
+"Dream Children," with its tender pathos and its revelation of a heart
+that never knew the joys of domestic love and care. Yet close after
+this beautiful reverie comes "A Dissertation On Roast Pig," in which
+Lamb develops the theory that the Chinese first discovered the virtues
+of roast suckling pig after a fire which destroyed the house of Ho-ti,
+and that with the fatuousness of the race they regularly burned down
+their houses to enjoy this succulent delicacy.</p>
+
+<p><i>The Last Essays of Elia</i>, a second series which Lamb brought out with
+a curious preface "by a friend of the late Elia," do not differ from
+the earlier series, save that they are shorter and are more devoted to
+literary themes. Perfect in its pathos is "The Superannuated Man,"
+while "The Child Angel" is a dream which appeals to the reader more
+than any of the splendid dreams that De Quincey immortalized in <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_46" id="Page_46">[46]</a></span>his
+florid prose. Lamb in these essays gives some wise counsel on books
+and reading, urging with a whimsical earnestness the claims of the
+good old books which had been his comfort in many dark hours. It is in
+such confidences that we come very close to this man, so richly
+endowed with all endearing qualities that the world will never forget
+Elia and his exquisite essays.</p>
+
+<br />
+<br />
+<br />
+<br />
+<a name="Foremost_of_Novelists" id="Foremost_of_Novelists"></a><hr />
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_47" id="Page_47">[47]</a></span><br />
+
+<h2 class="sc2">Dickens The Foremost of Novelists<span class="totoc"><a href="#toc">ToC</a></span></h2>
+
+<div class="block2">
+<p class="hang sc">More Widely Read Than Any Other Story Teller&mdash;The Greatest
+of the Modern Humorists Appeals to the Readers of All Ages and
+Classes.</p></div>
+<br />
+
+<p>Charles Dickens is the greatest English novelist since Scott, and he
+and Scott, to my mind, are the greatest English writers after
+Shakespeare. Many will dissent from this, but my reason for giving him
+this foremost place among the modern writers is the range, the
+variety, the dramatic power, the humor and the pathos of his work. He
+was a great caricaturist rather than a great artist, but he was
+supreme in his class, and his grotesque characters have enough in them
+of human nature to make them accepted as real people.</p>
+
+<p>To him belongs the first place among novelists, after Scott, because
+of his splendid creative imagination, which has peopled <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_48" id="Page_48">[48]</a></span>the world of
+fiction with scores of fine characters. His genial humor which has
+brightened life for so many thousands of readers; his tender pathos
+which brings tears to the eyes of those who seldom weep over imaginary
+or even real grief or pain; his rollicking gayety which makes one
+enjoy good food and good drink in his tales almost as much as if one
+really shared in those feasts he was so fond of describing; his keen
+sympathy with the poor and the suffering; his flaming anger against
+injustice and cruelty that resulted in so many great public reforms;
+his descriptive power that makes the reader actually see everything
+that he depicts&mdash;all these traits of Dickens' genius go to make him
+the unquestioned leader of our modern story tellers. Without his humor
+and his pathos he would still stand far above all others of his day;
+with these qualities, which make every story he ever wrote throb with
+genuine human feeling, he stands in a class by himself.</p>
+
+<p>Many literary critics have spent much labor in comparing Dickens with
+Thackeray, but there seems to me no basis for such comparison. One was
+a great caricaturist who wrote for the common people and brought tears
+or laughter at will from <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_49" id="Page_49">[49]</a></span>the kitchen maid as freely as from the
+great lady; from the little child with no knowledge of the world as
+readily as from the mature reader who has known wrong, sorrow and
+suffering. The other was the supreme literary artist of modern times,
+a gentleman by instinct and training, who wrote for a limited class of
+readers, and who could not, because of nature and temperament, touch
+at will the springs of laughter and tears as Dickens did. Dickens has
+created a score of characters that are household words to one that
+Thackeray has given us.</p>
+
+<div class="img"><a name="imagep048" id="imagep048"></a>
+<a href="images/imagep048.jpg">
+<img border="0" src="images/imagep048.jpg" width="52%" alt="Charles Dickens at the Age of Twenty-seven" /></a><br />
+<p class="cen sc" style="margin-top: .2em; margin-left: 20%; margin-right: 20%;">Charles Dickens at the Age of Twenty-seven&mdash;From
+the Portrait by Daniel Maclise, R.A.<span class="totoi"><a href="#toi">ToList</a></span></p>
+</div>
+
+<p>Both were men of the rarest genius, English to the core, but each
+expressed his genius in his own way, and the way of Dickens touched a
+thousand hearts where Thackeray touched but one. Personally, Thackeray
+appeals to me far more than Dickens does, but it is foolish to permit
+one's own fancies to blind or warp his critical judgments. Hence I set
+Dickens at the head of modern novelists and give him an equal place
+with Scott as the greatest English writer since Shakespeare.</p>
+
+<p>Take it all in all, Dickens had a successful and a happy life. He was
+born in 1812 and died in 1870. His boyhood was hard <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_50" id="Page_50">[50]</a></span>because of his
+father's thriftlessness, and it always rankled in his memory that at
+nine years of age he was placed at work pasting labels on boxes of
+shoe blacking. But he had many chances in childhood and youth for
+reading and study, and his keen mind took advantage of all these. He
+was a natural mimic, and it was mere blind chance that kept him from
+the stage and made him a great novelist. He drifted into newspaper
+work as a shorthand reporter, wrote the stories that are known as
+<i>Sketches by Boz</i>, and in this way came to be engaged to write the
+<i>Pickwick Papers</i>, to serve as a story to accompany drawings by
+Seymour, a popular artist. But Dickens from the outset planned the
+story and Seymour lived only to illustrate the first number.</p>
+
+<p>The tale caught the fancy of the public, and Dickens developed
+Pickwick, the Wellers and other characters in a most amusing fashion.
+Great success marked the appearance of the <i>Pickwick Papers</i> in book
+form, and the public appreciation gave Dickens confidence and
+stimulus. Soon appeared <i>Oliver Twist</i>, <i>Nicholas Nickleby</i>, <i>Old
+Curiosity Shop</i> and the long line of familiar stories that ended with
+<i>The Mystery of Edwin Drood</i>, left unfinished by the master's hand.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_51" id="Page_51">[51]</a></span>All these novels were originally published in monthly numbers. In
+these days, when so many new novels come from the press every month,
+it is difficult to appreciate the eagerness with which one of these
+monthly parts of Dickens' stories was awaited in England as well as in
+this country. My father used to tell of the way these numbers of
+Dickens' novels were seized upon in New England when he was a young
+man and were worn out in passing from hand to hand. Dickens first
+developed the Christmas story and made it a real addition to the joy
+of the holiday season. His <i>Christmas Carol</i> and <i>The Cricket on the
+Hearth</i> still stand as the best of these tales that paint the simple
+joys of the greatest of English Holidays. Dickens was also a great
+editor, and in <span class="sc">Household Words</span> and <span class="sc">All The Year
+Round</span> he found a means of giving pleasure to hosts of readers as
+well as a vehicle for the monthly publication of his novels.</p>
+
+<p>Dickens was the first to make a great fortune by giving public
+readings from his own works. His rare dramatic ability made him an
+ideal interpreter of his own work, and those who were fortunate enough
+to hear him on his two trips to this country <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_52" id="Page_52">[52]</a></span>speak always of the
+light which these readings cast on his principal characters and of the
+pleasure that the audience showed in the novelist's remarkable powers
+as a mimic and an elocutionist.</p>
+
+<p>Most of the great English writers have labored until forty or over
+before fame came to them. Of such were Scott, Thackeray, Carlyle and
+George Eliot. But Dickens had an international fame at twenty-four,
+and he was a household word wherever English was spoken by the time he
+was thirty. From that day to the day of his death, fame, popularity,
+wealth, troops of friends, were his portion, and with these were
+joined unusual capacity for work and unusual delight in the exercise
+of his great creative powers.</p>
+
+<p>In taking up Dickens' novels it must always be borne in mind that you
+will find many digressions, many bits of affectation, some mawkish
+pathos. But these defects do not seriously injure the stories. You
+cannot afford to leave <i>Pickwick Papers</i> unread, because this novel
+contains more spontaneous humor than any other of Dickens' work, and
+it is also quoted most frequently. The boy or girl who cannot follow
+with relish the amusing incidents in this book <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_53" id="Page_53">[53]</a></span>is not normal. Older
+readers will get more from the book, but it is doubtful whether they
+will enjoy its rollicking fun with so keen a zest. Mr. Pickwick, Sam
+Weller and his father, Bob Sawyer and the others, how firmly they are
+fixed in the mind! What real flesh and blood creatures they are,
+despite their creator's exaggeration of special traits and
+peculiarities!</p>
+
+<div class="img"><a name="imagep052" id="imagep052"></a>
+<a href="images/imagep052.jpg">
+<img border="0" src="images/imagep052.jpg" width="43%" alt="Original Pickwick Cover Issued in 1837 with Dickens' Autograph" /></a><br />
+<p class="cen sc" style="margin-top: .2em; margin-left: 20%; margin-right: 20%;">Original Pickwick Cover Issued in 1837 with
+Dickens' Autograph&mdash;Most of Dickens' Novels were Issued in Shilling
+Installments before being Published in the Complete Volume<span class="totoi"><a href="#toi">ToList</a></span></p>
+</div>
+
+<p>After the <i>Pickwick Papers</i> the choice of the most characteristic of
+Dickens' novels is difficult, but my favorites have always been <i>David
+Copperfield</i> and <i>A Tale of Two Cities</i>, the one the most spontaneous,
+the freshest in fancy, the most deeply pathetic of all Dickens' work;
+the other absolutely unlike anything he ever wrote, but great in its
+intense descriptive passages, which make the horrors of the French
+Revolution more real than Carlyle's famous history, and in the sublime
+self-sacrifice of Sidney Carton, which Henry Miller, in "The Only
+Way," has impressed on thousands of tearful playgoers. That <i>David
+Copperfield</i> is not autobiographical we have the positive assertion of
+Charles Dickens the younger, yet at the same time every lover of this
+book feels that the boyhood of David reproduces memories of the
+novelist's childhood <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_54" id="Page_54">[54]</a></span>and youth, and that from real people and real
+scenes are drawn the humble home and the loyal hearts of the
+Peggottys, the great self-sacrifice of Ham, the woes of Little Emily
+and the tragedy of Steerforth's fate. One misses much who does not
+follow the chief actors in this great story, the masterpiece of
+Dickens.</p>
+
+<p>Other fine novels, if you have time for them, are <i>Nicholas Nickleby</i>,
+which broke up the unspeakably cruel boarding schools for boys in
+Yorkshire, in one of which poor Smike was done to death; or <i>Our
+Mutual Friend</i> which Dickens attacked the English poor laws; or
+<i>Dombey and Son</i>, that paints the pathos of the child of a rich man
+dying for the love which his father was too selfish to give him; or
+<i>Bleak House</i>, in which the terrible sufferings wrought by the law's
+delay in the Court of Chancery are drawn with so much pathos that the
+book served as a valuable aid in removing a great public wrong, while
+the satire on foreign missions served to draw the English nation's
+attention to the wretched heathen at home in the East Side of London,
+of whom Poor Jo was a pitiable specimen. In other novels other good
+purposes were also served.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_55" id="Page_55">[55]</a></span>But several pages could be filled with a mere enumeration of Dickens'
+stories and their salient features. You cannot go wrong in taking up
+any of his novels or his short stories, and when you have finished
+with them you will have the satisfaction of having added to your
+possessions a number of the real people of fiction, whom it is far
+better to know than the best characters of contemporary fiction,
+because these will be forgotten in a twelvemonth, if not before. The
+hours that you spend with Dickens will be profitable as well as
+pleasant, for they will leave the memory of a great-hearted man who
+labored through his books to make the world better and happier.</p>
+
+<br />
+<br />
+<br />
+<br />
+<a name="Greatest_Master" id="Greatest_Master"></a><hr />
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_56" id="Page_56">[56]</a></span><br />
+
+<h2 class="sc2">Thackeray Greatest Master of Fiction<span class="totoc"><a href="#toc">ToC</a></span></h2>
+
+<div class="block2">
+<p class="hang sc">The Most Accomplished Writer of His Century&mdash;Tender Pathos
+Under An Affectation of Cynicism and Great Art in Style and
+Characters.</p></div>
+<br />
+
+<p>Of all modern English authors, Thackeray is my favorite. Humor,
+pathos, satire, ripe culture, knowledge of the world and of the human
+heart, instinctive good taste and a style equaled by none of his
+fellows in its clearness, ease, flexibility and winning charm&mdash;these
+are some of the traits that make the author of <i>Vanity Fair</i> and
+<i>Esmond</i> incomparably the first literary artist as well as the
+greatest writer of his age. Whether he would have been as fine a
+writer had he been given a happy life is a question that no one can
+answer. But to my mind it has always seemed as though the dark shadow
+that rested on his domestic life for thirty years made him
+infinitely <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_57" id="Page_57">[57]</a></span>tender to the grief and pain of others. Probably it came
+as a shock to most lovers of Thackeray to read in a news item from
+London only three or four years ago that the widow of Thackeray was
+dead, at the great age of ninety years. She had outlived her famous
+husband nearly a full half century, but of her we had heard nothing in
+all this time. When a beautiful young Irish girl she was married to
+the novelist, and she made him an ideal wife for a few years. Then her
+mind gave way, and the remainder of her long career was spent within
+the walls of a sanatorium&mdash;more lost to her loved ones than if she had
+been buried in her grave. The knowledge of her existence, which was a
+ghastly death in life, the fact that it prevented him from giving his
+three young girls a real home, as well as barred him under the English
+law from marrying again&mdash;all these things to Thackeray were an
+ever-present pain, like acid on an open wound. It was this sorrow,
+from which he could never escape that gave such exquisite tenderness
+to his pathos; and it was this sorrow, acting on one of the most
+sensitive natures, that often sharpened his satire and made it
+merciless when directed against the shams and hypocrisies of life.</p>
+
+<div class="img"><a name="imagep056" id="imagep056"></a>
+<a href="images/imagep056.jpg">
+<img border="0" src="images/imagep056.jpg" width="54%" alt="William Makepeace Thackeray From a Drawing by Samuel Laurence, Engraved by J.C. Armytage" /></a><br />
+<p class="cen sc" style="margin-top: .2em; margin-left: 20%; margin-right: 20%;">William Makepeace Thackeray From a Drawing by
+Samuel Laurence, Engraved by J.C. Armytage<span class="totoi"><a href="#toi">ToList</a></span></p>
+</div>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_58" id="Page_58">[58]</a></span>Thackeray's fame rests mainly on two great books&mdash;<i>Vanity Fair</i> and
+<i>Henry Esmond</i>. The first has been made very real to thousands of
+readers by the brilliant acting of Mrs. Fiske in Becky Sharp. The
+other is one of the finest historical novels in the language and the
+greatest exploit in bringing over into our century the style, the mode
+of thought, the very essence of a previous age. Thackeray was
+saturated with the literature of the eighteenth century, and in
+<i>Esmond</i> he reproduced the time of Addison and Steele as perfectly as
+he made an imitation of a number of the <span class="sc">Spectator</span>. This
+literary <i>tour de force</i> was made the more noteworthy by the absolute
+lack of all effort on the novelist's part. The style of Queen Anne's
+age seemed a part of the man, not an assumed garment. While in the
+heroine of <i>Vanity Fair</i> Thackeray gave the world one of the coldest
+and most selfish of women, he atoned for this by creating in <i>Esmond</i>
+the finest gentleman in all English literature, with the single
+exception of his own Colonel Newcome.</p>
+
+<p>Strict injunctions Thackeray left against any regulation biography,
+and the result is that the world knows less of his life before fame
+came to him than it does of <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_59" id="Page_59">[59]</a></span>any other celebrated author of his age.
+The scanty facts show that he was born in Calcutta in 1811; that he
+was left a fortune of $100,000 by his father, who died when he was
+five years old; that, like most children of Anglo-Indians, he was sent
+to school in England; that he was prepared for college at the old
+Charter House School; that he was graduated from Trinity College,
+Cambridge, and that while in college he showed much ability as a
+writer of verse and prose, although he took no honors and gained no
+prizes. After reading law he was moved to become an artist and spent
+some time in travel on the Continent.</p>
+
+<div class="img"><a name="imagep058" id="imagep058"></a>
+<a href="images/imagep058.jpg">
+<img border="0" src="images/imagep058.jpg" width="47%" alt="Title-page to &quot;Vanity Fair&quot; Drawn by Thackeray, who Furnished the Illustrations for many of his Earlier Editions" /></a><br />
+<p class="cen sc" style="margin-top: .2em; margin-left: 20%; margin-right: 20%;">Title-page to "Vanity Fair" Drawn by Thackeray, who
+Furnished the Illustrations for many of his Earlier Editions<span class="totoi"><a href="#toi">ToList</a></span></p>
+</div>
+
+<p>But this delightful life was rudely cut short by the loss of his
+fortune and he was forced to earn his living by literature and
+journalism. Under various pseudonyms he soon gained a reputation as a
+satirist and humorist, his first success being <i>The Great Hoggarty
+Diamond</i>. Then years of work for <span class="sc">Punch</span> and other papers
+followed before he won enduring fame by <i>Vanity Fair</i>, which he styled
+"a novel without a hero."</p>
+
+<p>Charlotte Bront&euml;, who gained a great reputation by <i>Jane Eyre</i>, added
+to Thackeray's vogue by dedicating to him in rarely eloquent words the
+second edition of her <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_60" id="Page_60">[60]</a></span>novel, against which preachers fulminated
+because of what they called its immoral tendencies. Then in rapid
+succession Thackeray wrote <i>Pendennis</i>, <i>Henry Esmond</i>, <i>The
+Newcomes</i>, <i>The Virginians</i>, <i>Lovel the Widower</i> and <i>The Adventures
+of Philip</i>. All these are masterpieces of wit, satire and humor, cast
+in a perfect style that never offends the most fastidious taste, yet
+they are neglected to-day mainly because they do not furnish exciting
+incidents.</p>
+
+<p>Thackeray, like Dickens in his readings, made a fortune by his
+lectures, first on "The English Humorists," and later on "The Four
+Georges," and, like Dickens, he received the heartiest welcome and the
+largest money returns from this country.</p>
+
+<p>He died alone in his room on Christmas eve in the fine new home in
+London which he had recently made for himself and his three daughters.</p>
+
+<p>Thackeray was a giant physically, with a mind that worked easily, but
+he was indolent and always wrote under pressure, with the printer's
+devil waiting for his "copy." He was a thorough man of the world, yet
+full of the freshness of fancy and the tenderness of heart of a little
+child. All children were a delight to him, and he never could <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_61" id="Page_61">[61]</a></span>refrain
+from giving them extravagant tips. The ever-present grief that could
+not be forgotten by fame or success made him very tender to all
+suffering, especially the suffering of the weak and the helpless. Yet,
+like many a sensitive man, he concealed this kindness of heart under
+an affectation of cynicism, which led many unsympathetic critics to
+style him hard and ferocious in his satire.</p>
+
+<p>Like Dickens, Thackeray was one of the great reporters of his day,
+with an eye that took in unconsciously every detail of face, costume
+or scene and reproduced it with perfect accuracy. The reader of his
+novels is entertained by a series of pen pictures of men and women and
+scenes in high life and life below stairs that are photographic in
+their clearness and fidelity. Dickens always failed when he came to
+depict British aristocratic life; but Thackeray moved in drawing-rooms
+and brilliant assemblages with the ease of a man familiar from youth
+with good society, and hence free from all embarrassment, even in the
+presence of royalty.</p>
+
+<p>Thackeray's early works are written in the same perfect, easy,
+colloquial style, rich in natural literary allusions and frequently
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_62" id="Page_62">[62]</a></span>rhythmic with poetic feeling, which marked his latest novel. He also
+had perfect command of slang and the cockney dialect of the Londoner.
+No greater master of dialogue or narrative ever wrote than he who
+pictured the gradual degradation of Becky Sharp or the many
+self-sacrifices of Henry Esmond for the woman that he loved.</p>
+
+<p>Howells and other critics have censured Thackeray severely because of
+his tendency to preach, and also because he regarded his characters as
+puppets and himself as the showman who brought out their
+peculiarities. There is some ground for this criticism, if one regards
+the art of the novelist as centered wholly in realism; but such a hard
+and fast rule would condemn all old English novelists from Richardson
+to Thackeray.</p>
+
+<p>It ought not to disturb any reader that Defoe turns aside and gives
+reflections on the acts of his characters, for these remarks are the
+fruit of his own knowledge of the world. In the same way Thackeray
+keeps up a running comment on his men and women, and these bits of
+philosophy make his novels a storehouse of apothegms, which may be
+read again and again with great profit and pleasure. The modern novel,
+with its comparative lack of thought and <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_63" id="Page_63">[63]</a></span>feeling, its insistence
+upon the absolute effacement of the author, is seldom worth reading a
+second time. Not so with Thackeray. Every reading reveals new beauties
+of thought or style. An entire book has been made up of brief extracts
+from Thackeray's novels, and it is an ideal little volume for a pocket
+companion on walks, as Thackeray fits into any mood and always gives
+one material for thought.</p>
+
+<div class="img"><a name="imagep062" id="imagep062"></a>
+<a href="images/imagep062.jpg">
+<img border="0" src="images/imagep062.jpg" width="49%" alt="William Makepeace Thackeray A Caricature Drawn by Himself" /></a><br />
+<p class="cen sc" style="margin-top: .2em; margin-left: 20%; margin-right: 20%;">William Makepeace Thackeray A Caricature Drawn by
+Himself<span class="totoi"><a href="#toi">ToList</a></span></p>
+</div>
+
+<p>Of all Thackeray's novels <i>Vanity Fair</i> is the best known and most
+popular. It is a remarkable picture of a thoroughly hard, selfish
+woman whom even motherhood did not soften; but it is something more
+than the chronicle of Becky Sharp's fortunes. It is a panoramic sketch
+of many phases of London life; it is the free giving out by a great
+master of fiction of his impressions of life. Hence <i>Vanity Fair</i>
+alone is worth a hundred books filled merely with exciting adventures,
+which do not make the reader think. The problems that Thackeray
+presents in his masterpiece are those of love, duty, self-sacrifice;
+of high aims and many temptations to fall below those aspirations; of
+sordid, selfish life, and of fine, noble, generous souls who light up
+the world and make it richer by their presence.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_64" id="Page_64">[64]</a></span>Thackeray, in <i>Vanity Fair</i>, has sixty characters, yet each is drawn
+sharply and clearly, and the whole story moves on with the ease of
+real life. Consummate art is shown in the painting of Becky's gradual
+rise to power and the great scene at the climax of her success, when
+Rawdon Crawley strikes down the Marquis of Steyne, is one of the
+finest in all fiction. Though Becky knows that this blow shatters her
+social edifice, she is still woman enough to admire her husband in the
+very act that marks the beginning of the decadence of her fortunes.
+<i>Vanity Fair</i>, read carefully a half-dozen times, is a liberal
+education in life and in the art of the novelist.</p>
+
+<p>Personally, I rank <i>Pendennis</i> next to <i>Vanity Fair</i> for the pleasure
+to be derived from it. From the time when the old Major receives the
+letter from his sister telling of young Arthur's infatuation for the
+cheap actress, Miss Fotheringay, the story carries one along in the
+leisurely way of the last century. All the people are a delight, from
+Captain Costigan to Fowker, and from the French chef, who went to the
+piano for stimulus in his culinary work, to Blanche Amory and her
+amazing French affectations. But <i>Pendennis</i> is not popular.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_65" id="Page_65">[65]</a></span>Nor is <i>Henry Esmond</i> popular, although it is worthy to rank with <i>The
+Cloister and the Hearth</i>, <i>Adam Bede</i> and <i>Tess of the D'Urbervilles</i>.
+There is little relief of humor in <i>Esmond</i>, but the story has a
+strong appeal to any sympathetic reader, and it is the one supreme
+achievement in all fiction in which the hero tells his own story.
+Thackeray's art is flawless in this tale, and it sometimes rises to
+great heights, as in the scenes following the death of Lord
+Castlewood, the exposure of the Prince's perfidy, the selfishness of
+Beatrice and the great sacrifice of Esmond.</p>
+
+<p>Space is lacking to take up Thackeray's other works, but it is safe to
+say if you read the three novels here hastily sketched you cannot go
+amiss among his minor works. Even his lighter sketches and his essays
+will be found full of material that is so far above the ordinary level
+that the similar work of to-day seems cheap and common. Happy is the
+boy or girl who has made Thackeray a chosen companion from childhood.
+Such a one has received unconsciously lessons in life and in culture
+that can be gained from few of the great authors of the world.</p>
+
+<br />
+<br />
+<br />
+<br />
+<a name="Charlotte_Bronte" id="Charlotte_Bronte"></a><hr />
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_66" id="Page_66">[66]</a></span><br />
+
+
+<h2 class="sc2">Charlotte Bront&euml; And Her Two Great Novels<span class="totoc"><a href="#toc">ToC</a></span></h2>
+
+<div class="block2">
+<p class="hang sc">"Jane Eyre" and "Villette" are Touched With
+Genius&mdash;Tragedy of a Woman's Life That Resulted in Two Stories
+Of Passionate Revolt Against Fate.</p></div>
+<br />
+
+<p>Charlotte Bront&euml; is always linked in my memory with Thackeray because
+of her visit to the author of <i>Vanity Fair</i> and its humorous and
+pathetic features. She went to London from her lonely Yorkshire home,
+and the great world, with its many selfish and unlovely features, made
+a painful impression on her. Even Thackeray, her idol, was found to
+have feet of clay. But this "little Puritan," as the great man called
+her, was endowed with the divine genius which was forced to seek
+expression in fiction, and nowhere in all literature will one find an
+author who shows more completely the compelling force of a powerful
+creative imagination than this <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_67" id="Page_67">[67]</a></span>little, frail, self-educated woman,
+who had none of the advantages of her fellow writers, but who
+surpassed them all in a certain fierce, Celtic spirit which forces the
+reader to follow its bidding.</p>
+
+<div class="img"><a name="imagep066" id="imagep066"></a>
+<a href="images/imagep066.jpg">
+<img border="0" src="images/imagep066.jpg" width="50%" alt="Charlotte Bront&euml;" /></a><br />
+<p class="cen sc" style="margin-top: .2em; margin-left: 18%; margin-right: 18%;">Charlotte Bront&euml; From the Exquisitely Sympathetic
+Crayon Portrait by George Richmond, R.A. now in the National Portrait
+Gallery of London<span class="totoi"><a href="#toi">ToList</a></span></p>
+</div>
+
+<p>He who would get a full realization of the importance of this Celtic
+element in English literature cannot afford to neglect <i>Jane Eyre</i> and
+<i>Villette</i>, the best of Charlotte Bront&euml;'s works. Old-fashioned these
+romances are in many ways, oversentimental, in parts poorly
+constructed, but in all English fiction there is nothing to surpass
+the opening chapters of <i>Jane Eyre</i> for vividness and pathos, and few
+things to equal the greater part of <i>Villette</i>, the tragedy of an
+English woman's life in a Brussels boarding school.</p>
+
+<p>Who can explain the mystery of the flowering of a great literary style
+among the bleak and desolate moors of Yorkshire? Who can tell why
+among three daughters of an Irish curate of mediocre ability but
+tremendously passionate nature one should have developed an abnormal
+imagination that in <i>Wuthering Heights</i> is as powerful as Poe's at his
+best, and another should have matured into the ablest woman novelist
+of her day and her generation? <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_68" id="Page_68">[68]</a></span>These are freaks of heredity which
+science utterly fails to explain.</p>
+
+<p>Charlotte Bront&euml; was born in 1816 and died in 1855. She was one of six
+children who led a curiously forlorn life in the old Haworth parsonage
+in the midst of the desolate Yorkshire moors. The outlook on one side
+was upon a gloomy churchyard; on the other three sides the eye ranged
+to the horizon over rolling, dreary moorland that looked like a
+heaving ocean under a leaden sky. One brother these five sisters had,
+a brilliant but superficial boy, with no stable character, who became
+a drunkard and died after lingering on for years, a source of intense
+shame to his family. The girls were left motherless at an early age.
+Four were sent to a boarding school for clergymen's daughters, but two
+died from exposure and lack of nutritious food, and the others,
+starved mentally and physically, returned to their home. This was the
+school that Charlotte held up to infamy in <i>Jane Eyre</i>.</p>
+
+<p>The three sisters who were left, in the order of their ages, were
+Emily, Charlotte and Anne. They, with their brother, lived in a kind
+of dream world. Charlotte was the natural story-teller, and she wove
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_69" id="Page_69">[69]</a></span>endless romances in which figured the great men of history who were
+her heroes. She also told over and over many weird Yorkshire legends.
+These children devoured every bit of printed matter that came to the
+parsonage, and they were as thoroughly informed on all political
+questions as the average member of Parliament.</p>
+
+<p>At an age when normal girls were playing with their dolls these
+precocious children were writing poems and stories. Their father
+developed the ways of a recluse and never took his meals with his
+children. Living in this dream world of their own, these children
+could not understand normal girls. They were terribly unhappy at
+school and came near to death of homesickness. Finally Emily and
+Charlotte found a congenial school and in a few years they both made
+great strides in education. Charlotte tried teaching and also the work
+of governess, but finally both decided to open a girls' school of
+their own. To prepare themselves in French, Emily and Charlotte went
+to a boarding school in Brussels.</p>
+
+<p>This was the turning point in Charlotte's life. Intensely ambitious,
+she worked like a galley slave and soon mastered French <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_70" id="Page_70">[70]</a></span>so that she
+wrote it with ease and vigor. There is no question that she had a
+girlish love for her teacher, as passionate as it was brief, and that
+her whole outlook was broadened by this experience of a world so
+unlike the only one that she had known.</p>
+
+<p>The story of Charlotte's life is told beautifully by Mrs. Gaskell, the
+well-known author of <i>Cranford</i>. It is one of the finest biographies
+in the language, and also one of the most stimulating. The reader who
+follows Charlotte's stormy youth is made ashamed of his own lack of
+application when he reads of the girl's tireless work in self-culture
+in the face of much bodily weakness and great unhappiness.</p>
+
+<p>Read of her experiences in Brussels and you will get some idea of the
+tremendous vitality of this frail girl with the luminous eyes and the
+fiery spirit that no labor could tire. Mrs. Gaskell has drawn largely
+upon Charlotte's letters, which are as vivid and full of character as
+any of her fiction. Genius flashes from them; one feels drawn very
+close to this woman who raged against her physical infirmities, but
+overcame them bravely. When the spirit moved her she poured out her
+soul to her friend in words that grip the heart after all these
+years.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_71" id="Page_71">[71]</a></span>The boarding-school project fell through, and for some years the three
+sisters lived at home and devoted themselves to literary work. The
+first fruits of their pen was a small volume of poems by Currer, Ellis
+and Acton Bell, the pseudonyms of Charlotte, Emily and Anne. This book
+fell practically stillborn from the press, but the sisters were
+undaunted and each began a novel. Without experience of life it is not
+strange that these stories lacked merit.</p>
+
+<p>Charlotte drew her novel from her Brussels experience and called it
+<i>The Professor</i>. Though it was far the best, it was rejected, but
+Emily's <i>Wuthering Heights</i> and Anne's <i>Agnes Gray</i> were published.
+Emily's novel revealed a powerful but ill-regulated imagination, with
+scenes of splendid imaginative force, yet morbid and unreal as an
+opium dream. It received some good notices, but Anne's was mediocre
+and fell flat. Nothing daunted by the refusal of the publishers to
+bring out her first book, Charlotte began <i>Jane Eyre</i>, largely
+autobiographical in the early chapters, and this book was promptly
+accepted and published in August, 1847.</p>
+
+<p><i>Jane Eyre</i> was a great success from the day it came from the press.
+It was an epoch-making novel because it dragged into the <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_72" id="Page_72">[72]</a></span>fierce light
+of publicity many questions which the English public of that day had
+decided to leave out of print. To us of today it contains nothing
+unusual, for modern women writers have gone far beyond Charlotte
+Bront&euml; in their demands for freedom from many strict social
+conventions. What makes the book valuable is the glimpse which it
+gives of the wild revolt of a passionate nature against the coldness,
+the hypocrisy and the many shams of the social life of England in the
+middle of the last century.</p>
+
+<p>This novel is also noteworthy for its intense picture of the
+sufferings of a lonely, unappreciated girl, who felt in herself the
+stirrings of genius and who hungered and thirsted for appreciation.
+The terrible pictures of Lowood, the fiction name of the Cowan's
+Bridge School, where her two sisters contracted their fatal illness,
+are stamped upon the brain of every reader, as are those of the
+humiliations of the governess. The style of this book was a revelation
+in that period of formal writing. Like Stevenson, Charlotte Bront&euml;
+wrought with words as a great artist works with his colors, and many
+of her descriptions in <i>Jane Eyre</i> have never been surpassed. Hers was
+that brooding <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_73" id="Page_73">[73]</a></span>Celtic imagination which, when given full play, takes
+the reader by the hand and shows him the heights and depths of human
+love and suffering.</p>
+
+<div class="img"><a name="imagep072" id="imagep072"></a>
+<a href="images/imagep072.jpg">
+<img border="0" src="images/imagep072.jpg" width="54%" alt="Mrs. Gaskell From the Portrait by George Richmond, R.A." /></a><br />
+<p class="cen sc" style="margin-top: .2em; margin-left: 20%; margin-right: 20%;">Mrs. Gaskell From the Portrait by George Richmond,
+R.A. Mrs. Gaskell's "Life of Bront&euml;" is one of the Finest Biographies
+in the Language<span class="totoi"><a href="#toi">ToList</a></span></p>
+</div>
+
+<p>The success of <i>Jane Eyre</i> opened wide the doors of London to the
+unknown author. For a time her identity was hidden, but when it was
+revealed she was induced to go up to London and see the great world.
+Thackeray was especially kind to her, but his efforts to entertain
+this Yorkshire recluse were dismal failures. Nothing is more amusing
+than his daughter's story of the great novelist, slipping out of the
+house one night, when he had asked several celebrities to meet
+Charlotte Bront&euml;. The party was a terrible fiasco, and so he escaped,
+putting his finger to his lips as he opened the front door to warn his
+daughter that she must not reveal his flight. Charlotte's
+correspondence with her publisher is also full of pathos. It shows how
+keenly she felt her aloofness from the world, which she could not
+overcome.</p>
+
+<p>The story of <i>Villette</i> is the real story of Charlotte's experiences
+in a Brussels boarding school, where she first tasted the delights of
+literary study and her genius first found adequate expression. The
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_74" id="Page_74">[74]</a></span>original draft of this novel was called <i>The Professor</i>. Charlotte
+knew that it contained good material. So, after the death of her
+sisters, she took up the subject, and with all her mature power
+produced <i>Villette</i>&mdash;one of those novels struck off at a white heat,
+like George Sand's <i>Indiana</i> or Balzac's <i>Seraphita</i>. The story is
+largely autobiographical, but the episodes of Charlotte's life are
+touched with romance when they appear as the experiences of Lucy Snow,
+the forlorn English girl in the Continental school, among people of
+alien natures and strange speech.</p>
+
+<p>In <i>Shirley</i>, Charlotte Bront&euml; revealed much genuine humor in the
+malicious portraits of the three curates, who were drawn from real
+life. In fact, throughout her books one will find most of the
+characters sketched from real people. Hence, if one reads the story of
+her life he can trace her from her return from her Continental life
+down through the cruel years almost to the end. Back she came to her
+gloomy home from Brussels only to watch in succession the lingering
+death of her brother and her two sisters. Think of these three
+sisters, two marked for sure and early death, laboring at literary
+work every day with the <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_75" id="Page_75">[75]</a></span>passion and intensity that come to few men.
+Think of Emily, the eldest, with fierce pride refusing help to climb
+the steep stairway of the parsonage home when her strength was almost
+spent and her racking cough struck cold on the hearts of her sisters.
+And think of Charlotte in her terrible grief turning to fiction as the
+only resource from unbearable woe and loneliness. It is one of the
+great tragedies of literature, but out of it came the flowering of a
+brilliant genius.</p>
+
+<br />
+<br />
+<br />
+<br />
+<a name="George_Eliot" id="George_Eliot"></a><hr />
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_76" id="Page_76">[76]</a></span><br />
+
+<h2 class="sc2">George Eliot And Her Two Great Novels<span class="totoc"><a href="#toc">ToC</a></span></h2>
+
+<div class="block2">
+<p class="hang sc">"Adam Bede" and "The Mill on the Floss"&mdash;Her Early Stories
+Are Rich In Character Sketches, With Much Pathos and
+Humor.</p></div>
+<br />
+
+<p>George Eliot is a novelist in a class by herself. She never impressed
+me as a natural story-teller, save when she lived over again that
+happy girlhood which served to relieve the sadness of her mature life.
+In parts of <i>Adam Bede</i> and throughout <i>The Mill on the Floss</i> she
+seems to tell her stories as though she really enjoyed the work. All
+the scenes of her beautiful girlhood in the pleasant Warwickshire
+country, when she drove through the pleasant sweet-scented lanes and
+enjoyed the lovely views that she has made immortal in her
+books&mdash;these she dwelt upon, and with the touch of poetry that
+redeemed the austerity of her nature she makes them live again,
+even <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_77" id="Page_77">[77]</a></span>for us in an alien land. So, too, the English rustics live for
+us in her pages with the same deathless force as the villagers in
+Hardy's novels of Wessex life. And George Eliot and Thomas Hardy are
+the two English writers who have made these villagers, with their
+peculiar dialect and their insular prejudices, serve the purpose of
+the Greek chorus in warning the reader of the fate that hangs over
+their characters.</p>
+
+<div class="img"><a name="imagep076" id="imagep076"></a>
+<a href="images/imagep076.jpg">
+<img border="0" src="images/imagep076.jpg" width="55%" alt="George Eliot in 1864 From the Etching by Mr. Paul Rajon" /></a><br />
+<p class="cen sc" style="margin-top: .2em; margin-left: 20%; margin-right: 20%;">George Eliot in 1864 From the Etching by Mr. Paul
+Rajon&mdash;Drawn by Mr. Frederick Burton&mdash;From the Frontispiece to the
+First Edition of "George Eliot's Life," by Her Husband, J.W.
+Cross<span class="totoi"><a href="#toi">ToList</a></span></p>
+</div>
+
+<p>Of all English novelists, George Eliot was probably the best equipped
+in minute and accurate scholarship. Trained as few college graduates
+are trained, she was impelled for several years to take up the study
+of German metaphysics. Her mind, like her face, was masculine in its
+strength, and though she suffered in her youth from persistent
+ill-health, she conquered this in her maturity and wrought with
+passionate ardor at all her literary tasks. So keen was her conscience
+that she often defeated her own ends by undue labor, as in the
+preparation for <i>Romola</i>, whose historical background swamps the
+story.</p>
+
+<p>Above all she was a preacher of a stern morality. She laid down the
+moral law that selfishness, like sin, corrodes the best nature, and
+that the only happiness lies <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_78" id="Page_78">[78]</a></span>in absolute forgetfulness of self and in
+working to make others happy. Thus all her books are full of little
+sermons on life, preached with so much force that they cannot fail to
+make a profound impression even upon the careless reader.</p>
+
+<p>George Eliot impresses one as a very sad woman, with an eager desire
+to recapture the lost religious faith of her happy, unquestioning
+childhood and a still more passionate desire to believe in that
+immortality which her cold agnostic creed rejected as illogical. It
+was pitiful, this strong-minded woman reaching out for the things that
+less-endowed women accept without question. It was even more pitiful
+to see her, with her keen moral sense, violate all the conventions of
+English law and society in order to take up life with the man who
+stimulated her mind and actually made her one of the greatest of
+English novelists.</p>
+
+<p>Left alone, it is very doubtful whether George Eliot ever would have
+found herself, ever would have developed that mine of reminiscence
+which produced those perfect early stories of English country life. To
+George Henry Lewes, the man for whose love and companionship she
+incurred social ostracism, readers in all <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_79" id="Page_79">[79]</a></span>English-speaking countries
+owe a great debt of gratitude, for it was his wise counsel and his
+constant stimulus and encouragement which resulted in making George
+Eliot a writer of fine novels instead of an essayist on ethical and
+religious subjects. It detracts little from this debt that Lewes was
+also responsible for the stimulus of George Eliot's bent toward
+philosophical speculation and to that cold if clear scientific
+thought, which spoiled parts of <i>Middlemarch</i> and ruined <i>Daniel
+Deronda</i>.</p>
+
+<p>Marian Evans was born at Ashbury farm in Warwickshire in 1819 and died
+in 1880. Her father was the agent for a large estate, and the happiest
+hours of her girlhood were spent in driving about the country with
+him. Those keen eyes which saw so deeply into human nature were early
+trained to observe all the traits of the English rustic, and those
+childish impressions gave vitality to her humorous characters. Before
+she was ten years old Marian had read Scott and Lamb, as well as
+<i>Pilgrim's Progress</i> and <i>Rasselas</i>. When thirteen years old she
+revealed unusual musical gifts. She had the misfortune at seventeen to
+lose her mother, and for years after she managed her father's house.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_80" id="Page_80">[80]</a></span>Evidently the old farmer, whom his daughter has sketched with loving
+hand in <i>Adam Bede</i>, took great pride in the mental superiority of his
+daughter, for he hired tutors for her in Latin, Greek, Italian and
+German. All four languages she mastered as few college men master
+them. She read everything, both old and new, and her intimacy with the
+wife of Charles Bray of Coventry led her to refuse to go to church.
+This free thinking angered her father and caused him to demand that
+she leave his house. After three weeks her love and her keen sense of
+duty led her to conform to her father's wishes and to resume the
+church-going, which in his eyes was a part of life that could not be
+dropped.</p>
+
+<p>But that early departure from the established religion carried her
+into the field of German skepticism. She translated Strauss' <i>Life of
+Jesus</i>. For three years her studies were interrupted by the serious
+illness of her father. When he died she went to Geneva and remained on
+the Continent a year. Then she came home and took up her residence
+with the Brays. The development of her mind was very rapid. She served
+for some time as editor of the <span class="sc">Westminster Review</span>. She then
+formed <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_81" id="Page_81">[81]</a></span>a strong friendship with Herbert Spencer, and through
+Spencer she met George Henry Lewes, who made a special study of Goethe
+and the German philosophers, and who was the editor of the
+<span class="sc">Leader</span>, the organ of the Free Thinkers.</p>
+
+<div class="img"><a name="imagep080" id="imagep080"></a>
+<a href="images/imagep080.jpg">
+<img border="0" src="images/imagep080.jpg" width="90%" alt="George Eliot's Birthplace, South Farm, Arbury, Nuneaton" /></a><br />
+<p class="cen sc" style="margin-top: .2em; margin-left: 20%; margin-right: 20%;">George Eliot's Birthplace, South Farm, Arbury,
+Nuneaton<span class="totoi"><a href="#toi">ToList</a></span></p>
+</div>
+
+<p>Lewes and Marian Evans soon became all the world to each other, but
+Lewes had an insane wife, and the foolish law of England forbade him
+to get a divorce or to marry again. So the two decided to live
+together and to be man and wife in everything except the sanction of
+the law. The result was disastrous for a time to the woman. There is
+no question that the social isolation that resulted hurt her deeply.
+Her close friends like Spencer remained loyal, and her husband was
+always the devoted lover as well as the ideal companion.</p>
+
+<p>Two years after this new connection Lewes induced his wife to try
+fiction. Her first story was <i>The Sad Adventures of the Rev. Amos
+Barton</i> which was followed by <i>Janet's Repentance</i>. These stories
+appeared under the pen name of George Eliot, which she never
+relinquished. Gathered into book form under the title <i>Scenes From
+Clerical Life</i>, these stories in a minor key made a profound
+impression on Charles Dickens, <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_82" id="Page_82">[82]</a></span>who divined they were the work of a
+woman of unusual gifts.</p>
+
+<p>The praise of Lewes and the appreciation of Dickens and other experts
+gave great stimulus to her mind, and she produced <i>Adam Bede</i>, perhaps
+her best work, which had a great success. In the following year came
+<i>The Mill on the Floss</i>, an even greater success. Then in quick
+succession came the other early novels, <i>Silas Marner</i>, <i>Romola</i> and
+<i>Felix Holt</i>. A break of six years follows, and then came
+<i>Middlemarch</i> and <i>Daniel Deronda</i>.</p>
+
+<p>Lewes died in 1878, and two years later this woman, almost exhausted
+by her tremendous literary labors, married J.W. Cross, an old friend,
+but, like Charlotte Bront&euml;, she had only short happiness, for she died
+in the following year. The nations praised her, but she never
+recovered from the shock of Lewes' death.</p>
+
+<p>Of George Eliot's work the things that impress one most are her fine
+descriptions of natural scenes, her keen analyses of character and her
+many little moral sermons on life and conduct. With an abnormal
+conscience and a keen sense of duty, life proved very hard for her.
+This is reflected in the somberness of her stories and in the <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_83" id="Page_83">[83]</a></span>dread
+atmosphere of fate that hangs over her characters. But over against
+this must be placed her joy in depicting the rustic character and
+humor and her delight in reproducing the scenes of her childhood in
+one of the most beautiful counties of England.</p>
+
+<p>Herbert Spencer, who was long associated with George Eliot, and for a
+time contemplated the possibility of a union with that remarkable
+woman, pays her a high tribute in <i>The Study of Sociology</i>. After
+explaining the origin in women of the ability to distinguish quickly
+the passing feelings of those around, he says: "Ordinarily, this
+feminine faculty, showing itself in an aptitude for guessing the state
+of mind through the external signs, ends simply in intuitions formed
+without assignable reasons; but when, as happens in rare cases, there
+is joined with it skill in psychological analysis, there results in
+extremely remarkable ability to interpret the mental states of others.
+Of this ability we have a living example (George Eliot) never hitherto
+paralleled among women, and in but few, if any, cases exceeded among
+men."</p>
+
+<p>Perhaps the reader who does not know George Eliot would do well to
+begin with <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_84" id="Page_84">[84]</a></span><i>The Mill on the Floss</i>, her finest work, which is full of
+humor, lovely pictures of English rural life and an analysis of soul
+in Maggie Tolliver that has never been surpassed. Yet the end is cruel
+and unnatural, as hard and as unsatisfying as the author's own
+religious creed. Next read <i>Adam Bede</i>, one of the saddest books in
+all literature, with comic relief in Mrs. Poyser, one of the most
+humorous characters in English fiction.</p>
+
+<p>George Eliot drew Dinah Morris from her favorite aunt, who was a
+Methodist exhorter, and the power and spontaneity of this novel came
+from the sharpness and clearness of her early impressions, joined to
+her love of living over again her girlhood days, before doubt had
+clouded her sky. Also read <i>Silas Marner</i> with its perfect picture of
+Raveloe, "an English village where many of the old echoes lingered,
+undrowned by new voices." These descriptions are instinct with poetry,
+and they affect one like Wordsworth's best poems or like Tennyson's
+vignettes of rural life. The pale weaver of Raveloe will always remain
+as one of the great characters in English fiction.</p>
+
+<p>Of George Eliot's more elaborate work it is impossible to speak in
+entire praise. <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_85" id="Page_85">[85]</a></span>If you have the leisure, and these books I have named
+please you, then by all means read <i>Romola</i>, which is a remarkable
+study of the degeneracy of a young Greek and of the noble strivings of
+a great-hearted woman. The pictures of Florence in the time of
+Savonarola are splendid, but they smell of the lamp. <i>Middlemarch</i> is
+also worth careful study for its fine analysis of character and
+motive. In all George Eliot's books her characters develop before our
+eyes, and this is especially true in this elaborate study of the
+pathos and the tragedy of human life.</p>
+
+<p>George Eliot wrote little poetry, but one piece may be commended to
+careful attention, "The Choir Invisible." It sums up with impassioned
+force her ethical creed, which she put in these fine lines:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Oh, may I join the choir invisible<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Of those immortal dead who live again<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">In minds made better by their presence: live<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">In pulses stirred to generosity,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">In deeds of daring rectitude, in scorn<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">For miserable aims that end in self. &nbsp; * &nbsp; &nbsp; * <br /></span>
+<span class="i0"><br /></span>
+<span class="i10">This is life to come<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Which martyred men have made more glorious<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">For us who strive to follow. May I reach<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">That purest heaven, be to other souls<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">The cup of strength in some great agony,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Enkindle generous ardor, feed pure love.<br /></span><span class='pn'><a name="Page_86" id="Page_86">[86]</a></span>
+<span class="i0">Beget the smiles that have no cruelty&mdash;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Be the sweet presence of a good diffused,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And in diffusion ever more intense.<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">So shall I join the choir invisible,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Whose music is the gladness of the world.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>This was the creed of George Eliot, which she preached in her books
+and which she followed in her life. This was the only hope of
+immortality that she cherished&mdash;to "live again" in minds that she
+stimulated.</p>
+
+<br />
+<br />
+<br />
+<br />
+<a name="Apostle_of_Art" id="Apostle_of_Art"></a><hr />
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_87" id="Page_87">[87]</a></span><br />
+
+<h2 class="sc2">Ruskin The Apostle of Art<span class="totoc"><a href="#toc">ToC</a></span></h2>
+
+<div class="block2">
+<p class="hang sc">His Work As Art Critic and Social Reformer&mdash;Best Books Are
+"Modern Painters," "The Seven Lamps" and "The Stones of
+Venice."</p></div>
+<br />
+
+<p>John Ruskin deserves a place among the great English writers of the
+last century, not only because of his superb style and the amount of
+his work, but because he was the first to encourage the study of art
+and nature among the people. So enormous have been the strides made in
+the last twenty years in popular knowledge of art and architecture,
+and so great the growth of interest in the beauties of nature that it
+is difficult to appreciate that a little over a half century ago, when
+Ruskin first came into prominence as a writer, the English public was
+densely ignorant of art, and was equally ignorant of the world of
+pleasure to be derived from beautiful scenery.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_88" id="Page_88">[88]</a></span>It was Ruskin's great service to the world that he opened the eyes of
+the public to the glories of the art of all countries, and that he
+also revealed the wonders of architecture. Many critics have laid bare
+his infirmities as a critic, but a man of colder blood and less
+emotional nature would never have reached the large public to which
+Ruskin appealed. Like a great orator he was swayed by the passion of
+convincing his audience, and the very extravagance of his language and
+the ardor of his nature served to make a profound impression upon
+readers who are not usually affected by such appeals as his.</p>
+
+<p>Ruskin was one of the most impractical men that ever lived, but in the
+exuberance of his nature and in his rare unselfishness he started a
+dozen social reforms in England, any one of which should have given
+fame to its founder. He gave away a great fortune in gifts to the
+public and in private generosity. He founded museums, established
+scholarships, tried to put into practical working order his dream of a
+New Life founded on the union of manual labor and high intellectual
+aims, labored to induce the public to read the good old books that
+help one to make life worth living.</p>
+
+<div class="img"><a name="imagep088" id="imagep088"></a>
+<a href="images/imagep088.jpg">
+<img border="0" src="images/imagep088.jpg" width="50%" alt="John Ruskin From a Photograph taken on July 20, 1882, by Messrs. Elliott &amp; Fry" /></a><br />
+<p class="cen sc" style="margin-top: .2em; margin-left: 22%; margin-right: 22%;">John Ruskin From a Photograph taken on July 20,
+1882, by Messrs. Elliott &amp; Fry<span class="totoi"><a href="#toi">ToList</a></span></p>
+</div>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_89" id="Page_89">[89]</a></span>That much of his good work was neutralized by his lack of common sense
+detracts nothing from the world's debt to Ruskin. The simple truth is
+that he was a reformer as well as a great writer, and the very fervor
+of his religious and social beliefs, his contempt of mere money
+getting, his hatred of falsehood, his boundless generosity and his
+childlike simplicity of mind&mdash;all these traits at which the world
+laughed lifted Ruskin above the other men of genius of his time and
+placed him among the world's great reformers.</p>
+
+<p>Among this small body of men whose spiritual force continues to live
+in their books or through the influence of their great
+self-sacrifices, Ruskin deserves a place, for he gave fortune, work
+and a splendid enthusiasm to the common people's cause.</p>
+
+<p>Ruskin's whole life was abnormal, and his early training served to
+accentuate those weaknesses of mind and will that made failures of so
+many schemes for the public good. If Ruskin had been trained in the
+English public schools he would have learned common sense in boyhood.
+As it was, his father and mother shielded the boy in every way from
+all contact with the world. Ruskin's father was a prosperous <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_90" id="Page_90">[90]</a></span>wine
+merchant with much culture; his mother was a religious fanatic, whose
+passion for the Bible imposed upon her boy the daily reading of the
+Scriptures and the daily memorizing of scores of verses.</p>
+
+<p>Such training in most cases causes a revolt against religion, but in
+Ruskin's case it resulted in training his boyish ear to the cadences
+of the Bible writers and in filling his mind with the sublime imagery
+of the prophets, with the result that when he began to write he had
+already formed a style, the richest and most varied of the last
+century.</p>
+
+<p>The boy was a mental prodigy, for he taught himself to read when four
+years old, and at five he had devoured hundreds of books and was
+already writing poems and plays. At ten, when he had his first tutor,
+his knowledge was wide and he had become a passionate lover of natural
+scenery, as well as no mean artist with pen and pencil. Scott's novels
+and Byron's <i>Childe Harold</i> formed much of his reading at a time when
+most boys are content with the stories of Ballantyne or Mayne Reid.
+The range of his mental activity until he entered Oxford at eighteen
+was very wide. He was interested in mineralogy, meteorology,
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_91" id="Page_91">[91]</a></span>mathematics, drawing and painting. What probably expanded his mind
+more than all else was the education of travel. His father spent about
+half his time journeying through England and the Continent in an
+old-fashioned chaise and John always shared in these expeditions. At
+Oxford he competed for the Newdigate prize in poetry, and after being
+twice defeated won the coveted honor. He never gained any high
+scholarship, but he received valuable training in writing.</p>
+
+<p>There is no space here to chronicle more than a few of his many
+activities after leaving college. He first came into prominence by his
+passionate defense of the painter Turner against the art critics, and
+his study of Turner led him to adopt art criticism as his life work.
+At twenty-three years of age, when most youths are puzzled about their
+vocation, Ruskin had completed the first volume of <i>Modern Painters</i>,
+the publication of which gave him fame and made him a social lion in
+London. Other volumes of this great work followed swiftly and caused a
+great commotion in the world of art and letters because of the radical
+views of the author and the remarkable qualities of his style.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_92" id="Page_92">[92]</a></span>This was followed by <i>The Seven Lamps of Architecture</i>, in which
+Ruskin expounded his radical views on this kindred art; <i>The Stones of
+Venice</i>, an eloquent book enforcing the argument that Gothic
+architecture sprang from a pure national faith and the domestic
+virtues; <i>King's Treasuries</i>, a noble plea for good books; <i>Fors
+Clavigera</i>, a series of ninety-six parts published in eight volumes,
+the record of his social experiments; <i>Preterita</i>, one of the most
+charming books of youthful reminiscences in any language, and many
+others. Ruskin's mental activity was enormous. He had to his credit in
+his fifty-five active years no less than seventy-two volumes and one
+hundred magazine articles, as well as thousands of lectures.</p>
+
+<p>This outline sketch of Ruskin's life would be incomplete without
+mention of the great sorrows that darkened his days but gave eloquence
+to his writings. The first was the desertion of his wife, who married
+the painter Millais, and the second was the loss by death of Rose La
+Touche, a beautiful Irish girl whom he had known from childhood. She
+refused to marry him because of their differences of religion; even
+refused to see him in her fatal illness <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_93" id="Page_93">[93]</a></span>unless he could say that he
+loved God better than he loved her. Her death brought bitter despair
+to Ruskin, but the world profited by it, for grief gave his work
+maturity and force. The last ten years of Ruskin's life were spent at
+his beautiful home at Brantwood, surrounded by the pictures that he
+loved and served faithfully by devoted relatives.</p>
+
+<div class="img"><a name="imagep092" id="imagep092"></a>
+<a href="images/imagep092.jpg">
+<img border="0" src="images/imagep092.jpg" width="52%" alt="John Ruskin From the Semi-Romantic Portrait of Sir John E. Millais" /></a><br />
+<p class="cen sc" style="margin-top: .2em; margin-left: 20%; margin-right: 20%;">John Ruskin From the Semi-Romantic Portrait of Sir
+John E. Millais<span class="totoi"><a href="#toi">ToList</a></span></p>
+</div>
+
+<p>Ruskin's books are not to be read continuously. Many dreary passages
+may be found in all of them, which the judicious reader skips. But his
+best works are more full of intellectual stimulus than those of any
+writer of his time with the single exception of Carlyle. <i>Modern
+Painters</i> overflows with the enthusiasm of a lover of art and of
+nature who preaches the gospel of sincerity and truth. It is marked,
+like all his work, by eloquent digressions on human life and conduct,
+for Ruskin held that the finest art was simply the flowering of a
+great soul nurtured on all that was highest and best. <i>The Seven
+Lamps</i> does for architecture what his first work did for painting. The
+book is written in more ornate style than any other, but he who loves
+impassioned prose will find many specimens here that can only by
+equaled in De Quincey's <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_94" id="Page_94">[94]</a></span>best work. Read the peroration of the "Lamp
+of Sacrifice" and you will not need to be told that this is the finest
+tribute to the work of the builders of the medi&aelig;val cathedral. Here is
+a part of this eloquent passage:</p>
+
+<div class="block"><p>It is to far happier, far higher exaltation that we owe those
+fair fronts of variegated mosaic, charged with wild fancies
+and dark hosts of imagery, thicker and quainter than ever
+filled the depth of midsummer dream; those vaulted gates,
+trellised with close leaves; those window labyrinths of
+twisted tracery and starry light; those misty masses of
+multitudinous pinnacle and diademed tower; the only witnesses,
+perhaps, that remain to us of the faith and fear of nations.
+All else for which the builders sacrificed has passed away. * &nbsp; * &nbsp; *
+But of them and their life and their toil upon earth, one
+reward, one evidence, is left to us in those great heaps of
+deep-wrought stone. They have taken with them to the grave
+their powers, their honors and their errors; but they have
+left us their adoration.</p></div>
+
+<p>No space is left here to mention in detail Ruskin's other works, but
+<i>Unto This Last</i>, <i>The Stones of Venice</i>, <i>Sesame and Lilies</i> and <i>The
+Crown of Wild Olive</i> may be commended as well worth careful reading.
+Also <i>Preterita</i> is alive with noble passages, such as the pen-picture
+of the view from the Dale in the Alps, or of the Rhone below Geneva.
+Read also Ruskin's description of Turner's "Slave Ship" or the
+impressive <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_95" id="Page_95">[95]</a></span>passage on the mental slavery of the modern workman in the
+sixth chapter of the second volume of <i>The Stones of Venice</i>. Read
+these things and you will have no doubt of the genius of Ruskin or of
+his command of the finest impassioned prose in the English language.</p>
+
+<br />
+<br />
+<br />
+<br />
+<a name="Victorian_Writers" id="Victorian_Writers"></a><hr />
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_96" id="Page_96">[96]</a></span><br />
+
+<h2 class="sc2">Tennyson Leads the Victorian Writers<span class="totoc"><a href="#toc">ToC</a></span></h2>
+
+<div class="block2">
+<p class="hang sc">The Poet Who Voiced The Aspirations Of His Age&mdash;"Locksley
+Hall," "In Memoriam" and "The Idylls of the King" Among His
+Best Works.</p></div>
+<br />
+
+<p>Of all the great English writers of the Victorian age it is probable
+that the next century will give the foremost place to Tennyson. Better
+than any other poet of his day, he stands as a type of the English
+people in obedience to law, in strong religious faith, in splendid
+imaginative force and in a certain unyielding cast of mind that made
+him bide his time during the dark years when he was bitterly
+criticized or coldly neglected. Tennyson had to the full the poet's
+temperament, but he had also a superb physique, which carried him into
+his eighty-fourth year. From a boy he was a lover of nature, and in
+nearly every poem that he wrote are found many proofs of his <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_97" id="Page_97">[97]</a></span>close
+observation in English woods and fields. Through a period of general
+skepticism he kept unimpaired his strong faith in God and in
+immortality that lends so much force to his best verse.</p>
+
+<div class="img"><a name="imagep096" id="imagep096"></a>
+<a href="images/imagep096.jpg">
+<img border="0" src="images/imagep096.jpg" width="53%" alt="Alfred, Lord Tennyson After an Engraving by G.J. Stodart from a Photograph by J. Mayall" /></a><br />
+<p class="cen sc" style="margin-top: .2em; margin-left: 20%; margin-right: 20%;">Alfred, Lord Tennyson After an Engraving by G.J.
+Stodart from a Photograph by J. Mayall<span class="totoi"><a href="#toi">ToList</a></span></p>
+</div>
+
+<p>Tennyson's genius found its natural expression in verse, and it is his
+distinction that while he explored many realms of thought he was
+always clear and always musical. Browning had more passion, but it was
+the misfortune of the author of <i>The Ring and the Book</i> that he could
+not refrain from a cramped and obscure style of verse that makes much
+of his work very hard reading. Many Browning societies have been
+formed to study the works of the poet whom they are proud to call
+master; but Tennyson needs no societies, as the man in the street and
+the woman whose soul is troubled can understand every line he has
+written. Nor is Tennyson lacking in passion, as any one may see by
+reading <i>Locksley Hall</i> or <i>Maud</i>.</p>
+
+<p>Tennyson summed up in his poetry all the spiritual aspiration and the
+eager search for knowledge of his time. He explored all domains of
+thought, and he enriched his verse with the fruit of his studies. All
+the great elemental forces are found in his <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_98" id="Page_98">[98]</a></span>poems: he is the laureate
+of love and sorrow, of grief and aspiration. Throughout his verse runs
+the great natural law that the man who is not pure in heart can never
+see the glory of the poet's vision.</p>
+
+<p>The purity of his own life was reflected in his verse, just as the mad
+license and the furious self-indulgence of Byron are mirrored in <i>Don
+Juan</i>, <i>Manfred</i> and <i>Cain</i>. Even to extreme old age Tennyson
+preserved that high poetic faculty which he manifested in early youth.
+One of his latest poems, <i>Crossing the Bar</i>, is also one of the finest
+in the language, breathing the old man's assurance of a life beyond
+the grave and a reunion with the dear friend of his youth, whom he
+mourned and immortalized in <i>In Memoriam</i>.</p>
+
+<p>Alfred Tennyson had one of the finest lives in the roll of English
+authors. He was born in 1809 and lived to 1892. He spent his early
+years in one of the most beautiful parts of Lincolnshire. He enjoyed
+the personal training of his father, a very accomplished clergyman,
+and much of his boyhood and youth was spent in the open air. In this
+way he absorbed that knowledge of birds and animals, trees and flowers
+and all the aspects of nature which is <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_99" id="Page_99">[99]</a></span>reflected in his verse. As a
+youth he experimented in many styles of verse, and when only eighteen
+he issued, with his brother Charles, <i>Poems by Two Brothers</i>. The next
+year he and Charles entered Trinity College, Cambridge. There they
+received the greatest impulse toward culture in a society of
+undergraduates known as the "Apostles." Its membership included
+Thackeray, Trench, Spedding, Monckton Milnes and Alfred and Arthur
+Henry Hallam, sons of the famous author of <i>The Middle Ages</i>.</p>
+
+<p>In his second year at college Tennyson won the Chancellor's gold medal
+with his prize poem, <i>Timbuctoo</i>, and in the following year he
+published his first volume, <i>Poems, Chiefly Lyrical</i>. He left college
+without a degree, and in 1833 he issued another volume of poems which
+contained some of his best work&mdash;<i>The Lady of Shalott</i>, <i>The Lotos
+Eaters</i>, <i>The Palace of Art</i> and <i>A Dream of Fair Women</i>. Any one of
+these poems if issued to-day would make the reputation of a poet, but
+this book made little impression on the Victorian public which had
+lost its taste for poetry and was devoted mainly to prose fiction. The
+world has yet to catch the note of this master singer.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_100" id="Page_100">[100]</a></span>In 1837 Arthur Hallam, Tennyson's friend and other self, the one man
+who predicted that he would be the greatest poet of his age, died
+suddenly in Vienna while traveling abroad. The shock made a profound
+impression on Tennyson. For ten years he put forth no work. Finally,
+in 1842, he issued two volumes of poems that at once caught the public
+fancy. Among the poems that brought him fame were <i>Locksley Hall</i>,
+<i>Lady Godiva</i>, <i>Ulysses</i>, <i>The Two Voices</i> and <i>Morte d' Arthur</i>. The
+latter was the seed of the splendid <i>Idylls of the King</i>. Five years
+later he published <i>The Princess</i>, with its beautiful songs, and three
+years after <i>In Memoriam</i> the greatest elegiac poem in the language,
+in which he lamented the fate of Arthur Hallam and poured forth his
+own grief over this irreparable loss. In the same year he married Miss
+Emily Sellwood, who made his home a haven of rest and of whom he once
+said that with her "the peace of God came into my life."</p>
+
+<p><i>Maud</i>, his most dramatic poem, was issued in 1855. As early as 1859
+he published the first part of <i>The Idylls of the King</i>, but it was
+not until 1872 that the complete sequence of the <i>Idylls</i> was given
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_101" id="Page_101">[101]</a></span>to the public. These Arthurian legends are cast by Tennyson in his
+most musical blank verse, and he has given to them a tinge of
+mysticism that seems to lift them above the everyday world into a
+realm of pure romance and chivalry.</p>
+
+<div class="img"><a name="imagep100" id="imagep100"></a>
+<a href="images/imagep100.jpg">
+<img border="0" src="images/imagep100.jpg" width="48%" alt="Facsimile of Tennyson's Original Manuscript of &quot;Crossing the Bar&quot; Copyright by The Macmillan Company" /></a><br />
+<p class="cen sc" style="margin-top: .2em; margin-left: 20%; margin-right: 20%;">Facsimile of Tennyson's Original Manuscript of
+"Crossing the Bar" Copyright by The Macmillan Company<span class="totoi"><a href="#toi">ToList</a></span></p>
+</div>
+
+<p><i>Enoch Arden</i>, a domestic idyll, written in 1864, made a great hit. It
+was followed by several plays&mdash;<i>Queen Mary</i>, <i>Harold</i>, <i>Becket</i> and
+others&mdash;all finely written, but none appealing to the great public. Up
+to his last years Tennyson remained the real laureate of his people,
+his words always tinged with the fire of inspiration. Only three years
+before his death he wrote <i>Crossing the Bar</i>, a poem which met with
+instant response from the English-speaking world because of its signs
+of courage in the face of death and its proofs of steadfast faith in
+the life beyond the grave.</p>
+
+<p>No adequate estimate of Tennyson's work can be made in the small space
+allotted to this article. All that can be done is to mention a few of
+his best works and to quote a few of his stirring lines. If the reader
+will study these poems he will be pretty sure to read more of
+Tennyson. To my mind, <i>Locksley Hall</i> is Tennyson's finest poem, as
+true to-day as when it was <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_102" id="Page_102">[102]</a></span>written seventy years ago. The long,
+rolling, trochaic verse, like the billows on the coast that it
+pictures, suits the thought. The poem is the passionate lament of a
+returned soldier from India over the mercenary marriage of the cousin
+whom he loved. Here are a few of the lines that will never die:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Many a night I saw the Pleiades, rising through the mellow shade,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Glitter like a swarm of fireflies tangled in a silver braid.<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Love took up the harp of Life, and smote on all the chords with might;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Smote the chord of Self, that, trembling, pass'd in music out of sight.<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Cursed be the sickly forms that err from honest Nature's rule!<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Cursed be the gold that gilds the straiten'd forehead of a fool!<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Comfort? Comfort scorn'd of devils! this is truth the poet sings,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">That a sorrow's crown of sorrow is remembering happier things.<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">But the jingling of the guinea helps the hurt that Honor feels,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And the nations do but murmur, snarling at each other's heels.<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Mated with a squalid savage&mdash;what to me were sun or clime?<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">I the heir of all the ages in the foremost files of time.<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Not in vain the distance beacons. Forward, forward, let us range,<br /></span><span class='pn'><a name="Page_103" id="Page_103">[103]</a></span>
+<span class="i0">Let the great world spin forever down the ringing grooves of change.<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Thro' the shadow of the globe we sweep into the younger day:<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Better fifty years of Europe than a cycle of Cathay.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>It would be difficult among the poets of the last century to parallel
+these passages for their imaginative sweep and magnetic appeal to the
+reader. The new criticism that disparages Tennyson and raises Browning
+to the seventh heaven calls <i>Locksley Hall</i> old-fashioned and
+sentimental, but to me it is the greatest poem of its age. Next to
+this I would place <i>In Memoriam</i>, which has never received its just
+recognition. Readers of Taine will recall his flippant Gaelic comment
+on Tennyson's conventional but cold words of lament. Nothing, it seems
+to me, is further from the truth. The many beautiful lines in the poem
+depict the changing moods of the man who mourned for his dead and
+finally found comfort in the words of the Bible&mdash;the only source of
+comfort in this world for the sorely wounded heart. The whole poem, as
+his son Hallam says, emphasizes the poet's belief "in an omnipotent
+and <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_104" id="Page_104">[104]</a></span>all-loving God, who has revealed himself through the highest
+self-sacrificing love in the freedom of the human will and in the
+immortality of the soul."</p>
+
+<p>The meter of <i>In Memoriam</i> serves to fix the poem in the memory. It
+seems to fit the thought with perfect naturalness. It is not strange
+that Queen Victoria should have placed this poem next to the Bible as
+a means of comfort after the loss of her husband, whom she loved so
+dearly that all the attractions of power and wealth never made her
+forget him a single day.</p>
+
+<p><i>The Idylls of the King</i> are also unappreciated in these days, yet
+they contain a body of splendid poetry that cannot be duplicated. They
+represent the author's dreams from early youth, when his imagination
+was first fired by old Malory's chronicle of the good King Arthur.
+They breathe a chivalry as lofty as Sidney's, and they teach many
+ethical lessons that it would do the present-day world good to take to
+heart. These noble poems, cast in the most musical blank verse in our
+literature, were the work of thirty years, written only when the poet
+felt genuine inspiration. They represent, as the poet told his son,
+"the dream of a man coming into practical life <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_105" id="Page_105">[105]</a></span>and ruined by one sin.
+It is not the history of one man or of one generation, but of a whole
+cycle of generations." And the old poet added these fine words:
+"Poetry is like shot silk with many glancing colors. Every reader must
+find his own interpretation according to his ability and according to
+his sympathy with the poet."</p>
+
+<p>Other fine poems of Tennyson which one should read are the noble <i>Ode
+on the Death of the Duke of Wellington</i>, <i>Break, Break, Break</i>, the
+perfect songs in <i>The Princess</i>, and <i>Crossing the Bar</i>. If you read
+these aright you will wish to know more of Tennyson, the poet who
+reconciled science and religion and kept his old faith strong to the
+end.</p>
+
+<br />
+<br />
+<br />
+<br />
+<a name="Greatest_Poet" id="Greatest_Poet"></a><hr />
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_106" id="Page_106">[106]</a></span><br />
+
+<h2 class="sc2">Browning Greatest Poet Since Shakespeare<span class="totoc"><a href="#toc">ToC</a></span></h2>
+
+<div class="block2">
+<p class="hang sc">How to Get the Best of Browning's Poems&mdash;Read the Lyrics
+First and Then Take Up the Longer and the More Difficult
+Works.</p></div>
+<br />
+
+<p>The greatest of English poets since Shakespeare, is the title given to
+Robert Browning by many admirers of recognized ability as critics. For
+his dramatic force and his insight into human nature there is no
+question that Browning deserves this high rank. In these two qualities
+he stands above Tennyson. But a large part of his work is written in a
+style so crabbed that it acts as a bar to one's enjoyment of many fine
+poems. Only the most resolute reader can go through <i>Sordello</i> or <i>The
+Ring and the Book</i>, the latter, with its interminable discussions of
+motive and its curious descriptions of half-forgotten legal and church
+methods of the seventeenth <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_107" id="Page_107">[107]</a></span>century. If one-half this long poem of
+over twenty thousand lines had been cut out, it would have been vastly
+improved.</p>
+
+<div class="img"><a name="imagep106" id="imagep106"></a>
+<a href="images/imagep106.jpg">
+<img border="0" src="images/imagep106.jpg" width="54%" alt="Robert Browning From a Photograph by Hollyer after the Portrait by G.F. Watts, R.A." /></a><br />
+<p class="cen sc" style="margin-top: .2em; margin-left: 20%; margin-right: 20%;">Robert Browning From a Photograph by Hollyer after
+the Portrait by G.F. Watts, R.A.<span class="totoi"><a href="#toi">ToList</a></span></p>
+</div>
+
+<p>The advocates of Browning hold that the study of the poet's
+obscurities is good mental discipline, but I am of the belief that
+poetry, like music, should not demand too great exertion of the mind
+to appreciate its beauty. Wagner's "Seigfried" and "Parsifal" are
+altogether too long to be enjoyed thoroughly. The composer would have
+done well to eliminate a third of each, for as they are produced they
+strain the attention to the point of fatigue, and no work of art
+should ever tire its admirers.</p>
+
+<p>In the same way Browning offends against this primal canon of art. A
+man who was capable of writing the most melodious verse, as is shown
+in some of his lyrics, he refused to put his thoughts in simple form,
+and often clothed them in obscurity. The result is that the great
+public which would have enjoyed his studies of character and his
+powerful dramatic faculty is repelled at the outset by the
+difficulties of understanding his poems. Browning added to this
+obscurity by constant reference to little-known authors. This was not
+pedantry, any more than Milton's use of classic mythology <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_108" id="Page_108">[108]</a></span>was
+pedantry. Both men possessed unusual knowledge of rare books, and both
+were much given to quoting authors who are unknown to the general
+reading public.</p>
+
+<p>But with all these difficulties in the way, there still remains a body
+of verse in Browning's work which will richly repay any reader. The
+lyrics and short poems like <i>The Pied Piper of Hamelin</i>, <i>Pippa
+Passes</i>, <i>Prospice</i>, <i>O Lyric Love</i>, <i>The Last Ride</i>, <i>One Word More</i>,
+<i>How They Brought the Good News</i>, <i>Herve Riel</i>, the epilogue to
+<i>Asolando</i>, <i>The Lost Leader</i>, <i>Men and Women</i>, and <i>A Soul's Tragedy</i>
+will give any reader a taste of the real Browning. If you like these
+poems, then try the more ambitious poems like <i>A Blot in the
+'Scutcheon</i>, <i>The Inn Album</i>, <i>Fifine at the Fair</i> and others.</p>
+
+<p>Browning, above all other English poets, seems to have had the power
+of seizing upon a character at a crucial hour in life and laying bare
+all the impulses that impel one to high achievement or great
+self-sacrifice. He seems always to have worked at the highest
+emotional stress, so that his words are surcharged with feeling. In
+many of his poems this emotional element is painful in its intensity.
+Character to him was the main feature, and his selections <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_109" id="Page_109">[109]</a></span>comprise
+some of the most picturesque in all history. That he was able to make
+these people live and move and impress us as real flesh-and-blood
+human beings shows the great creative power of the man, who ought to
+have written some of the world's finest plays.</p>
+
+<p>Robert Browning was born in 1812 and died in 1889. His father, though
+a clerk in the Bank of England, was a fine classical scholar and had
+dabbled in verse. His mother was an accomplished musician. Browning
+had every early advantage, and while still a lad he came under the
+spell of Byron and had his poetical faculty greatly stimulated by the
+"Napoleon of rhyme." Then came Shelley and Keats, and their influence
+set him upon the course which he followed for many years. His first
+poem was <i>Pauline</i>, which has passages of rare beauty set among dreary
+commonplaces. He followed this with <i>Paracelsus</i> and <i>Strafford</i>,
+which opened to him the doors of all London salons and made his
+reputation. <i>Sordello</i>, one of his most difficult poems, came next,
+but he varied these dramatic tragedies with a series of short poems
+called <i>Bells and Pomegranates</i>. In this the finest thing was <i>Pippa
+Passes</i>, which was warmly <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_110" id="Page_110">[110]</a></span>praised by Elizabeth Barrett, who
+afterwards became his wife. Among the many poems that Browning
+produced in five years were <i>Colombe's Birthday</i>, <i>A Blot in the
+'Scutcheon</i>, <i>Dramatic Romances and Lyrics</i> and <i>A Soul's Tragedy</i>.</p>
+
+<p>Browning, in 1846, married Elizabeth Barrett, the author of <i>Lady
+Geraldine's Courtship</i> and other poems, a woman who had been an
+invalid, confined to her room for years. Love gave her strength to
+arise and walk, and love also gave her the courage to defy the foolish
+tyranny of her father and elope with Browning. What kind of man that
+father was may be seen in his comment after the marriage: "I've no
+objection to the young man, but my daughter should have been thinking
+of another world." They went to Italy, where for fifteen years they
+made an ideal home. Mrs. Browning's story of her love is seen in
+<i>Sonnets From the Portuguese</i>, and some of her finest work is in <i>Casa
+Guidi Windows</i>. Each stimulated the other, while there was a notable
+absence of that jealousy which has often served to turn the love of
+literary men and women into the fiercest hatred.</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Browning died suddenly in 1861, and the poet for some time was
+stunned <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_111" id="Page_111">[111]</a></span>by this unlooked-for calamity. He spent two years in
+seclusion at work on poems, but then he gathered up his courage and
+once more took his old place in the social life of London. In
+<i>Prospice</i> and <i>One Word More</i>, written in the autumn following his
+wife's death, he shows that he has overcome all doubts of the reality
+of immortality. These two poems alone would entitle Browning to the
+highest place among the world's great poets. In addition he wrote the
+memorial to his wife, <i>O Lyric Love</i>, that is the cry of the soul left
+here on this earth to the soul of the beloved in Paradise. To the
+sympathetic this poem, with its solemn rhythm, will appeal like
+splendid organ music.</p>
+
+<div class="img"><a name="imagep110" id="imagep110"></a>
+<a href="images/imagep110.jpg">
+<img border="0" src="images/imagep110.jpg" width="49%" alt="Elizabeth Barrett Browning After the Portrait by Field Talfourd" /></a><br />
+<p class="cen sc" style="margin-top: .2em; margin-left: 20%; margin-right: 20%;">Elizabeth Barrett Browning After the Portrait by
+Field Talfourd<span class="totoi"><a href="#toi">ToList</a></span></p>
+</div>
+
+<p>Among Browning's other poems that are noteworthy are <i>Fifine at the
+Fair</i>, <i>Red Cotton Nightcap Country</i>, <i>The Inn Album</i> and <i>Dramatic
+Idylls</i>. Browning's last poem, <i>Asolando</i>, appeared in London on the
+same day that its author died at Venice. As the great bell of San
+Marco struck ten in the evening, Browning, as he lay in bed, asked his
+son if there were any news of the new volume. A telegram was read
+saying the book was well received. The aged poet smiled and breathed
+his last.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_112" id="Page_112">[112]</a></span>In beginning the reading of Browning it is well to understand that at
+least half or maybe two-thirds of his work should be discarded at the
+outset, as it is of interest only to scholars. My suggestion to one
+who would learn to love Browning is to get a little book, <i>Lyrical
+Poems of Robert Browning</i>, by Dr. A.J. George. The editor in a preface
+indicates the best work of Browning, and also brings out strongly the
+fact that readers, and especially young readers, must be given poems
+which interest them. His selections of lyrics have been made from this
+standpoint, and his notes will be found very helpful. He develops the
+point that Browning's great revelation to the world through his poems
+was his strong and abiding assurance that man has in him the principle
+of divinity, and that many of the experiences that the world calls
+failures are really the stepping stones of the ascent to that conquest
+of self and that development of the whole nature which means the
+highest life. He says also that Browning is one of the most eloquent
+expounders of the doctrine of the reality of a future life, in which
+those who live a noble and unselfish life will get their reward in an
+existence free from all physical ills.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_113" id="Page_113">[113]</a></span>In this little book will be found <i>Pippa Passes</i>, a noble series of
+lyrics, which develops the idea of the silent influence of a little
+silk weaver of Asolo upon four sets of people in the great crises of
+their lives. In each episode Pippa sings a song that awakens remorse
+or kindles manhood or arouses patriotism or duty. It is a perfect
+poem. Among other lyrics given here are <i>Evelyn Hope</i>, which must be
+bracketed with Burns' <i>To Mary in Heaven</i> or with Wordsworth's <i>Lucy</i>
+and <i>Prospice</i>, which sounds the note of deep personal love that is as
+sure of immortality as of life. It is as beautiful and as inspiring as
+Tennyson's <i>Crossing the Bar</i>. Other poems due to Browning's love for
+his wife are <i>My Star</i> and <i>One Word More</i>.</p>
+
+<p>If these lyrics appeal to you, then take up some of Browning's longer
+poems, <i>A Blot in the 'Scutcheon</i>, <i>Colombe's Birthday</i>, <i>A Soul's
+Tragedy</i>, <i>Fra Lippo Lippi</i> and <i>Rabbi Ben Ezra</i>. Very few readers in
+these days have time or patience to read <i>The Ring and the Book</i>, but
+it will repay your attention, as it is the most remarkable attempt in
+all literature to revive the tragedy of the great and innocent love of
+a woman and a priest.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_114" id="Page_114">[114]</a></span>Among the many fine passages in Browning, I think there is nothing
+which equals these lines in <i>O Lyric Love</i>, the beautiful invocation
+to his wife:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">O lyric Love, half angel and half bird<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And all a wonder and a wild desire&mdash;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Boldest of hearts that ever braved the sun,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Took sanctuary within the holier blue<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And sang a kindred soul out to his face&mdash;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Hail then, and hearken from the realms of help!<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Never may I commence my song, my due<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">To God who best taught song by gift of thee,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Except with bent head and beseeching hand&mdash;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">That shall despite the distance and the dark,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">What was, again may be; some interchange<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Of grace, some splendor once thy very thought,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Some benediction anciently thy smile.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>The songs in <i>Pippa Passes</i> should be read, as they are as near
+perfect as Shakespeare's songs or the songs of Tennyson in <i>The
+Princess</i>.</p>
+
+<br />
+<br />
+<br />
+<br />
+<a name="Meredith_Best_Novels" id="Meredith_Best_Novels"></a><hr />
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_115" id="Page_115">[115]</a></span><br />
+
+<h2 class="sc2">Meredith And a Few of His Best Novels<span class="totoc"><a href="#toc">ToC</a></span></h2>
+
+<div class="block2">
+<p class="hang sc">One of the Greatest Masters of Fiction of Last
+Century&mdash;"The Ordeal of Richard Feverel," "Diana of the
+Crossways" and Other Novels.</p></div>
+<br />
+
+<p>George Meredith is acknowledged by the best critics to be among the
+greatest English novelists of the last century; yet to the general
+reader he is only a name. Like Henry James, he is barred off from
+popular appreciation by a style which is "caviare to the general."
+Thomas Hardy is recognized as the finest living English novelist, but
+there is very little comparison between himself and Meredith.
+Professor William Lyon Phelps, who is one of the best and sanest of
+American critics, says they are both pagans, but Meredith was an
+optimist, while Hardy is a pessimist. Then he adds this illuminating
+comment: "Mr. Hardy is a great novelist; whereas, <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_116" id="Page_116">[116]</a></span>to adapt a phrase
+that Arnold applied to Emerson, I should say that Mr. Meredith was not
+a great novelist; he was a great man who wrote novels."</p>
+
+<p>It is only within the last twenty-five years that Meredith has had any
+vogue in this country. At that time a good edition of his novels was
+issued, and critics gave the volumes generous mention in the leading
+magazines and newspapers. But the public did not respond with any
+cordiality. The novel with us has come to be looked upon mainly as a
+source of amusement, and a writer of fiction who demands too keen
+attention from his readers can never hope to be popular. Meredith, as
+Professor Phelps says, was a great man who, among other intellectual
+activities, wrote some good novels. Doubtless he did more real good to
+literature as the inspirer of other writers than he did with his
+books. For more than the ordinary working years of most men he was one
+of the chief "readers" for a large London publishing house. To him
+were submitted the manuscripts of new novels, and it was his privilege
+to recognize the genius of Thomas Hardy, of the author of <i>The Story
+of an African Farm</i> and other now famous English novelists.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_117" id="Page_117">[117]</a></span>Meredith was a singularly acute critic of the work of others, but when
+he came to write himself he cast his thoughts in a style that has been
+the despair of many admirers. In this he resembled Browning, who never
+would write verse that was easy reading. Meredith's thought is usually
+clear, yet his brilliant but erratic mind was impelled to clothe this
+thought in the most bizarre garments. Literary paradox he loved; his
+mind turned naturally to metaphor, and despite the protests of his
+closest friends he continued to puzzle and exasperate the public. He
+who could have written the greatest novels of his age merely wrote
+stories which serve to illustrate his theories of life and conduct. No
+man ever put more real thought into novels than he; none had a finer
+eye for the beauties of nature or the development of character. But he
+had no patience to develop his men and women in the clear, orthodox
+way. He imagined that the ordinary reader could follow his lightning
+flashes of illumination, his piling up of metaphor on metaphor, and
+the result is that many are discouraged by his methods, just as nine
+readers out of ten are wearied when they attempt to read Browning's
+longer <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_118" id="Page_118">[118]</a></span>poems. His kinship to Browning is strong in style and in
+method of thought, in his way of leaping from one conclusion to
+another, in his elimination of all the usual small connecting words
+and in his liberties with the language. He seemed to be writing for
+himself, not for the general public, and he never took into account
+the slower mental processes of those not endowed with his own vivid
+imagination.</p>
+
+<div class="img"><a name="imagep118" id="imagep118"></a>
+<a href="images/imagep118.jpg">
+<img border="0" src="images/imagep118.jpg" width="52%" alt="George Meredith with His Daughter and Grandchildren" /></a><br />
+<p class="cen sc" style="margin-top: .2em; margin-left: 20%; margin-right: 20%;">George Meredith with His Daughter and
+Grandchildren&mdash;From a Photograph Taken Shortly Before His Death<span class="totoi"><a href="#toi">ToList</a></span></p>
+</div>
+
+<p>Meredith's life was that of a scholar; it contained few exciting
+episodes. He was of Welsh and Irish stock. At an early age he was sent
+to Germany, where he remained at a Moravian school until he was
+fifteen. He then returned to England to study law, but he never
+practiced it. For a number of years he was a regular contributor to
+the London <span class="sc">Morning Post</span>, and in 1866 he acted as
+correspondent during the Austro-Italian war. For many years he served
+as chief reader and literary adviser to Chapman &amp; Hall, the English
+publishers, and in that capacity he showed an insight that led to the
+development of many authors whose first work was crude and
+unpromising. Meredith himself began his literary career with <i>The
+Shaving of Shagpat</i>, a series of Oriental tales the central <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_119" id="Page_119">[119]</a></span>idea of
+which is the overcoming of established evil. Shagpat stands for any
+evil or superstition, and Shibli Bagarag, the hero, is the reformer.
+This book, with its wealth of metaphor, opened the door for Meredith,
+but he did not score a success until he wrote <i>The Ordeal of Richard
+Feverel</i>, two years later. Despite its faults, this is his greatest
+book, and it is the one which readers should begin with. It is
+overloaded with aphorism in the famous "Pilgrim's Scrip," which is a
+diary kept by Sir Austin, the father of Richard. The boy is trained to
+cut women out of his life, and just when the father's theory seems to
+have succeeded Richard meets and falls in love with Lucy, and the
+whole towering structure founded on the "Pilgrim's Scrip" falls into
+ruin. The scene in which Richard and Lucy meet is one of the great
+scenes in English fiction, in which Meredith's passionate love of
+nature serves to bring out the natural love of the two young people.
+Earth was all greenness in the eyes of these two lovers, and nature
+served only to deepen the love that they saw in each other's gaze and
+felt with thrilling force in each other's kisses. But even stronger
+that this scene is that last terrible chapter, in which Richard
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_120" id="Page_120">[120]</a></span>returns to his home and refuses to stay with Lucy and her child.
+Stevenson declared that this parting scene was the strongest bit of
+English since Shakespeare. It certainly reaches great heights of
+exaltation, and in its simplicity it reveals what miracles Meredith
+could work when he allowed his creative imagination full play.</p>
+
+<p>Another story which is usually bracketed with this is <i>Diana of the
+Crossways</i>. This great novel was founded on a real incident in English
+history of Meredith's time. Diana Warwick was drawn from Caroline
+Norton, one of the three beautiful and brilliant granddaughters of
+Sheridan, author of <i>The School for Scandal</i>. Her marriage was
+disastrous, and her husband accused her of infidelity with Lord
+Melbourne, Prime Minister at the time. His divorce suit caused a great
+scandal, but it resulted in her vindication. Then later she was
+accused of betraying to a writer on the <span class="sc">Times</span> the secret that
+Sir Robert Peel had decided to repeal the corn laws. This secret had
+been confided to her by Sidney Herbert, one of her admirers.
+Meredith's novel, in which the results of Diana's treachery were
+brought out, resulted in a public inquiry into the charge against
+Caroline <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_121" id="Page_121">[121]</a></span>Norton, which found that she was innocent. But the fact
+that Meredith used such an incident as the climax of his story gave
+<i>Diana of the Crossways</i> an enormous vogue, and did much to bring the
+novelist into public favor.</p>
+
+<div class="img"><a name="imagep120" id="imagep120"></a>
+<a href="images/imagep120.jpg">
+<img border="0" src="images/imagep120.jpg" width="54%" alt="Flint Cottage, Boxhill, the Home of George Meredith" /></a><br />
+<p class="cen sc" style="margin-top: .2em; margin-left: 20%; margin-right: 20%;">Flint Cottage, Boxhill, the Home of George
+Meredith&mdash;His Writing was done in a Small Swiss Chalet in the
+Garden<span class="totoi"><a href="#toi">ToList</a></span></p>
+</div>
+
+<p>No more brilliant woman than Diana has ever been drawn by Meredith,
+but despite the art of her creator it is impossible for the reader to
+imagine her selling for money a great party secret which had been
+whispered to her by the man she loved. She was too keen a woman to
+plead, as Diana pleaded, that she did not recognize the importance of
+this secret, for the defense is cut away by her admission that she was
+promised thousands of pounds by the newspaperman at the very time that
+her extravagances had loaded her with debts.</p>
+
+<p>Space is lacking here to do more than mention three or four of
+Meredith's other novels that are fine works of art. These are <i>Rhoda
+Fleming</i>, <i>Sandra Belloni</i>, <i>Evan Harrington</i> and <i>The Egoist</i>. Each
+is a masterpiece in its way; each is full of human passion, yet tinged
+with a philosophy that lifts up the novels to what Meredith himself
+called "honorable fiction, a fount of life, an aid to life, quick with
+our blood." <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_122" id="Page_122">[122]</a></span>The novel to him was a means of showing man's spiritual
+nature, "a soul born active, wind-beaten, but ascending."</p>
+
+<p>A score of novels Meredith wrote in his long life. The work of his
+later years was not happy. <i>The Amazing Marriage</i> and <i>Lord Ormont and
+His Aminta</i> are mere shadows of his earlier work, with all his old
+mannerisms intensified. But if you like Richard and Diana, then you
+can enlarge your acquaintance with Meredith to your own exceeding
+profit, for he is one of the great masters of fiction, who used the
+novel merely to preach his doctrine of the richness and fulness of
+human life if we would but see it with his eyes.</p>
+
+<br />
+<br />
+<br />
+<br />
+<a name="Modern_Story-Tellers" id="Modern_Story-Tellers"></a><hr />
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_123" id="Page_123">[123]</a></span><br />
+
+<h2 class="sc2">Stevenson Prince of Modern Story-Tellers<span class="totoc"><a href="#toc">ToC</a></span></h2>
+
+<div class="block2">
+<p class="hang sc">His Stories of Adventure and His Brilliant
+Essays&mdash;"Treasure Island" And "Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde" His
+Most Popular Books.</p></div>
+<br />
+
+<p>It is as difficult to criticise the work of Robert Louis Stevenson as
+it is to find faults in the friend that you love as a brother. For
+with all his faults, this young Scotchman with his appealing charm
+disarms criticism. Nowhere in all literature may one find his like for
+warming the heart unless it be Charles Lamb, of gracious memory, and
+the secret of this charm is that Stevenson remained a child to the end
+of his days, with all a child's eagerness for love and praise, and
+with all a child's passion for making believe that his puppets are
+real flesh and blood people. When such a nature is endowed with
+consummate skill in the use of words, then one gets the finest, if not
+the greatest, of creative artists.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_124" id="Page_124">[124]</a></span>In sheer technical skill Stevenson stands head and shoulders above all
+the other literary craftsmen of his day; but this skill was not used
+to refine his meaning until it wearied the reader, as in the case of
+Henry James, nor was it used to bewilder him with the richness of his
+resources, as was too often the case with George Meredith. With
+Stevenson, style had actually become the man; he could not write the
+simplest article in any other than a highly finished literary way.
+Witness the amazingly eloquent defense of Father Damien which he
+dashed off in a few hours and read to his wife and his stepson before
+the ink was dry on the sheets.</p>
+
+<p>Above all other things Stevenson was a great natural story-teller.
+With him the story was the main consideration, yet in some of his
+short tales such as <i>Markheim</i>, or <i>A Lodging for the Night</i>, or <i>The
+Sire de Maletroit's Door</i>, the story itself merely serves as a thread
+upon which he has strung the most remarkable analysis of a man's soul.
+He has the distinction of having written in <i>Treasure Island</i> the best
+piratical story of the last century. If he could have maintained the
+high level of the opening chapter he would have produced a work
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_125" id="Page_125">[125]</a></span>worthy to rank with <i>Robinson Crusoe</i>. As it is, he created two
+villains, the blind man Pew and John Silver, who are absolutely unique
+in literature. The blind pirate in his malevolent fury is a creature
+that chills the heart, while Silver is a cheerful villain who murders
+with a smile. In <i>Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde</i> Stevenson has aroused that
+sense of mystery and horror which springs from the spectacle of the
+domination of an evil spirit over a nature essentially kind and good.</p>
+
+<p>Stevenson came of a race of Scotch men of affairs. His grandfather was
+the most distinguished lighthouse builder of his day and his father
+gained prominence in the same work that demands the highest
+engineering skill with great executive capacity. Stevenson himself
+would have been an explorer or a soldier of fortune had he been born
+with the physical strength to fit his mental endowments. His childhood
+was so full of sickness that it reads like a hospital report. His life
+was probably preserved by the assiduous care and rare devotion of an
+old Scotch nurse, Alison Cunningham, whom he has immortalized in his
+letters and in his <i>A Child's Garden of Verse</i>. The sickly boy was an
+eager reader of <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_126" id="Page_126">[126]</a></span>everything that fell in his way in romance and
+poetry. Later he devoted himself to systematic training of his powers
+of observation and his great capacity for expressing his thoughts.</p>
+
+<p>His youth was spent in migrations to the south in winter and in
+efforts to thrive in Scotland's dour climate in the summer. His school
+training was fitful and brief, but from the age of ten the boy had
+been training himself in the field which he felt was to be his own.
+His first literary work was essays and descriptive sketches for the
+magazines. Then came short stories in which he revealed great
+capacity. Recognition came very slowly. He was comparatively unknown
+after he had produced such charming work as <i>An Inland Voyage</i> and
+<i>Travels With a Donkey</i>, not to mention the <i>New Arabian Nights</i>.
+Popularity came with <i>Treasure Island</i>, written as a story for boys,
+and the one work of Stevenson's in which his creative imagination does
+not flag toward the end; but fame came only after the writing of <i>The
+Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde</i>&mdash;the most remarkable story of
+a dual personality produced in the last century. After this he wrote a
+long succession of stories, not one of which can <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_127" id="Page_127">[127]</a></span>be called a
+masterpiece because of the author's inability to finish his novels as
+he planned them. Lack of patience or want of sustained creative power
+invariably made him cut short his novels or end them in a way that
+exasperates the reader.</p>
+
+<div class="img"><a name="imagep126" id="imagep126"></a>
+<a href="images/imagep126.jpg">
+<img border="0" src="images/imagep126.jpg" width="90%" alt="Robert Louis Stevenson" /></a><br />
+<p class="cen sc" style="margin-top: .2em; margin-left: 20%; margin-right: 20%;">Robert Louis Stevenson&mdash;The Author's Intimate
+Associates Pronounce this Photograph a Perfect Presentation of his
+most Typical Expression<span class="totoi"><a href="#toi">ToList</a></span></p>
+</div>
+
+<p>Some months Stevenson spent in California, but this State, with its
+romantic history and its singular scenic beauty, appeared to have
+little influence on his genius. In fact, locality seemed not to color
+the work of his imagination. His closing years were spent in Somoa, a
+South Sea Island paradise, in which he reveled in the primitive
+conditions of life and recovered much of his early zest in physical
+life. Yet his best work in those last years dealt not with the
+palm-fringed atolls of the Pacific, but with the bleak Scotch moors
+which refused him a home. In his letters he dwells on the curious
+obsession of his imagination by old Scotch scenes and characters, and
+on the day of his death he dictated a chapter of <i>Weir of Hermiston</i>,
+a romance of the picturesque period of Scotland which had in it the
+elements of his best work.</p>
+
+<p>It is idle to deny that Stevenson appeals only to a limited audience.
+Despite his keen interest in all kinds of people, he <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_128" id="Page_128">[128]</a></span>lacked that
+sympathetic touch which brings large sales and wide circulation. About
+the time of his death his admirers declared he would supersede Scott
+or Dickens; but the seventeen years since his death have seen many
+changes in literary reputations. Stevenson has held his own remarkably
+well. As a man the interest in him is still keen, but of his works
+only a few are widely read.</p>
+
+<p>Among these the first place must be given to <i>Dr. Jekyll and Mr.
+Hyde</i>, partly because of the profound impression made upon the public
+mind by the dramatization of this tale, and partly because it appeals
+strongly to the sense of the mystery of conflicting personality. Next
+to this is <i>Treasure Island</i>, one of the best romances of adventure
+ever written. Readers who cannot feel a thrill of genuine terror when
+the blind pirate Pew comes tapping with his cane have missed a great
+pleasure. One-legged John Silver, in his cheerful lack of all the
+ordinary virtues, is a character that puts the fear of death upon the
+reader. The opening chapter of this story is one of the finest things
+in all the literature of adventure.</p>
+
+<p>Of Stevenson's other work the two Scotch stories, <i>Kidnaped</i> and
+<i>David Balfour</i>, <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_129" id="Page_129">[129]</a></span>always seemed to me to be among his best. The
+chapter on the flight of David and Allan across the moor, the contest
+in playing the pipes and the adventures of David and Catriona in
+Holland&mdash;these are things to read many times and enjoy the more at
+every reading. Stevenson, like Jack London, is a writer for men; he
+could not draw women well, When he brings one in there is usually an
+end of stirring adventure, just as London spoiled <i>The Sea Wolf</i> with
+his literary heroine.</p>
+
+<div class="img"><a name="imagep128" id="imagep128"></a>
+<a href="images/imagep128.jpg">
+<img border="0" src="images/imagep128.jpg" width="90%" alt="Stevenson's Home at Valima, Samoa, Looking Toward Vaea" /></a><br />
+<p class="cen sc" style="margin-top: .2em; margin-left: 20%; margin-right: 20%;">Stevenson's Home at Valima, Samoa, Looking Toward
+Vaea<span class="totoi"><a href="#toi">ToList</a></span></p>
+</div>
+
+<p>Of Stevenson's short stories the finest are <i>The Pavilion on the
+Links</i>, a tale of Sicilian vengeance and English love that is full of
+haunting mystery and the deadly fear of unknown assassins; <i>Markheim</i>,
+a brilliant example of this author's skill in laying bare the conflict
+of a soul with evil and its ultimate triumph; <i>The Sire de Maletroit's
+Door</i>, a vivid picture of the cruelty and the autocratic power of a
+great French noble of the fifteenth century, and <i>A Lodging for the
+Night</i>, a remarkable defense of his life by the vagabond poet, Villon.
+Other short stories by Stevenson are worth careful study, but if you
+like these I have mentioned you will need no guide to those which
+strike your fancy.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_130" id="Page_130">[130]</a></span>The vogue of Stevenson's essays will last as long as that of his
+romances; for he excelled in this literary art of putting his
+personality into familiar talks with his reader. He ranks with Lamb
+and Thackeray, Washington Irving and Donald G. Mitchell. Read those
+fine short sermons, <i>Pulvis et Umbra</i> and <i>Aes Triplex</i>, the latter
+with its eloquent picture of sudden death in the fulness of power
+which was realized in Stevenson's own fate. Read <i>Books Which Have
+Influenced Me</i>, <i>A Gossip on Romance</i> and <i>Talk and Talkers</i>. They are
+unsurpassed for thought and feeling and for brilliancy of style.</p>
+
+<p>But above everything looms the man himself&mdash;a chronic invalid, who
+might well have pleaded his weakness and constant pains as an excuse
+for idleness and railings against fate. Stoic courage in the strong is
+a virtue, but how much greater the cheerful courage that laughs at
+sickness and pain! Stevenson writing in a sickbed stories and essays
+that help one to endure the blows of fate is a spectacle such as this
+world has few to offer. So the man's life and work have come to be a
+constant inspiration to those who are faint-hearted, a call to arms of
+all one's courage and devotion.</p>
+
+<br />
+<br />
+<br />
+<br />
+<a name="Thomas_Hardy" id="Thomas_Hardy"></a><hr />
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_131" id="Page_131">[131]</a></span><br />
+
+<h2 class="sc2">Thomas Hardy And His Tragic Tales Of Wessex<span class="totoc"><a href="#toc">ToC</a></span></h2>
+
+<div class="block2">
+<p class="hang sc">Greatest Living Writer of English Fiction&mdash;Because of
+Resentment of Harsh Criticisms the Prose Master Turns to
+Verse.</p></div>
+<br />
+
+<p>No one will question the assertion that Thomas Hardy is the greatest
+living English writer of fiction, and the pity of it is that a man
+with so splendid an equipment for writing novels of the first rank
+should have failed for many years to give the world any work in the
+special field in which he is an acknowledged master. Hardy seems to
+have revolted from certain harsh criticism of his last novel, <i>Jude
+the Obscure</i>, and to have determined that he would write no more
+fiction for an unappreciative world. So he has turned to the writing
+of verse, in which he barely takes second rank. It is one of the
+tragedies of literature to think of a man of Hardy's rank as a
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_132" id="Page_132">[132]</a></span>novelist, who might give the world a second <i>Tess</i> or <i>The Return of
+the Native</i>, contenting himself with a ponderous poem like <i>The
+Dynasts</i>, or wasting his powers on minor poems containing no real
+poetry.</p>
+
+<p>Hardy's best novels are among the few in English fiction that can be
+read again and again, and that reveal at every reading some fresh
+beauties of thought or style. The man is so big, so genuine and so
+unlike all other writers that his work must be set apart in a class by
+itself. Were he not so richly endowed his pessimism would be fatal,
+for the world does not favor the novelist who demands that his fiction
+should be governed by the same hard rules that govern real life. In
+the work of most novelists we know that whatever harsh fate may befall
+the leading characters the skies will be sunny before the story
+closes, and the worthy souls who have battled against malign destiny
+will receive their reward. Not so with Hardy. We know when we begin
+one of his tales that tragedy is in store for his people. The dark
+cloud of destiny soon obscures the heavens, and through the lowering
+storm the victims move on to the final scene in which the wreck of
+their fortunes is completed.</p>
+
+<div class="img"><a name="imagep132" id="imagep132"></a>
+<a href="images/imagep132.jpg">
+<img border="0" src="images/imagep132.jpg" width="54%" alt="" /></a><br />
+<p class="cen sc" style="margin-top: .2em; margin-left: 20%; margin-right: 20%;">Thomas Hardy&mdash;A Portrait Which Brings out
+Strikingly the Man of Creative Power, the Artist, the Philosopher and
+the Poet<span class="totoi"><a href="#toi">ToList</a></span></p>
+</div>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_133" id="Page_133">[133]</a></span>Literary genius can work no greater miracle than this&mdash;to make the
+reader accept as a transcript of life stories in which generous,
+unselfish people are dealt heavy blows by fate, while the mean-souled,
+sordid men and women often escape their just deserts. Hardy is not
+unreligious; he is simply and frankly pagan. Yet he differs from the
+classical writers in the fact that he is keenly alive to all the
+strong influences of nature on a sympathetic mind, and he is also a
+believer in the power of romantic love.</p>
+
+<p>No one has ever equaled Hardy in making the reader feel the living
+power of trees and other objects of nature. You can not escape the
+influence of his scenic effects. These are never theatrical&mdash;in fact
+they seem to form a vital part of every story. The scenes of all his
+novels are laid in his native Dorsetshire, which he has thinly
+disguised under the old Saxon name of Wessex. In <i>Far From the Madding
+Crowd</i> Hardy first demonstrated the tremendous possibilities of rural
+scenes as a vital background for a story, but in <i>The Return of the
+Native</i> he actually makes Egdon heath the most absorbing feature of
+the book. All the characters seem to take life and coloring <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_134" id="Page_134">[134]</a></span>from this
+heath, which has in it the potency of transforming characters and of
+wrecking lives. And in <i>Tess</i> the peaceful, rural scenes appear to
+accentuate the tragedy of the heroine's unavailing struggles against a
+fate that was worse than death.</p>
+
+<p>Hardy's parents intended him for the church, but the boy probably gave
+some indications of his pagan cast of mind, for they finally
+compromised by apprenticing him to an ecclesiastical architect. In
+this calling the youth worked with sympathy and ability; the results
+of this training may be seen in the perfection of his plots and in his
+fondness for graphic description of churches and other picturesque
+buildings. One curious feature of this training may be seen in Hardy's
+sympathy and reverence for any church building. As Professor William
+Lyon Phelps very aptly says of Hardy: "No man to-day has less respect
+for God and more devotion to his house."</p>
+
+<p>The antipathy of Hardy to any kind of publicity has kept the facts of
+his life in the background, but it is an open secret that much of the
+longing of Jude for a college education was drawn from his own
+boyhood. It is also a matter of record that as a boy he served as
+amanuensis for <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_135" id="Page_135">[135]</a></span>many servant maids, writing the love letters which
+they dictated. In this way, before he knew the real meaning of sex and
+the significance of life he had obtained a deep insight into the
+nature of women, which served him in good stead when he came to draw
+his heroines. All his women are made up of mingled tenderness and
+caprice, and though female critics of his work may claim that these
+traits are over-drawn, no man ever feels like dissecting Hardy's
+women, for the reason that they are so charmingly feminine.</p>
+
+<p>One may fancy that Hardy took great delight in his architectural work,
+for it required many excursions to old churches in Dorsetshire to see
+whether they were worth restoring. When he was thirty-one Hardy
+decided to abandon architecture for fiction. His first novel,
+<i>Desperate Remedies</i>, was crude, but it is interesting as showing the
+novelist in his first attempts to reveal real life and character. His
+second book, <i>Under the Greenwood Tree</i>, is a charming love story, and
+<i>A Pair of Blue Eyes</i> was a forerunner of his first great story, <i>Far
+From the Madding Crowd</i>. It may have been the title, torn from a line
+of Gray's <i>Elegy</i>, or the novelty of the tale, in which English
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_136" id="Page_136">[136]</a></span>rustics were depicted as ably as in George Eliot's novels, that made
+it appeal to the great public. Whatever the cause, the book made a
+great popular hit. I can recall when Henry Holt brought it out in the
+pretty Leisure Hour series in 1875. Three years later Hardy produced
+his finest work, <i>The Return of the Native</i>. He followed this with
+more than a dozen novels, among which may be mentioned <i>The Mayor of
+Casterbridge</i>, <i>The Woodlanders</i>, <i>Tess of the d'Urbervilles</i>, and
+<i>Jude the Obscure</i>.</p>
+
+<p>In taking up Hardy one should begin with <i>Far From the Madding Crowd</i>.
+The story of Bathsheba Everdene's relations with her three lovers,
+Sergeant Troy, Boldwood and Gabriel Oak, moves one at times to some
+impatience with this charming woman's frequent change of mind, but she
+would not be so attractive or so natural if she were not so full of
+caprice. His women all have strong human passion, but they are
+destitute of religious faith. They adore with rare fervor the men whom
+they love. In this respect Bathsheba is like Eustacia, Tess, Marty
+South or Lady Constantine. Social rank, education or breeding does not
+change them. Evidently Hardy believes women are made to charm and
+comfort <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_137" id="Page_137">[137]</a></span>man, not to lead him to spiritual heights, where the air is
+thin and chill and kisses have no sweetness.</p>
+
+<p>In his first novel Hardy lightened the tragedy of life with rare
+comedy. These comic interludes are furnished by a choice collection of
+rustics, who discuss the affairs of the universe and of their own
+township with a humor that is infectious. In this work Hardy surpasses
+George Eliot and all other novelists of his day, just as he surpasses
+them all in such wholesome types of country life as Giles Winterbourne
+and Marty South of <i>The Woodlanders</i>. No pathos is finer than Marty's
+unselfish love for the man who cannot see her own rare spirit, and
+nothing that Hardy has written is more powerful than Marty's lament
+over the grave of Giles:</p>
+
+<div class="block"><p>"Now, my own, my love," she whispered, "you are mine, and on'y
+mine, for she has forgot 'ee at last, although for her you
+died. But I&mdash;whenever I get up I'll think of 'ee, and whenever
+I lie down I'll think of 'ee. Whenever I plant the young
+larches I'll think none can plant as you planted; and whenever
+I split a gad, and whenever I turn the cider-wring, I'll say
+none could do it like you. If I forget your name, let me
+forget home and heaven! But, no, no, my love, I never can
+forget 'ee, for you was a good man and did good things!"</p></div>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_138" id="Page_138">[138]</a></span><i>The Return of the Native</i> is generally regarded as Hardy's finest
+work. Certainly in this novel of passion and despair he has conjured
+up elements that speak to the heart of every reader. The hand of fate
+clutches hold of all the characters. When Eustacia fails to go to the
+door and admit her husband's mother she sets in motion events that
+bring swift ruin upon her as well as upon others. At every turn of the
+story the somber Egdon heath looms in the background, more real than
+any character in the romance, a sinister force that seems to sweep the
+characters on to their doom. <i>Tess</i> is more appealing than any other
+of Mr. Hardy's works, but it is hurt by his desire to prove that the
+heroine was a good woman in spite of her sins against the social code.
+What has also given this work a great vogue is the splendid acting of
+Mrs. Fiske in the play made from the novel.</p>
+
+<p>In <i>Jude the Obscure</i> Hardy had a splendid conception, but he
+developed it in a morbid way, bringing out the animalism of the hero's
+wife and forcing upon the reader his curious ideas about marriage.</p>
+
+<p>But above and beyond everything else Thomas Hardy is one of the
+greatest <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_139" id="Page_139">[139]</a></span>story tellers the world has ever seen. You may take up any
+of his works and after reading a chapter you have a keen desire to
+follow the tale to the end, despite the fact that you feel sure the
+end will be tragic. Nothing is forced for effect; the whole story
+moves with the simplicity of fate itself, and the characters, good and
+bad, are swept on to their doom as though they were caught in the rush
+of waters that go over Niagara falls. Hardy's style is clear, simple,
+direct, and abounds in Biblical allusions and phrases. In nature study
+Hardy's novels are a liberal education, for beyond any other author of
+the last century he has brought out the beauty and the significance of
+tree and flower, heath and mountain. They may be read many times, and
+at each perusal new beauties will be discovered to reward the reader.</p>
+
+<br />
+<br />
+<br />
+<br />
+<a name="Kiplings_Best" id="Kiplings_Best"></a><hr />
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_140" id="Page_140">[140]</a></span><br />
+
+<h2 class="sc2">Kipling's Best Short Stories And Poems<span class="totoc"><a href="#toc">ToC</a></span></h2>
+
+<div class="block2">
+<p class="hang sc">Tales of East Indian Life and Character&mdash;Ideal Training of
+the Genius That Has Produced Some of the Best Literary Work of
+Our Day.</p></div>
+<br />
+
+<p>Rudyard Kipling cannot be classified with any writer of his own age or
+of any literary age in the past. His tremendous strength, his visual
+faculty, even his mannerisms, are his own. He has written too much for
+his own fame, but although the next century will discard nine-tenths
+of his work, it will hold fast to the other tenth as among the best
+short stories and poems that our age produced. Kipling is essentially
+a short-story writer; not one of his longer novels has any real plot
+or the power to hold the reader's interest to the end. <i>Kim</i>, the best
+of his long works, is merely a series of panoramic views of Indian
+life and character, which could be split up into a dozen short stories
+and sketches.</p>
+
+<div class="img"><a name="imagep140" id="imagep140"></a>
+<a href="images/imagep140.jpg">
+<img border="0" src="images/imagep140.jpg" width="90%" alt="Rudyard Kipling A Striking Likeness of the Author in a Characteristic Pose" /></a><br />
+<p class="cen sc" style="margin-top: .2em; margin-left: 15%; margin-right: 15%;">Rudyard Kipling A Striking Likeness of the Author
+in a Characteristic Pose<span class="totoi"><a href="#toi">ToList</a></span></p>
+</div>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_141" id="Page_141">[141]</a></span>But in the domain of the short story Kipling is easily the first great
+creative artist of his time. No one approaches him in vivid
+descriptive power, in keen character portraiture, in the faculty of
+making a strange and alien life as real to us as the life we have
+always known. And in some of his more recent work, as in the story of
+the two young Romans in <i>Puck of Pook's Hill</i>, Kipling reaches rare
+heights in reproducing the romance of a bygone age. In these tales of
+ancient Britain the poet in Kipling has full sway and his visual power
+moves with a freedom that stamps clearly and deeply every image upon
+the reader's mind.</p>
+
+<p>The first ten years of Kipling's literary activity were given over to
+a wonderful reproduction of East Indian life as seen through
+sympathetic English eyes. Yet the sympathy that is revealed in
+Kipling's best sketches of native life in India is never tinged with
+sentiment. The native is always drawn in his relations to the
+Englishman; always the traits of revenge or of gratitude or of
+dog-like devotion are brought out. Kipling knows the East Indian
+through and through, because in his childhood he had a rare
+opportunity to <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_142" id="Page_142">[142]</a></span>watch the native. The barrier of reserve, which was
+always maintained against the native Englishman, was let down in the
+case of this precocious child, who was a far keener observer than most
+adults. And these early impressions lend an extraordinary life and
+vitality to the sketches and stories on which Kipling's fame will
+ultimately rest.</p>
+
+<p>The early years of Kipling were spent in an ideal way for the
+development of the creative literary artist. Born at Bombay in
+December, 1865, he absorbed Hindustanee from his native nurse, and he
+saw the native as he really is, without the guard which is habitually
+put up in the presence of the Briton, even though this alien may be
+held in much esteem. The son of John Lockwood Kipling, professor of
+architectural sculpture in the British School of Art at Bombay, and of
+a sister of Edward Burne-Jones, it was not strange that this boy
+should have developed strong powers of imagination or that his mind
+should have sought relief in literary expression.</p>
+
+<p>The school days of Kipling were spent at Westward Ho, in Devon, where,
+though he failed to distinguish himself in his studies, he established
+a reputation as a clever <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_143" id="Page_143">[143]</a></span>writer of verse and prose. He also enjoyed
+in these formative years the friendship and counsel of Burne-Jones,
+and he had the use of several fine private libraries. His wide reading
+probably injured his school standing, but it was of enormous benefit
+to him in his future literary work. At seventeen young Kipling
+returned to India, where he secured a position on the <span class="sc">Civil and
+Military Gazette</span> of Lahore, where his father was principal of a
+large school of arts.</p>
+
+<p>The Anglo-Indian newspaper is not a model, but it afforded a splendid
+field for the development of Kipling's abilities. He was not only a
+reporter of the ordinary occurrences of his station, but he was
+constantly called upon to write short sketches and poems to fill
+certain corners in the paper, that varied in size according to the
+number and length of the advertisements. Some of the best of his short
+sketches and bits of verse were written hurriedly on the composing
+stone to satisfy such needs. These sketches and poems he published
+himself and sent them to subscribers in all parts of India, but though
+their cleverness was recognized by Anglo-Indians, they did not appeal
+to the general public. After <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_144" id="Page_144">[144]</a></span>five years' work at Lahore, Kipling was
+transferred to the <span class="sc">Allahabad Pioneer</span>, one of the most
+important of the Anglo-Indian journals. For the weekly edition of this
+paper he wrote many verses and sketches and also served as special
+correspondent in various parts of India.</p>
+
+<p>It was in 1889 that the <span class="sc">Pioneer</span> sent him on a tour of the
+world and he wrote the series of letters afterwards reprinted under
+the title <i>From Sea to Sea</i>. Kipling, like Stevenson, had to have a
+story to tell to bring out all his powers; hence these letters are not
+among his best work.</p>
+
+<p>Vividly do I recall Kipling's visit to San Francisco. He came into the
+<span class="sc">Chronicle</span> office and was keenly interested in the fine
+collections which made this newspaper's library before the fire the
+most valuable on this Coast, if not in the country. He was also much
+impressed with the many devices for securing speed in typesetting and
+other mechanical work. The only feature of his swarthy face that
+impressed one was his brilliant black eyes, which behind his large
+glasses, seemed to note every detail. He talked very well, but
+although he made friends among local newspapermen, he was unsuccessful
+in selling any of his stories to <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_145" id="Page_145">[145]</a></span>the editors of the Sunday
+supplements. He soon went to New York, but there also he failed to
+dispose of his stories.</p>
+
+<div class="img"><a name="imagep144" id="imagep144"></a>
+<a href="images/imagep144.jpg">
+<img border="0" src="images/imagep144.jpg" width="56%" alt="Rudyard Kipling From a Cartoon by W. Nicholson" /></a><br />
+<p class="cen sc" style="margin-top: .2em; margin-left: 20%; margin-right: 20%;">Rudyard Kipling From a Cartoon by W.
+Nicholson<span class="totoi"><a href="#toi">ToList</a></span></p>
+</div>
+
+<p>Finally Kipling reached London in September, 1889, and after several
+months of discouragement, he induced a large publishing house to bring
+out <i>Plain Tales From the Hills</i>. It scored an immediate success. Like
+Byron, the unknown young writer awoke to find himself famous; magazine
+editors clamored for his stories at fancy prices and publishers
+eagerly sought his work. It may be said to Kipling's credit that he
+did not utilize this opportunity to make money out of his sudden
+reputation. He doubtless worked over many old sketches, but he put his
+best into whatever he gave the public. He married the sister of
+Wolcott Balestier, a brilliant American who became very well known in
+London as a publishers' agent, and after Balestier's death Kipling
+moved to his wife's old home in Brattleboro, Vermont, where he built a
+fine country house; but constant trouble with a younger brother of his
+wife caused him to abandon this American home and go back to England,
+where he set up his lares at Rottingdean, in Surrey. There he has
+remained, <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_146" id="Page_146">[146]</a></span>averaging a book a year, until now he has over twenty-five
+large volumes to his credit. In 1907 Kipling was given the Nobel prize
+"for the best work of an idealist tendency."</p>
+
+<p>In reading Kipling it is best to begin with some of the tales written
+in his early life, for these he has never surpassed in vigor and
+interest. Take, for instance, <i>Without Benefit of Clergy</i>, <i>The Man
+Who Was</i>, <i>The Drums of the Fore and Aft</i>, <i>The Man Who Would Be King</i>
+and <i>Beyond the Pale</i>. These stories all deal with Anglo-Indian life,
+two with the British soldier and the other three with episodes in the
+lives of British officials and adventurers.</p>
+
+<p><i>The Man Who Would Be King</i>, the finest of all Kipling's tales of
+Anglo-Indian life and adventure, is the story of the fatal ambition of
+Daniel Dravot, told by the man who accompanied him into the wildest
+part of Afghanistan. Daniel made the natives believe that he was a god
+and he could have ruled them as a king had he not foolishly become
+enamored of a native beauty. This girl was prompted by a native
+soothsayer to bite Dravot in order to decide whether he was a god or
+merely human. The blood that she drew on his neck was ample proof of
+his spurious claims and the <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_147" id="Page_147">[147]</a></span>two adventurers were chased for miles
+through a wild country. When captured Daniel is forced to walk upon a
+bridge, the ropes of which are then cut, and his body is hurled
+hundreds of feet down upon the rocks. The story of the survivor, who
+escaped after crucifixion, is one of the ghastliest tales in all
+literature.</p>
+
+<p>Other tales that Kipling has written of Indian life are scarcely
+inferior to these in strange, uncanny power. One of the weirdest
+relates the adventures of an army officer who fell into the place
+where those who have been legally declared dead, but who have
+recovered, pass their lives. As a picture of hell on earth it has
+never been surpassed. Another of Kipling's Indian tales that is worth
+reading is <i>William the Conqueror</i>, a love story that has a background
+of grim work during the famine year.</p>
+
+<p>One of Kipling's claims to fame is that he has drawn the British
+soldier in India as he actually lives. His <i>Soldiers Three</i>&mdash;Mulvaney,
+the Irishman, Ortheris, the cockney, and Learoyd, the
+Yorkshireman&mdash;are so full of real human nature that they delight all
+men and many women. Mulvaney is the finest creation of Kipling, and
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_148" id="Page_148">[148]</a></span>most of his stories are brimful of Irish wit. Of late years Kipling
+has written some fine imaginative stories, such as <i>The Brushwood
+Boy</i>, <i>They</i> and <i>An Habitation Enforced</i>. He has also revealed his
+genius in such tales of the future as <i>With the Night Mail</i>, a
+remarkably graphic sketch of a voyage across the Atlantic in a single
+night in a great aeroplane. Another side of Kipling's genius is seen
+in his <i>Jungle Stories</i>, in which all the wild animals are endowed
+with speech. Mowgli, the boy who is suckled by a wolf, is a distinct
+creation, and his adventures are full of interest. Compare these
+stories with the work of Thompson-Seton and you get a good idea of the
+genius of Kipling in making real the savage struggle for life in the
+Indian jungle.</p>
+
+<p>Of Kipling's long novels <i>The Naulakha</i> ranks first for interest of
+plot, but <i>Kim</i> is the best because of its series of wonderful
+pictures of East Indian life and character. <i>Captains Courageous</i> is a
+story of Cape Cod fishing life, with an improbable plot but much good
+description of the perils and hardships of the men who seek fortune on
+the fishing banks.</p>
+
+<p>As a poet Kipling appeals strongly to men who love the life of action
+and <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_149" id="Page_149">[149]</a></span>adventure in all parts of the world. In his <i>Departmental
+Ditties</i> he has painted the life of the British soldier and the
+civilian in India, and his <i>Danny Dever</i>, his <i>Mandalay</i> and others
+which sing themselves have passed into the memory of the great public
+that seldom reads any verse unless it be the words of a popular song.
+The range of his verse is very wide, whether it is the superb imagery
+in <i>The Last Chantey</i> or the impressive Calvanism of <i>McAndrew's
+Hymn</i>. His <i>Recessional</i>, of course, is known to everyone. It is one
+of the finest bits of verse printed in the last twenty years.</p>
+
+<p>Kipling, in spite of his many volumes, is only forty-six years old,
+and he may be counted on to do much more good work.</p>
+
+<p>If he turns to historical fiction he may yet do for English history
+what the author of <i>Waverley</i> has done for the history of Scotland.
+Certainly he has the finest creative imagination of his age; in
+whatever domain it may work it is sure to produce literature that will
+live.</p>
+
+<br />
+<br />
+<br />
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_150" id="Page_150"></a></span><br />
+<a name="Bibliography" id="Bibliography"></a><hr />
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_151" id="Page_151">[151]</a></span><br />
+
+<h2><i>Bibliography</i><span class="totoc"><a href="#toc">ToC</a></span></h2>
+
+<div class="block2"><p class="hang"><i>Short Notes of Both Standard and Other Editions, With Lives,
+Sketches and Reminiscences.</i></p></div>
+<br />
+
+<p><i>These bibliographical notes on the authors discussed in this volume
+are brief because the space allotted to them was limited. They are
+designed to mention the first complete editions&mdash;the standard
+editions&mdash;as well as the lives of authors, estimates of their works
+and sketches and personal reminiscences. A mass of good material on
+the great writers of the Victorian age is buried in the bound volumes
+of English and American reviews and magazines. The best guide to these
+articles is Poole's "Index."</i></p>
+
+<p><i>The most valuable single volumes to one who wishes to make a study of
+eighteenth and nineteenth century English writers are: "A Study of
+English Prose Writers" and "A Study of English and American Poets" by
+J. Scott Clark. (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons. Price, $2 net a
+volume.) These two volumes will give any one who wishes to make <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_152" id="Page_152">[152]</a></span>a
+study of the authors I have discussed the material for a mastery of
+their works. Under full biographical sketches the author gives
+estimates of the best critics, extracts from their works and a full
+bibliography, including the best magazine articles.</i></p>
+
+
+<h3 style="text-align: left;">MACAULAY</h3>
+
+<div class="block3"><p>The editions of Macaulay are so numerous that it is useless to
+attempt to enumerate them. A standard edition was collected in
+1866 by his sister, Lady Trevelyan. Four volumes are devoted
+to the history and three to the essays and lives of famous
+authors which he wrote for the <i>Encyclopedia Britannica</i>.
+Macaulay's essays, which have enjoyed the greatest popularity
+in this country, may be found in many forms. A one-volume
+edition, containing the principal essays, is issued by several
+publishers. Sir George Otto Trevelyan's <i>The Life and Letters
+of Lord Macaulay</i> in two volumes (1876) is a more interesting
+biography than Lockhart's <i>Scott</i>. The best single-volume
+estimate of Macaulay is J. Cotter Morison's <i>Macaulay</i> in the
+English Men of Letters series. Good short critical sketches of
+Macaulay and his work may be found in Sir Leslie Stephen's
+<i>Hours in a Library</i>, volume 2, and in Lord Morley's <i>Critical
+Miscellanies</i>, volume 2.</p></div>
+
+
+<h3 style="text-align: left;">SCOTT</h3>
+
+<div class="block3"><p>The edition of Scott, which was his own favorite, was issued
+in Edinburgh in forty-eight volumes, from 1829 to 1833. Scott
+wrote new prefaces and notes for this edition. Another is the
+Border edition, with introductory essays and notes by Andrew
+Lang <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_153" id="Page_153">[153]</a></span>(forty-eight volumes, 1892-1894). The recent editions of
+Scott are numerous for, despite all criticisms of his careless
+style, he holds his own with the popular favorites of the day.
+Of his poems a good edition was edited by William Minto in two
+volumes, in 1888. <i>The Life of Scott</i> by his son-in-law, J.G.
+Lockhart, is the standard work. This was originally issued in
+seven volumes but Lockhart was induced to condense it into one
+volume, which gives about all that the ordinary reader cares
+for. This may be found in Everyman's library. Scott's
+<i>Journal</i> and his <i>Familiar Letters</i>, both edited by David
+Douglas, contain much interesting material. The best short
+lives of Scott are by R.H. Hutton in the English Men of
+Letters series and by George Saintsbury in the Famous Scots
+series. Among the best sketches and estimates of Scott are by
+Andrew Lang in <i>Letters to Dead Authors</i>; Sir Leslie Stephen
+in <i>Hours in a Library</i>; Conan Doyle in <i>Through the Magic
+Door</i>; Walter Bagehot in <i>Literary Studies</i>; Stevenson in
+<i>Gossip on Romance</i> and in <i>Memoirs and Portraits</i>, and S.R.
+Crockett in <i>The Scott Country</i>. <i>Abbotsford</i>, by Washington
+Irving, gives the best personal sketches of Scott at home.</p></div>
+
+
+<h3 style="text-align: left;">CARLYLE</h3>
+
+<div class="block3"><p>Carlyle's <i>Essays</i> and his <i>French Revolution</i>, upon which his
+fame will chiefly rest, are issued in many editions. It would
+be well if his longer works could be condensed into single
+volumes by competent hands. A revised edition of his
+<i>Frederick</i> was issued in one short volume. For the facts of
+Carlyle's life, the best book is his own <i>Reminiscences
+issued</i> in 1881 and edited by Froude, who was his literary
+executor with the full power to publish or suppress. Froude
+had so great <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_154" id="Page_154">[154]</a></span>an antipathy to what Carlyle himself called
+"mealy-mouthed biography" that he erred on the side of extreme
+frankness. In <i>Thomas Carlyle&mdash;The First Forty Tears of His
+Life</i>, <i>Life in London</i> and <i>Letters of Jane Welsh Carlyle</i>,
+Froude permitted the publication of many malicious comments by
+Carlyle on his famous contemporaries. These and morbid
+expressions of remorse by Carlyle over imaginary neglect of
+his wife caused a great revulsion of public sentiment and the
+fame of Carlyle was clouded for ten years. Finally, after much
+acrimonious controversy, the truth prevailed and Carlyle came
+into his own again.</p>
+
+<p>Among the best books on Carlyle are Lowell's <i>Essays</i>, volume
+2; David Masson, <i>Carlyle Personally and in His Writings</i>;
+E.P. Whipple, <i>Essays and Reviews</i>; Emerson, <i>English Traits</i>;
+Lowell, <i>My Study Windows</i>; Morley, <i>English Literature in the
+Reign of Victoria</i>; Greg, <i>Literary and Social Judgments</i>;
+Moncure Conway, <i>Carlyle</i>, and Henley, <i>Views and Reviews</i>.</p>
+
+<p>Among magazine and review articles may be mentioned George
+Eliot in <span class="sc">Westminster Review</span>, volume 57; John
+Burroughs in <span class="sc">Atlantic Monthly</span>, volume 51; Emerson in
+<span class="sc">Scribner's Magazine</span>, volume 22; Froude in
+<span class="sc">Nineteenth Century</span>, volume 10, and Leslie Stephen in
+<span class="sc">Cornhill</span>, volume 44.</p></div>
+
+
+<h3 style="text-align: left;">DE QUINCEY</h3>
+
+<div class="block3"><p>It is a curious fact that the first complete edition of De
+Quincey's works was issued in Boston in twenty volumes
+(1850-1855) by Ticknor &amp; Fields. Much of the material was
+gathered from English periodicals, as De Quincey was the
+greatest magazine writer of his age. This was followed by the
+Riverside edition in twelve volumes (Boston, 1877). The
+standard English <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_155" id="Page_155">[155]</a></span>edition is <i>The Collected Writings of Thomas
+De Quincey</i>, fourteen volumes, edited by David Masson
+(1889-1890). A.H. Japp wrote the standard English <i>Life of De
+Quincey</i> (London, two volumes, 1879). The best short life is
+Masson's in the English Men of Letters series. George
+Saintsbury gives a good sketch of De Quincey in <i>Essays in
+English Literature</i>. Other estimates may be found in the
+following works: Leslie Stephen, <i>Hours in a Library</i>; H.A.
+Page, <i>De Quincey, His Life and Writings</i> and in Mrs.
+Oliphant's <i>Literary History of England</i>.</p></div>
+
+
+<h3 style="text-align: left;">LAMB</h3>
+
+<div class="block3"><p>Reprints of the <i>Essays of Elia</i> have been very numerous. One
+of the best editions of Lamb's complete works was edited by
+E.V. Lucas in seven volumes, to which he added in 1905 <i>The
+Life of Charles Lamb</i> in two volumes. Another is <i>Complete
+Works and Correspondence</i>, edited by Canon Ainger (London, six
+volumes). Ainger also wrote an excellent short life of Lamb
+for the English Men of Letters series. Hazlitt and Percy
+Fitzgerald have revised Thomas Noon Talfourd's standard
+<i>Letters of Charles Lamb, With a Sketch of His Life</i>. Among
+sketches of the life of Charles and Mary Lamb may be noted
+Barry Cornwall's <i>Charles Lamb&mdash;A Memoir</i>; Fitzgerald,
+<i>Charles Lamb: His Friends, His Haunts and His Books</i>; Walter
+Pater, <i>Appreciations</i>; R.H. Stoddard, <i>Personal
+Recollections</i>; Augustine Birrell, <i>Res Judicat&aelig;</i>; Nicoll,
+<i>Landmarks of English Literature</i>; Talfourd, <i>Final Memorials
+of Charles Lamb</i>; Hutton, <i>Literary Landmarks of London</i>.</p></div>
+
+
+<h3 style="text-align: left;">DICKENS</h3>
+
+<div class="block3"><p>The first collective edition of Dickens' works was issued in
+1847. The standard edition is that of <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_156" id="Page_156">[156]</a></span>Chapman &amp; Hall, London,
+who were the original publishers of <i>Pickwick</i>. One of the
+best of the many editions of Dickens is the Macmillan Pocket
+edition with reproductions of the original covers of the
+monthly parts of the novels as they appeared, the original
+illustrations by Cruikshank, Leech, "Phiz" (Hablot Browne) and
+others, and valuable and interesting introductions by Charles
+Dickens the younger. Another good edition is in the World's
+Classics, with brilliant introductions by G.K. Chesterton. In
+buying an edition of Dickens it is well to get one with
+reproductions of the original illustrations, as these add much
+to the pleasure and interest of the novels.</p>
+
+<p>For ready reference to Dickens' works there is a <i>Dickens
+Dictionary</i>, giving the names of all characters and places in
+the novels, by G.A. Pierce, and another similar work by A.J.
+Philip. Mary Williams has also prepared a <i>Dickens
+Concordance</i>.</p>
+
+<p>Forster's <i>Life of Charles Dickens</i>, in three volumes, is the
+standard work, as Forster was closely connected with the
+novelist from the time he made his hit with <i>Pickwick</i>. George
+Gissing, the novelist, made an abridgment of Forster's <i>Life</i>
+in one volume, which is well done. Scores of shorter lives and
+sketches have been written. Among the best of these are Dr.
+A.W. Ward's <i>Charles Dickens</i> in the English Men of Letters
+series; Taine's chapter on Dickens in his <i>History of English
+Literature</i>; Sir Leslie Stephen's article in the <i>Dictionary
+of National Biography</i>; Mrs. Oliphant's <i>The Victorian Age in
+English Literature</i>; F.G. Kitton's <i>Charles Dickens: His Life,
+Writings and Personality</i>. <i>The Letters</i>, edited by Miss
+Hogarth and Mary Dickens, are valuable for the light they
+throw on the novelist's character and work.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_157" id="Page_157">[157]</a></span>In reminiscence of Dickens, the best books are Mary Dickens'
+<i>My Father as I Recall Him</i>; J.T. Fields' <i>In and Out of Doors
+With Charles Dickens</i> and G. Dolby's <i>Charles Dickens as I
+Knew Him</i>, the last devoted to the famous reading tours.
+Edmund Yates, Anthony Trollope, James Payn, R.H. Haine and
+many others have written readable reminiscences.</p>
+
+<p>For the home life of Dickens and his haunts see F.G. Kitton's
+<i>The Dickens Country</i>; Thomas Fort's <i>In Kent With Charles
+Dickens</i> and H.S. Ward's <i>The Real Dickens Land</i>. Of poems on
+Dickens' death the very best is Bret Harte's <i>Dickens in
+Camp</i>. <i>The Wisdom of Dickens</i>, compiled by Temple Scott, is a
+good collection of extracts.</p></div>
+
+
+<h3 style="text-align: left;">THACKERAY</h3>
+
+<div class="block3"><p>Almost as many editions of Thackeray's works have been
+published as of Dickens' novels, and the reader in his
+selection must be guided largely by his own taste. In choosing
+an edition, however, always get one that contains Thackeray's
+own illustrations, as, though the drawing is frequently crude,
+the sketches are full of humor and help one to understand the
+author's conception of the characters. The best general
+edition is <i>The Biographical</i>, with introductions by his
+daughter, Mrs. Richmond Ritchie (London, 1897-1900). The
+Charterhouse edition of Thackeray in twenty-six volumes,
+published in England by Smith, Elder &amp; Co. and in this country
+by Lippincott, is an excellent library set containing all the
+original illustrations.</p>
+
+<p>No regular biography of Thackeray has ever been written
+because of his expressed wish, but his daughter, Mrs. Richmond
+Ritchie, has supplied this lack with many sketches and
+introductions to various editions of <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_158" id="Page_158">[158]</a></span>her father's works.
+Anthony Trollope in his autobiography gives many charming
+glimpses of Thackeray but his sketch of Thackeray in the
+English Men of Letters series is not warmly appreciative.</p>
+
+<p>One of the best short estimates of Thackeray is Charles
+Whibley's <i>Thackeray</i> (1905). Also valuable are sketches by
+Frederic Harrison in <i>Early Victorian Literature</i>; Brownell,
+<i>Early Victorian Masters</i>; Whipple, <i>Character and
+Characteristic Men</i>; R.H. Stoddard, <i>Anecdote Biography of
+Thackeray</i>; Andrew Lang, <i>Letters to Dead Authors</i>; G.T.
+Fields, <i>Yesterdays With Authors</i>; Jeaffreson, <i>Novels and
+Novelists</i> and W.B. Jerrold, <i>The Best of All Good Company</i>.</p>
+
+<p>The reviews and magazines, especially in the last ten years,
+have abounded in articles on Thackeray. Among these the best
+have appeared in <span class="sc">Scribner's Magazine</span>. A small volume,
+<i>The Sense and Sentiment of Thackeray</i> (Harper's, 1909), gives
+numerous good extracts from the novels as well as from the
+essays.</p></div>
+
+
+<h3 style="text-align: left;">CHARLOTTE BRONT&Euml;</h3>
+
+<div class="block3"><p>Smith, Elder &amp; Co. of London were the publishers of <i>Jane
+Eyre</i> and they also issued the first collected edition of
+Charlotte Bront&euml;'s works. This firm still publishes the
+standard English edition, the Haworth edition, with admirable
+introductions by Mrs. Humphrey Ward and with many
+illustrations from photographs of the places and people made
+memorable in Charlotte's novels. A good American edition is
+the Shirley edition, with excellent illustrations, many of
+them reproductions of rare daguerreotypes.</p>
+
+<p>The standard life of Charlotte Bront&euml; until fifteen years ago
+was Mrs. Gaskell's, one of the most appealing stories in all
+literature. Clement K. Shorter's <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_159" id="Page_159">[159]</a></span><i>Charlotte Bront&euml; and Her
+Circle</i> is now indispensable because of the mass of facts that
+the author has gathered in regard to the life of the sisters
+in the lonely parsonage and their remarkable literary
+development. Augustine Birrell has written a good short life
+of Charlotte, while A.M.F. Robinson (Mme. Duclaux) has a
+volume on Emily Bront&euml; in the Famous Women series.</p>
+
+<p>T. Wemyss Reid was the first writer to make original research
+among the Bront&euml; material and his book, <i>Charlotte Bront&euml;&mdash;A
+Monograph</i>, paved the way for the exhaustive study of this
+strange family of genius by Clement Shorter. Other books that
+give much original material are <i>The Bront&euml;s in Ireland</i>, by
+Rev. Dr. William Wright, and <i>Charlotte Bront&euml; and Her
+Sisters</i>, by Clement Shorter. Mr. Shorter also in <i>The
+Bront&euml;s&mdash;Life and Letters</i> gives all of Charlotte's letters in
+the order of their dates.</p></div>
+
+
+<h3 style="text-align: left;">GEORGE ELIOT</h3>
+
+<div class="block3"><p>The first collected edition of George Eliot's works was
+brought out in 1878-1880 in London and Edinburgh. Many
+editions have since appeared in England and in this country,
+the best one being the English Cabinet edition, published by
+A. &amp; C. Black.</p>
+
+<p>The standard life of George Eliot is <i>George Eliot's Life as
+Related in Her Letters and Journals</i>, edited by her husband,
+J.W. Cross, who served for ten years as curate of Haworth.
+Leslie Stephen has written a remarkably good short life of
+George Eliot in the English Men of Letters series.</p>
+
+<p>Among critical articles on George Eliot may be mentioned Henry
+James in <i>Partial Portraits</i>; Mathilde Blind, <i>George Eliot</i>;
+Oscar Browning, <i>Life of George Eliot</i> in Great Writers
+series; Dowden, <i>Studies in Literature</i>; Oscar Browning,
+<i>Great Writers</i>; Mayo W. <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_160" id="Page_160">[160]</a></span>Hazeltine, <i>Chats About Books</i>; R.H.
+Hutton, <i>Modern Guides of Religious Thought</i>; R.E. Cleveland,
+<i>George Eliot's Poetry</i>; Frederic Harrison, <i>The Choice of
+Books</i> and Sydney Lanier, <i>The Development of the English
+Novel</i>.</p></div>
+
+
+<h3 style="text-align: left;">RUSKIN</h3>
+
+<div class="block3"><p>The great edition of Ruskin is the Library edition by E.T.
+Cook and A. Wedderburn, begun in 1903. It is splendidly
+illustrated and is a superb specimen of book-making. English
+and American editors of Ruskin are numerous.</p>
+
+<p>The standard life of Ruskin is by W.G. Collingwood, his
+secretary and ardent disciple. One of his pupils, E.T. Cook,
+published <i>Studies in Ruskin</i>, which throws much light on his
+methods of teaching art. J.A. Hobson in <i>John Ruskin, Social
+Reformer</i> discusses his economic and social teaching. Dr.
+Charles Waldstein of Cambridge in <i>The Work of John Ruskin</i>
+develops his art theories. Good critical studies may also be
+found in W.M. Rossetti's <i>Ruskin</i> and Frederic Harrison's
+<i>Tennyson, Ruskin, Mill and Other Literary Estimates</i>; Justin
+McCarthy, <i>Modern Leaders</i>; Mary R. Mitford, <i>Recollections of
+a Literary Life</i> and R.H. Hutton, <i>Contemporary Thought and
+Thinkers</i>.</p>
+
+<p>Among magazine articles may be noted W.J. Stillman in the
+<span class="sc">Century</span>, volume 13; Charles Waldstein in
+<span class="sc">Harper's</span>, volume 18; Justin McCarthy in the
+<span class="sc">Galaxy</span>, volume 13, and Leslie Stephen in
+<span class="sc">Frazer's</span>, volumes 9 and 49.</p></div>
+
+
+<h3 style="text-align: left;">TENNYSON</h3>
+
+<div class="block3"><p>The best edition of Tennyson is the Eversley in six volumes,
+published by the Macmillans and edited by his son Hallam,
+which contains a mass of notes left by <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_161" id="Page_161">[161]</a></span>the poet and many
+explanations of peculiar words and metaphors which the father
+gave to the son in discussing his work. This edition also
+gives the changes made by the poet in his constant revision of
+his works, some of which were not improvements.</p>
+
+<p>A mass of critical commentary and reminiscence has been
+published on Tennyson and his poetical work. Among the best of
+these volumes are <i>Tennyson, Ruskin and Mill</i>, by Frederic
+Harrison; <i>Tennyson and His Friends</i>, by Mrs. Richmond
+Ritchie; <i>The Homes and Haunts of Tennyson</i>, by Napier;
+<i>Tennyson, His Art and Relation to Modern Life</i>, by Stopford
+A. Brooke; <i>The Poetry of Tennyson</i>, by Henry Van Dyke; the
+chapter on Tennyson in Stedman's <i>Victorian Poets</i>; a
+commentary on Tennyson's <i>In Memoriam</i> by Prof. A.C. Bradley;
+<i>Alfred Tennyson</i>, by Andrew Lang; <i>Views and Reviews</i>, by
+W.E. Henley; <i>Yesterdays With Authors</i>, by J.T. Fields; <i>The
+Victorian Age</i>, by Mrs. Oliphant. Dr. Henry Van Dyke
+contributed five articles on Tennyson to <span class="sc">Scribner's
+Magazine</span>, volume 6.</p></div>
+
+
+<h3 style="text-align: left;">BROWNING</h3>
+
+<div class="block3"><p>An enormous literature of comment, appreciation and
+interpretation has grown up around Browning, largely due to
+the work of various Browning societies in this country and in
+Europe. The London Browning Society especially has brought out
+many papers that will be of interest to Browning students.
+Other works are Arthur Symons, <i>Introduction to the Study of
+Browning</i> (London, 1886); G.W. Cooke, <i>Browning Guide Book</i>
+(New York, 1901); Fotheringham, <i>Studies</i> (London, 1898);
+Stedman, <i>Victorian Poets</i>; Prof. Hiram Corson, <i>Introduction
+to Browning</i>; George E. Woodberry, <i>Studies in Literature and
+Life</i>; Hamilton W. Mabie, <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_162" id="Page_162">[162]</a></span><i>Essays in Literary
+Interpretation</i>; A. Birrell, <i>Obiter Dicta</i>; George
+Saintsbury, <i>Corrected Impressions</i>.</p>
+
+<p>The first edition of Browning's poems appeared in two volumes
+in 1849, a second in three volumes in 1863 and a third in six
+volumes in 1868. A revised edition containing all the poems
+was issued in sixteen volumes in 1888-1889. A fine complete
+edition in two volumes, edited by Augustine Birrell and F.G.
+Kenyon, was issued in 1896, and Smith, Elder &amp; Co., London,
+brought out a two-volume edition in 1900. In this country the
+Riverside edition of <i>Browning's Poetical Works</i> in six
+volumes, issued by Houghton, Mifflin &amp; Co., and the Camberwell
+edition in twelve handy volumes, with notes by Charlotte
+Porter and Helen A. Clarke, published by Crowell, are valuable
+for Browning students.</p>
+
+<p>The standard life is <i>The Life and Letters of Robert
+Browning</i>, by Mrs. Sutherland Orr, but valuable are <i>The Love
+Letters of Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Browning</i>,
+issued by Browning's son in 1899. For Edmund Gosse's <i>Robert
+Browning&mdash;Personalia</i> the poet supplied much of the material
+in notes. Good short sketches and estimates are Chesterton's
+<i>Browning</i> in the English Men of Letters series and Waugh's
+<i>Robert Browning</i>.</p></div>
+
+
+<h3 style="text-align: left;">GEORGE MEREDITH</h3>
+
+<div class="block3"><p>The standard edition of Meredith's works is the Boxhill
+edition in seventeen volumes, with photogravure frontispieces,
+issued in this country by the Scribners. The same text is used
+in the Pocket Edition in sixteen volumes, which does not
+include the unfinished novel, <i>Celt and Saxon</i>. A mass of
+comment on Meredith may be found in the English and American
+reviews and magazines, to which Poole's <i>Index</i> furnishes the
+best guide.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_163" id="Page_163">[163]</a></span>Mrs. M.S. Henderson, <i>George Meredith: Novelist, Poet,
+Reformer</i>; George Macaulay Trevelyan, <i>The Poetry and
+Philosophy of George Meredith</i>; John Lane, <i>Biography of
+George Meredith</i>, and R. Le Gallienne, <i>Characteristics of
+George Meredith</i>.</p></div>
+
+
+<h3 style="text-align: left;">STEVENSON</h3>
+
+<div class="block3"><p>Robert Louis Stevenson's early work appeared in fugitive form
+in magazines and reviews and even after he had written <i>The
+New Arabian Nights</i> and <i>Travels With a Donkey</i> he was forced
+to see such excellent matter as <i>The Silverado Squatters</i> cut
+up into magazine articles and more than half of it discarded.
+The vogue of Stevenson was greater in this country than in
+England until he had fully established his reputation. In 1878
+<i>An Inland Voyage</i> appeared and in 1879 <i>Travels With a
+Donkey</i>, but it was not until 1883 that <i>Treasure Island</i> made
+him well known. The standard edition of Stevenson is the
+Thistle edition, beautifully printed and illustrated, and
+issued at Edinburgh and New York, 1894-1898. <i>The Letters of
+Stevenson to His Family</i>, originally issued in 1899, have now
+been incorporated with <i>Vailima Letters</i> and issued in four
+volumes. They are arranged chronologically, with admirable
+biographical commentary by Sydney Colvin, to whom a great part
+of them was written. Stevenson's personality was so attractive
+that a mass of reminiscence and comment has been produced
+since his death in 1894. The best books are Graham Balfour,
+<i>Life of Robert Louis Stevenson</i>; Walter Raleigh, <i>R.L.
+Stevenson</i>; Simpson, <i>Stevenson's Edinburgh Days</i>, and
+<i>Memoirs of Vailima</i>, by Isobel Strong and Lloyd Osbourne, the
+novelist's stepchildren. Henry James in <i>Partial Portraits</i>
+has a fine appreciation of Stevenson and <i>Robert Louis
+Stevenson in California</i>, by Katharine D. Osbourne is rich in
+reminiscence.</p></div>
+
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_164" id="Page_164">[164]</a></span>
+<h3 style="text-align: left;">THOMAS HARDY</h3>
+
+<div class="block3"><p>Since 1895, Thomas Hardy has written no fiction. The standard
+edition of his works is published in this country by the
+Harpers. Recently this firm has issued Hardy in a convenient
+thin paper edition which may be slipped into the coat pocket.
+His first novel, <i>Desperate Remedies</i>, appeared in 1871 but it
+was not until the issue of <i>Far From the Madding Crowd</i> in
+1874 that he gained popular fame. Many magazine articles have
+been written on the "corner of Dorsetshire" which Hardy calls
+Wessex. Good books on the Hardy country are <i>The Wessex of
+Romance</i>, by W. Sherren, and <i>The Wessex of Thomas Hardy</i>, by
+Windle.</p></div>
+
+
+<h3 style="text-align: left;">KIPLING</h3>
+
+<div class="block3"><p>The standard edition of Kipling is the Outward Bound edition,
+published in this country by the Scribners. It contains a
+general introduction by the author and special prefaces to
+each volume, with illustrations from bas reliefs made by the
+novelist's father. Doubleday, Page &amp; Co. are issuing a pocket
+edition of Kipling, on thin paper with flexible leather
+binding, which is very convenient. Any additional books will
+be added to each of these editions. Kipling has told of his
+early life in India and of his precocious literary activity in
+<i>My First Book</i> (1894). Richard Le Gallienne made a study of
+the novelist in <i>Rudyard Kipling&mdash;A Criticism</i> and Edmund
+Gosse in <i>Questions at Issue</i> discusses his short stories.
+Prof. William Lyon Phelps in <i>Essays on Modern Novelists</i> has
+a fine chapter on Kipling. Andrew Lang in <i>Essays in Little</i>
+treats of "Mr. Kipling's Stories" and Barrie has an
+appreciation in <span class="sc">Contemporary Review</span> for March, 1891.
+A useful <i>Kipling Index</i> is issued by Doubleday, Page &amp; Co.
+All titles are indexed so that one may locate any story or
+character.</p></div>
+
+<br />
+<br />
+<br />
+<br />
+<a name="Index" id="Index"></a><hr />
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_165" id="Page_165">[165]</a></span><br />
+
+<h2><i>Index</i><span class="totoc"><a href="#toc">ToC</a></span></h2>
+<br />
+
+
+<ul><li>A Blot on the 'Scutcheon, <a href="#Page_108">108</a>, <a href="#Page_110">110</a>, <a href="#Page_113">113</a>.</li>
+
+<li>A Child's Garden of Verse, <a href="#Page_125">125</a>.</li>
+
+<li>Adam Bede, <a href="#Page_65">65</a>, <a href="#Page_76">76</a>, <a href="#Page_82">82</a>, <a href="#Page_84">84</a>.</li>
+
+<li>Addison, <a href="#Page_58">58</a>.</li>
+
+<li>A Dissertation on Roast Pig, <a href="#Page_41">41</a>, <a href="#Page_71">71</a>.</li>
+
+<li>A Dream of Fair Women, <a href="#Page_99">99</a>.</li>
+
+<li>Adventures of Philip, The, <a href="#Page_60">60</a>.</li>
+
+<li>Aes Triplex, <a href="#Page_130">130</a>.</li>
+
+<li>Agnes Gray, <a href="#Page_71">71</a>.</li>
+
+<li>A Gossip on Romance, <a href="#Page_130">130</a>.</li>
+
+<li>A Lodging for the Night, <a href="#Page_124">124</a>, <a href="#Page_129">129</a>.</li>
+
+<li>Alison Cunningham, <a href="#Page_125">125</a>.</li>
+
+<li>Allahabad Pioneer, <a href="#Page_144">144</a>.</li>
+
+<li>Amazing Marriage, The, <a href="#Page_122">122</a>.</li>
+
+<li>An English Mail Coach, <a href="#Page_31">31</a>.</li>
+
+<li>An Habitation Enforced, <a href="#Page_148">148</a>.</li>
+
+<li>An Inland Voyage, <a href="#Page_126">126</a>.</li>
+
+<li>Anglo-Indian Life, <a href="#Page_146">146</a>.</li>
+
+<li>Antiquary, The, <a href="#Page_18">18</a>.</li>
+
+<li>A Pair of Blue Eyes, <a href="#Page_135">135</a>.</li>
+
+<li>Apostles, <a href="#Page_99">99</a>.</li>
+
+<li>Arnold, <a href="#Page_116">116</a>.</li>
+
+<li>Arthurian Legends, <a href="#Page_101">101</a>.</li>
+
+<li>Ashburton, Lady, <a href="#Page_25">25</a>.</li>
+
+<li>Ashby de la Zouch, <a href="#Page_17">17</a>.</li>
+
+<li>Asolando, <a href="#Page_108">108</a>, <a href="#Page_111">111</a>.</li>
+
+<li>A Soldier of France, <a href="#Page_12">12</a>.</li>
+
+<li>Asolo, <a href="#Page_113">113</a>.</li>
+
+<li>A Soul's Tragedy, <a href="#Page_108">108</a>, <a href="#Page_110">110</a>, <a href="#Page_113">113</a>.</li>
+
+<li>A Tale of Two Cities, <a href="#Page_53">53</a>.</li>
+
+<li>Austro-Italian War, <a href="#Page_118">118</a>.</li>
+
+<li>A Window in Thrums, <a href="#Page_39">39</a>.<br /><br /></li>
+
+
+<li>Balestier, Wolcott, <a href="#Page_145">145</a>.</li>
+
+<li>Ballantyne, <a href="#Page_16">16</a>, <a href="#Page_90">90</a>.</li>
+
+<li>Balzac, <a href="#Page_12">12</a>.</li>
+
+<li>Balzac's Seraphita, <a href="#Page_74">74</a>.</li>
+
+<li>Bank of England, <a href="#Page_109">109</a>.</li>
+
+<li>Barrett, Elizabeth, <a href="#Page_110">110</a>.</li>
+
+<li>Barrie, <a href="#Page_39">39</a>.</li>
+
+<li>Bathsheba Everdene, <a href="#Page_136">136</a>.</li>
+
+<li>Becket, <a href="#Page_101">101</a>.</li>
+
+<li>Bells and Pomegranates, <a href="#Page_109">109</a>.</li>
+
+<li>Beyond the Pale, <a href="#Page_146">146</a>.</li>
+
+<li>Biblical Allusions, <a href="#Page_139">139</a>.</li>
+
+<li>Bleak House, <a href="#Page_54">54</a>.</li>
+
+<li>Blue Coat School, <a href="#Page_44">44</a>.</li>
+
+<li>Boldwood, <a href="#Page_136">136</a>.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_166" id="Page_166">[166]</a></span></li>
+
+<li>Boswell, <a href="#Page_4">4</a>.</li>
+
+<li>Bray, Charles, of Coventry, <a href="#Page_80">80</a>.</li>
+
+<li>Brantwood, <a href="#Page_93">93</a>.</li>
+
+<li>Break, Break, Break, <a href="#Page_105">105</a>.</li>
+
+<li>Bront&euml;, Charlotte, <span class="fakesc"><a href="#Page_xii">XII</a></span>, <a href="#Page_66">66 to 72</a>.</li>
+
+<li>Bront&euml;, Emily, <a href="#Page_68">68</a>.</li>
+
+<li>Browning, Robert, <span class="fakesc"><a href="#Page_xii">XII</a></span>, <a href="#Page_97">97</a>, <a href="#Page_103">103</a>, <a href="#Page_106">106 to 115</a>, <a href="#Page_117">117</a>, <a href="#Page_118">118</a>.</li>
+
+<li>Browning, Mrs., <a href="#Page_110">110</a>.</li>
+
+<li>Brushwood Boy, The, <a href="#Page_148">148</a>.</li>
+
+<li>Bunyan, <a href="#Page_28">28</a>.</li>
+
+<li>Burne-Jones, <a href="#Page_142">142</a>, <a href="#Page_143">143</a>.</li>
+
+<li>Burns, <a href="#Page_113">113</a>.</li>
+
+<li>Byron, <a href="#Page_7">7</a>, <a href="#Page_98">98</a>, <a href="#Page_109">109</a>, <a href="#Page_145">145</a>.<br /><br /></li>
+
+
+<li>Cain, <a href="#Page_98">98</a>.</li>
+
+<li>California, <a href="#Page_127">127</a>.</li>
+
+<li>Calvanism, <a href="#Page_149">149</a>.</li>
+
+<li>Cape Cod, <a href="#Page_148">148</a>.</li>
+
+<li>Captains Courageous, <a href="#Page_148">148</a>.</li>
+
+<li>Carlyle, Thomas, <span class="fakesc"><a href="#Page_xii">XII</a></span>, <span class="fakesc"><a href="#Page_xiii">XIII</a></span>, <a href="#Page_3">3</a>, <a href="#Page_4">4</a>, <a href="#Page_8">8</a>, <a href="#Page_20">20 to 30</a>, <a href="#Page_43">43</a>, <a href="#Page_52">52</a>, <a href="#Page_53">53</a>, <a href="#Page_93">93</a>.</li>
+
+<li>Casa Guidi Windows, <a href="#Page_110">110</a>.</li>
+
+<li>Cervantes, <a href="#Page_11">11</a>.</li>
+
+<li>Chapman &amp; Hall, <a href="#Page_118">118</a>.</li>
+
+<li>Charlotte, <a href="#Page_68">68</a>.</li>
+
+<li>Child Angel, The, <a href="#Page_45">45</a>.</li>
+
+<li>Childe Harold, <a href="#Page_7">7</a>, <a href="#Page_90">90</a>.</li>
+
+<li>Choir Invisible, The, <a href="#Page_85">85</a>.</li>
+
+<li>Christmas Carol, <a href="#Page_51">51</a>.</li>
+
+<li>Christmas Story, <a href="#Page_51">51</a>.</li>
+
+<li>Chronicle, <a href="#Page_144">144</a>.</li>
+
+<li>Clive, <a href="#Page_4">4</a>, <a href="#Page_9">9</a>.</li>
+
+<li>Cloister and the Hearth, The, <a href="#Page_65">65</a>.</li>
+
+<li>Coleridge, <a href="#Page_35">35</a>, <a href="#Page_42">42</a>, <a href="#Page_43">43</a>.</li>
+
+<li>Colombe's Birthday, <a href="#Page_110">110</a>, <a href="#Page_113">113</a>.</li>
+
+<li>Colonel Newcome, <a href="#Page_58">58</a>.</li>
+
+<li>Confessions of an English Opium Eater, <a href="#Page_36">36</a>.</li>
+
+<li>Count Robert of Paris, <a href="#Page_18">18</a>.</li>
+
+<li>Court of Chancery, <a href="#Page_54">54</a>.</li>
+
+<li>Cricket on the Hearth, The, <a href="#Page_51">51</a>.</li>
+
+<li>Croker, <a href="#Page_4">4</a>.</li>
+
+<li>Cromwell, <a href="#Page_24">24</a>.</li>
+
+<li>Cross, J.W., <a href="#Page_82">82</a>.</li>
+
+<li>Crossing the Bar, <a href="#Page_98">98</a>, <a href="#Page_101">101</a>, <a href="#Page_105">105</a>, <a href="#Page_113">113</a>.</li>
+
+<li>Crown of Wild Olives, The, <a href="#Page_94">94</a>.<br /><br /></li>
+
+
+<li>Dale in the Alps, <a href="#Page_94">94</a>.</li>
+
+<li>Daniel Deronda, <a href="#Page_79">79</a>, <a href="#Page_82">82</a>.</li>
+
+<li>Daniel Dravot, <a href="#Page_146">146</a>.</li>
+
+<li>Danny Dever, <a href="#Page_149">149</a>.</li>
+
+<li>David and Allan, <a href="#Page_129">129</a>.</li>
+
+<li>David and Catriona in Holland, <a href="#Page_129">129</a>.</li>
+
+<li>David Balfour, <a href="#Page_128">128</a>.</li>
+
+<li>David Copperfield, <a href="#Page_53">53</a>, <a href="#Page_128">128</a>.</li>
+
+<li>David Warwick, <a href="#Page_120">120</a>.</li>
+
+<li>Defoe, <a href="#Page_62">62</a>.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_167" id="Page_167">[167]</a></span></li>
+
+<li>Departmental Ditties, <a href="#Page_149">149</a>.</li>
+
+<li>De Quincey, Thomas, <span class="fakesc"><a href="#Page_xii">XII</a></span>, <a href="#Page_30">30 to 38</a>, <a href="#Page_45">45</a>, <a href="#Page_93">93</a>.
+ <ul class="nest">
+  <li>Autobiography, <a href="#Page_31">31</a>.</li>
+  <li>Confessions, <a href="#Page_31">31</a>, <a href="#Page_32">32</a>.</li>
+ </ul>
+</li>
+
+<li>Desperate Remedies, <a href="#Page_135">135</a>.</li>
+
+<li>Dickens, Charles, <span class="fakesc"><a href="#Page_xii">XII</a></span>, <a href="#Page_13">13</a>, <a href="#Page_44">44</a>, <a href="#Page_47">47 to 55</a>, <a href="#Page_61">61</a>, <a href="#Page_128">128</a>.</li>
+
+<li>Dinah Morris, <a href="#Page_84">84</a>.</li>
+
+<li>Diana of the Crossways, <a href="#Page_115">115</a>, <a href="#Page_120">120</a>, <a href="#Page_121">121</a>, <a href="#Page_122">122</a>.</li>
+
+<li>Dombey and Son, <a href="#Page_54">54</a>.</li>
+
+<li>Don Juan, <a href="#Page_98">98</a>.</li>
+
+<li>Doyle, Conan, <a href="#Page_12">12</a>.</li>
+
+<li>Dramatic Idylls, <a href="#Page_111">111</a>.</li>
+
+<li>Dramatic Romances and Lyrics, <a href="#Page_110">110</a>.</li>
+
+<li>Dream Children, <span class="fakesc"><a href="#Page_xiv">XIV</a></span>, <a href="#Page_41">41</a>, <a href="#Page_45">45</a>.</li>
+
+<li>Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, <a href="#Page_125">125</a>, <a href="#Page_126">126</a>, <a href="#Page_128">128</a>.</li>
+
+<li>Drums of the Fore and Aft, The, <a href="#Page_146">146</a>.</li>
+
+<li>Dynasts, The, <a href="#Page_132">132</a>.<br /><br /></li>
+
+
+<li>East India Life, <a href="#Page_141">141</a>.</li>
+
+<li>Edinburgh Review, <a href="#Page_4">4</a>, <a href="#Page_23">23</a>.</li>
+
+<li>Egdon Heath, <a href="#Page_133">133</a>, <a href="#Page_138">138</a>.</li>
+
+<li>Egoist, The, <a href="#Page_121">121</a>.</li>
+
+<li>Eliot, George, <span class="fakesc"><a href="#Page_xii">XII</a></span>, <a href="#Page_52">52</a>, <a href="#Page_76">76 to 86</a>, <a href="#Page_136">136</a>, <a href="#Page_137">137</a>.</li>
+
+<li>Emerson, <a href="#Page_27">27</a>, <a href="#Page_116">116</a>.</li>
+
+<li>English History, <a href="#Page_120">120</a>.</li>
+
+<li>English Humorists, The, <a href="#Page_60">60</a>.</li>
+
+<li>Enoch Arden, <a href="#Page_101">101</a>.</li>
+
+<li>Esmond, <a href="#Page_56">56</a>.</li>
+
+<li>Essays of Elia, <a href="#Page_40">40</a>, <a href="#Page_43">43</a>.</li>
+
+<li>Eugenie Grandet, <a href="#Page_12">12</a>.</li>
+
+<li>Eustacia, <a href="#Page_136">136</a>, <a href="#Page_138">138</a>.</li>
+
+<li>Evan Harrington, <a href="#Page_121">121</a>.</li>
+
+<li>Evelyn Hope, <a href="#Page_113">113</a>.<br /><br /></li>
+
+
+<li>Far From the Madding Crowd, <a href="#Page_133">133</a>, <a href="#Page_135">135</a>, <a href="#Page_136">136</a>.</li>
+
+<li>Father Damien, <a href="#Page_124">124</a>.</li>
+
+<li>Felix Holt, <a href="#Page_82">82</a>.</li>
+
+<li>Fifine at the Fair, <a href="#Page_108">108</a>, <a href="#Page_111">111</a>.</li>
+
+<li>Fiske, Mrs., in Becky Sharp, <a href="#Page_58">58</a>, <a href="#Page_138">138</a>.</li>
+
+<li>Flight of the Tartar Tribe, The, <a href="#Page_31">31</a>.</li>
+
+<li>Fors Clavigera, <a href="#Page_92">92</a>.</li>
+
+<li>Four Georges, The, <a href="#Page_60">60</a>.</li>
+
+<li>Fra Lippo Lippi, <a href="#Page_113">113</a>.</li>
+
+<li>Fraser's Magazine, <a href="#Page_23">23</a>.</li>
+
+<li>Frederick the Great, <a href="#Page_24">24</a>.</li>
+
+<li>French Revolution, The, <a href="#Page_23">23</a>, <a href="#Page_27">27</a>.</li>
+
+<li>From Sea to Sea, <a href="#Page_144">144</a>.</li>
+
+<li>Froude, <a href="#Page_24">24</a>.<br /><br /></li>
+
+
+<li>Gabriel Oak, <a href="#Page_136">136</a>.</li>
+
+<li>Gaelic Comment, <a href="#Page_103">103</a>.</li>
+
+<li>Gaskell, Mrs., <a href="#Page_70">70</a>.</li>
+
+<li>Gethsemane, <span class="fakesc"><a href="#Page_xiv">XIV</a></span>.</li>
+
+<li>Giles Winterbourne, <a href="#Page_137">137</a>.</li>
+
+<li>Goethe, <a href="#Page_23">23</a>, <a href="#Page_26">26</a>.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_168" id="Page_168">[168]</a></span></li>
+
+<li>Goldsmith, <a href="#Page_3">3</a>.</li>
+
+<li>Gray's Elegy, <a href="#Page_135">135</a>.</li>
+
+<li>Great Hoggarty Diamond, The, <a href="#Page_59">59</a>.<br /><br /></li>
+
+
+<li>Hallam, Alfred, <a href="#Page_99">99</a>.</li>
+
+<li>Hallam, Arthur, <a href="#Page_99">99</a>, <a href="#Page_100">100</a>, <a href="#Page_103">103</a>.</li>
+
+<li>Hardy, Thomas, <span class="fakesc"><a href="#Page_xiii">XIII</a></span>, <a href="#Page_77">77</a>, <a href="#Page_115">115</a>, <a href="#Page_116">116</a>, <a href="#Page_131">131 to 140</a>.</li>
+
+<li>Harold, <a href="#Page_101">101</a>.</li>
+
+<li>Hastings, Warren, <a href="#Page_4">4</a>, <a href="#Page_9">9</a>.</li>
+
+<li>Heart of the Midlothian, The, <a href="#Page_17">17</a>, <a href="#Page_18">18</a>.</li>
+
+<li>Henry Esmond, <a href="#Page_60">60</a>.</li>
+
+<li>Herbert, Sidney, <a href="#Page_120">120</a>.</li>
+
+<li>Heroes and Hero Worship, <a href="#Page_22">22</a>.</li>
+
+<li>Herve Riel, <a href="#Page_108">108</a>.</li>
+
+<li>History of England, <a href="#Page_7">7</a>.</li>
+
+<li>Holt, Henry, <a href="#Page_136">136</a>.</li>
+
+<li>Household Words and All the Year Round, <a href="#Page_51">51</a>.</li>
+
+<li>Howells' Criticism of Thackeray, <a href="#Page_62">62</a>.</li>
+
+<li>How They Brought the Good News, <a href="#Page_108">108</a>.<br /><br /></li>
+
+
+<li>Idylls of the King, The, <a href="#Page_96">96</a>, <a href="#Page_100">100</a>, <a href="#Page_104">104</a>.</li>
+
+<li>India, <a href="#Page_102">102</a>.</li>
+
+<li>Indian Life, <a href="#Page_140">140</a>.</li>
+
+<li>In Memoriam, <a href="#Page_96">96</a>, <a href="#Page_98">98</a>, <a href="#Page_100">100</a>, <a href="#Page_103">103</a>, <a href="#Page_104">104</a>.</li>
+
+<li>Inn Album, The, <a href="#Page_108">108</a>, <a href="#Page_111">111</a>.</li>
+
+<li>Irving, Washington, <a href="#Page_130">130</a>.</li>
+
+<li>Ivanhoe, <a href="#Page_17">17</a>.<br /><br /></li>
+
+
+<li>James, Henry, <a href="#Page_115">115</a>, <a href="#Page_124">124</a>.</li>
+
+<li>Jane Eyre, <a href="#Page_59">59</a>, <a href="#Page_66">66</a>, <a href="#Page_68">68</a>, <a href="#Page_71">71</a>, <a href="#Page_73">73</a>.</li>
+
+<li>Janet's Repentance, <a href="#Page_81">81</a>.</li>
+
+<li>John Silver, <a href="#Page_125">125</a>, <a href="#Page_128">128</a>.</li>
+
+<li>Johnson, <a href="#Page_3">3</a>.</li>
+
+<li>Jude the Obscure, <a href="#Page_131">131</a>, <a href="#Page_134">134</a>, <a href="#Page_136">136</a>, <a href="#Page_138">138</a>.</li>
+
+<li>Jungle Stories, <a href="#Page_148">148</a>.<br /><br /></li>
+
+
+<li>Keats, <a href="#Page_109">109</a>.</li>
+
+<li>Kidnaped, <a href="#Page_128">128</a>.</li>
+
+<li>King Arthur, <a href="#Page_104">104</a>.</li>
+
+<li>King's Treasures, <a href="#Page_92">92</a>.</li>
+
+<li>Kim, <a href="#Page_140">140</a>, <a href="#Page_148">148</a>.</li>
+
+<li>Kipling, John Lockwood, <a href="#Page_142">142</a>.</li>
+
+<li>Kipling, Rudyard, <span class="fakesc"><a href="#Page_xiii">XIII</a></span>, <a href="#Page_140">140 to 149</a>.<br /><br /></li>
+
+
+<li>Labor, <a href="#Page_26">26</a>.</li>
+
+<li>Lacy, <a href="#Page_113">113</a>.</li>
+
+<li>Lady Constantine, <a href="#Page_136">136</a>.</li>
+
+<li>Lady Geraldine's Courtship, <a href="#Page_110">110</a>.</li>
+
+<li>Lady Godiva, <a href="#Page_100">100</a>.</li>
+
+<li>Lady of Shalott, The, <a href="#Page_99">99</a>.</li>
+
+<li>Lady of the Lake, The, <a href="#Page_7">7</a>, <a href="#Page_15">15</a>.</li>
+
+<li>Lahore, <a href="#Page_144">144</a>.</li>
+
+<li>Lamb, Mary, <a href="#Page_41">41</a>, <a href="#Page_42">42</a>.</li>
+
+<li>Lamb, Charles, <span class="fakesc"><a href="#Page_xii">XII</a></span>, <a href="#Page_35">35</a>, <a href="#Page_38">38 to 46</a>, <a href="#Page_123">123</a>, <a href="#Page_130">130</a>.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_169" id="Page_169">[169]</a></span></li>
+
+<li>Lamp of Sacrifice, <a href="#Page_94">94</a>.</li>
+
+<li>Last Chantey, The, <a href="#Page_149">149</a>.</li>
+
+<li>Last Essays of Elia, The, <a href="#Page_45">45</a>.</li>
+
+<li>Last Ride, The, <a href="#Page_108">108</a>.</li>
+
+<li>Lay of the Last Minstrel, The, <a href="#Page_15">15</a>.</li>
+
+<li>Lays of Ancient Rome, <a href="#Page_7">7</a>.</li>
+
+<li>Leader, Organ of the Free Thinkers, <a href="#Page_81">81</a>.</li>
+
+<li>Learoyd, <a href="#Page_147">147</a>.</li>
+
+<li>Leisure Hour Series, <a href="#Page_136">136</a>.</li>
+
+<li>Lewes, George Henry, <a href="#Page_78">78</a>, <a href="#Page_81">81</a>, <a href="#Page_82">82</a>.</li>
+
+<li>Lincolnshire, <a href="#Page_98">98</a>.</li>
+
+<li>Lockhart, <a href="#Page_16">16</a>.</li>
+
+<li>Locksley Hall, <a href="#Page_96">96</a>, <a href="#Page_97">97</a>, <a href="#Page_100">100</a>, <a href="#Page_101">101</a>, <a href="#Page_103">103</a>.</li>
+
+<li>London, Jack, <a href="#Page_129">129</a>.</li>
+
+<li>London Magazine, <a href="#Page_43">43</a>.</li>
+
+<li>Lord Ormont and His Aminta, <a href="#Page_122">122</a>.</li>
+
+<li>Lotus Eaters, The, <a href="#Page_99">99</a>.</li>
+
+<li>Lovel, the Widower, <a href="#Page_60">60</a>.</li>
+
+<li>Lucy, <a href="#Page_119">119</a>, <a href="#Page_120">120</a>.</li>
+
+<li>Lyrical Poems of Robert Browning, by Dr. A.J. George, <a href="#Page_112">112</a>.<br /><br /></li>
+
+
+<li>Macaulay, Thomas Babington, <a href="#Page_3">3 to 11</a>, <a href="#Page_20">20</a>.</li>
+
+<li>Malory's Chronicle, <a href="#Page_104">104</a>.</li>
+
+<li>Manchester Grammar School, <a href="#Page_34">34</a>.</li>
+
+<li>Mandalay, <a href="#Page_149">149</a>.</li>
+
+<li>Manfred, <a href="#Page_98">98</a>.</li>
+
+<li>Man Who Was, The, <a href="#Page_146">146</a>.</li>
+
+<li>Man Who Would be King, The, <a href="#Page_146">146</a>.</li>
+
+<li>Margaret Ogilvie, <a href="#Page_39">39</a>.</li>
+
+<li>Marion Evans, <a href="#Page_79">79</a>.</li>
+
+<li>Markheim, <a href="#Page_124">124</a>, <a href="#Page_129">129</a>.</li>
+
+<li>Marmion, <a href="#Page_15">15</a>.</li>
+
+<li>Marty South, <a href="#Page_136">136</a>, <a href="#Page_137">137</a>.</li>
+
+<li>Mason's Song, <a href="#Page_26">26</a>.</li>
+
+<li>Maud, <a href="#Page_97">97</a>, <a href="#Page_100">100</a>.</li>
+
+<li>Mayor of Casterbridge, The, <a href="#Page_136">136</a>.</li>
+
+<li>McAndrew's Hymn, <a href="#Page_149">149</a>.</li>
+
+<li>Melbourne, Lord, <a href="#Page_120">120</a>.</li>
+
+<li>Men and Women, <a href="#Page_108">108</a>.</li>
+
+<li>Meredith, George, <span class="fakesc"><a href="#Page_xii">XII</a></span>, <a href="#Page_115">115 to 123</a>, <a href="#Page_124">124</a>.</li>
+
+<li>Micah Clarke, <a href="#Page_12">12</a>.</li>
+
+<li>Middle Ages, The, <a href="#Page_99">99</a>.</li>
+
+<li>Middlemarch, <a href="#Page_79">79</a>, <a href="#Page_82">82</a>, <a href="#Page_85">85</a>.</li>
+
+<li>Millais, <a href="#Page_92">92</a>.</li>
+
+<li>Miller, Henry, in The Only Way, <a href="#Page_53">53</a>.</li>
+
+<li>Mill on the Floss, The, <a href="#Page_76">76</a>, <a href="#Page_82">82</a>, <a href="#Page_84">84</a>.</li>
+
+<li>Milnes, <a href="#Page_99">99</a>.</li>
+
+<li>Milton, <a href="#Page_9">9</a>, <a href="#Page_107">107</a>.</li>
+
+<li>Mitchell, <a href="#Page_130">130</a>.</li>
+
+<li>Modern Painters, <a href="#Page_87">87</a>, <a href="#Page_91">91</a>, <a href="#Page_93">93</a>.</li>
+
+<li>Monckton, <a href="#Page_99">99</a>.</li>
+
+<li>Monte Cristo, <a href="#Page_12">12</a>.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_170" id="Page_170">[170]</a></span></li>
+
+<li>Moravian School, <a href="#Page_118">118</a>.</li>
+
+<li>Morning Post, London, <a href="#Page_118">118</a>.</li>
+
+<li>Morte d' Arthur, <a href="#Page_100">100</a>.</li>
+
+<li>Mowgli, <a href="#Page_148">148</a>.</li>
+
+<li>Mrs. Battle's Opinion on Whist, <a href="#Page_41">41</a>, <a href="#Page_45">45</a>.</li>
+
+<li>Mulvaney, the Irishman, <a href="#Page_147">147</a>.</li>
+
+<li>Murder As One of the Fine Arts, <a href="#Page_31">31</a>, <a href="#Page_35">35</a>.</li>
+
+<li>My Star, <a href="#Page_113">113</a>.</li>
+
+<li>Mystery of Edwin Drood, The, <a href="#Page_50">50</a>.<br /><br /></li>
+
+
+<li>Napoleon of Rhyme, <a href="#Page_109">109</a>.</li>
+
+<li>Naulakha, The, <a href="#Page_148">148</a>.</li>
+
+<li>New Arabian Nights, <a href="#Page_126">126</a>.</li>
+
+<li>Newcomes, The, <a href="#Page_60">60</a>.</li>
+
+<li>Newdigate Prize, <a href="#Page_91">91</a>.</li>
+
+<li>Niagara Falls, <a href="#Page_139">139</a>.</li>
+
+<li>Nicholas Nickleby, <a href="#Page_50">50</a>, <a href="#Page_54">54</a>.</li>
+
+<li>Nobel Prize, <a href="#Page_146">146</a>.</li>
+
+<li>Norton, Caroline, <a href="#Page_120">120</a>.<br /><br /></li>
+
+
+<li>Ode on the Death of the Duke of Wellington, <a href="#Page_105">105</a>.</li>
+
+<li>Old Curiosity Shop, <a href="#Page_50">50</a>.</li>
+
+<li>Old Mortality, <a href="#Page_18">18</a>.</li>
+
+<li>Oliver Twist, <a href="#Page_50">50</a>.</li>
+
+<li>O Lyric Love, <a href="#Page_108">108</a>, <a href="#Page_111">111</a>, <a href="#Page_114">114</a>.</li>
+
+<li>One Word More, <a href="#Page_108">108</a>, <a href="#Page_111">111</a>, <a href="#Page_113">113</a>.</li>
+
+<li>Ordeal of Richard Feverel, The, <a href="#Page_115">115</a>, <a href="#Page_119">119</a>.</li>
+
+<li>Our Mutual Friend, <a href="#Page_54">54</a>.</li>
+
+<li>Oxford, <a href="#Page_90">90</a>.<br /><br /></li>
+
+
+<li>Palace of Art, The, <a href="#Page_99">99</a>.</li>
+
+<li>Past and Present, <a href="#Page_22">22</a>, <a href="#Page_26">26</a>, <a href="#Page_27">27</a>.</li>
+
+<li>Paracelsus, <a href="#Page_109">109</a>.</li>
+
+<li>Parsifal, <a href="#Page_107">107</a>.</li>
+
+<li>Pauline, <a href="#Page_109">109</a>.</li>
+
+<li>Pavilion on the Links, The, <a href="#Page_129">129</a>.</li>
+
+<li>Payn, James, <a href="#Page_17">17</a>.</li>
+
+<li>Peel, Sir Robert, <a href="#Page_120">120</a>.</li>
+
+<li>Pendennis, <a href="#Page_60">60</a>, <a href="#Page_64">64</a>.</li>
+
+<li>Pew, <a href="#Page_125">125</a>, <a href="#Page_128">128</a>.</li>
+
+<li>Pickwick Papers, <a href="#Page_50">50</a>, <a href="#Page_52">52</a>.</li>
+
+<li>Pied Piper of Hamelin, The, <a href="#Page_108">108</a>.</li>
+
+<li>Pilgrim's Progress, <a href="#Page_79">79</a>.</li>
+
+<li>Pilgrim's Scrip, <a href="#Page_119">119</a>.</li>
+
+<li>Pippa Passes, <a href="#Page_108">108</a>, <a href="#Page_109">109</a>, <a href="#Page_113">113</a>, <a href="#Page_114">114</a>.</li>
+
+<li>Phelps, Prof. William Lyon, <a href="#Page_115">115</a>, <a href="#Page_116">116</a>, <a href="#Page_134">134</a>.</li>
+
+<li>Plain Tales from the Hills, <a href="#Page_145">145</a>.</li>
+
+<li>Poems by Two Brothers, <a href="#Page_99">99</a>.</li>
+
+<li>Poems, Chiefly Lyrical, <a href="#Page_99">99</a>.</li>
+
+<li>Preterita, <a href="#Page_92">92</a>, <a href="#Page_94">94</a>.</li>
+
+<li>Princess, The, <a href="#Page_100">100</a>, <a href="#Page_105">105</a>, <a href="#Page_114">114</a>.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_171" id="Page_171">[171]</a></span></li>
+
+<li>Professor, The, <a href="#Page_71">71</a>.</li>
+
+<li>Prospice, <a href="#Page_108">108</a>, <a href="#Page_111">111</a>, <a href="#Page_113">113</a>.</li>
+
+<li>Puck of Pook's Hill, <a href="#Page_141">141</a>.</li>
+
+<li>Pulvis et Umbra, <a href="#Page_130">130</a>.</li>
+
+<li>Punch, <a href="#Page_59">59</a>.<br /><br /></li>
+
+
+<li>Queen Mary, <a href="#Page_101">101</a>.</li>
+
+<li>Queen Victoria, <a href="#Page_104">104</a>.</li>
+
+<li>Quentin Durward, <a href="#Page_17">17</a>, <a href="#Page_18">18</a>.<br /><br /></li>
+
+
+<li>Rabbi Ben Ezra, <a href="#Page_113">113</a>.</li>
+
+<li>Rasselas, <a href="#Page_79">79</a>.</li>
+
+<li>Recessional, <a href="#Page_149">149</a>.</li>
+
+<li>Red Cotton Nightcap Country, <a href="#Page_111">111</a>.</li>
+
+<li>Reid, Mayne, <a href="#Page_90">90</a>.</li>
+
+<li>Return of the Native, The, <a href="#Page_132">132</a>, <a href="#Page_133">133</a>, <a href="#Page_136">136</a>, <a href="#Page_138">138</a>.</li>
+
+<li>Rhoda Fleming, <a href="#Page_121">121</a>.</li>
+
+<li>Rhone below Geneva, <a href="#Page_94">94</a>.</li>
+
+<li>Richardson, <a href="#Page_62">62</a>.</li>
+
+<li>Richard the Lion-Hearted, <a href="#Page_17">17</a>.</li>
+
+<li>Ring and the Book, The, <a href="#Page_97">97</a>, <a href="#Page_106">106</a>, <a href="#Page_113">113</a>.</li>
+
+<li>Robinson Crusoe, <a href="#Page_125">125</a>.</li>
+
+<li>Rob Roy, <a href="#Page_18">18</a>.</li>
+
+<li>Romola, <a href="#Page_77">77</a>, <a href="#Page_82">82</a>, <a href="#Page_85">85</a>.</li>
+
+<li>Rose La Touche, <a href="#Page_92">92</a>.</li>
+
+<li>Rottingdean, <a href="#Page_145">145</a>.</li>
+
+<li>Ruskin, John, <span class="fakesc"><a href="#Page_xii">XII</a></span>, <a href="#Page_17">17</a>, <a href="#Page_30">30</a>, <a href="#Page_87">87 to 95</a>.<br /><br /></li>
+
+
+<li>Sad Adventures of the Rev. Amos Barton, The, <a href="#Page_81">81</a>.</li>
+
+<li>Sandra Belloni, <a href="#Page_121">121</a>.</li>
+
+<li>Sands, George, <a href="#Page_74">74</a>.</li>
+
+<li>San Marco, <a href="#Page_111">111</a>.</li>
+
+<li>Sartor Resartus, <a href="#Page_21">21</a>, <a href="#Page_23">23</a>, <a href="#Page_28">28</a>.</li>
+
+<li>Scenes From Clerical Life, <a href="#Page_81">81</a>.</li>
+
+<li>School of Scandal, The, <a href="#Page_120">120</a>.</li>
+
+<li>Scotch Moors, <a href="#Page_127">127</a>.</li>
+
+<li>Scotch Scenes, <a href="#Page_127">127</a>.</li>
+
+<li>Scotch Stories, <a href="#Page_128">128</a>.</li>
+
+<li>Scott, Sir Walter, <a href="#Page_11">11 to 19</a>, <a href="#Page_47">47</a>, <a href="#Page_52">52</a>, <a href="#Page_90">90</a>, <a href="#Page_128">128</a>.</li>
+
+<li>Sea Wolf, The, <a href="#Page_129">129</a>.</li>
+
+<li>Seigfried, Wagner's, <a href="#Page_107">107</a>.</li>
+
+<li>Sellwood, Miss Emily, <a href="#Page_100">100</a>.</li>
+
+<li>Sesame and Lilies, <a href="#Page_94">94</a>.</li>
+
+<li>Seven Lamps, The, <a href="#Page_87">87</a>, <a href="#Page_92">92</a>, <a href="#Page_93">93</a>.</li>
+
+<li>Seymour, <a href="#Page_50">50</a>.</li>
+
+<li>Shakespeare, <a href="#Page_47">47</a>, <a href="#Page_106">106</a>, <a href="#Page_114">114</a>, <a href="#Page_120">120</a>.</li>
+
+<li>Shaving of Shagpat, The, <a href="#Page_118">118</a>.</li>
+
+<li>Shelley, <a href="#Page_109">109</a>.</li>
+
+<li>Sheridan, <a href="#Page_120">120</a>.</li>
+
+<li>Shibli Bagarag, <a href="#Page_119">119</a>.</li>
+
+<li>Shirley, <a href="#Page_74">74</a>.</li>
+
+<li>Sicilian vengeance, <a href="#Page_129">129</a>.</li>
+
+<li>Sidney, <a href="#Page_104">104</a>.</li>
+
+<li>Silas Marner, <a href="#Page_82">82</a>, <a href="#Page_84">84</a>.</li>
+
+<li>Sir Austin, <a href="#Page_119">119</a>.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_172" id="Page_172">[172]</a></span></li>
+
+<li>Sire de Maletroit's Door, The, <a href="#Page_124">124</a>, <a href="#Page_129">129</a>.</li>
+
+<li>Sketches by Boz, <a href="#Page_50">50</a>.</li>
+
+<li>Soldiers Three, <a href="#Page_147">147</a>.</li>
+
+<li>Somoa, <a href="#Page_127">127</a>.</li>
+
+<li>Sonnets From the Portuguese, <a href="#Page_110">110</a>.</li>
+
+<li>Sordello, <a href="#Page_106">106</a>, <a href="#Page_109">109</a>.</li>
+
+<li>Southey, <a href="#Page_43">43</a>.</li>
+
+<li>South Sea Islands, <a href="#Page_127">127</a>.</li>
+
+<li>Spectator, <a href="#Page_58">58</a>.</li>
+
+<li>Spedding, <a href="#Page_99">99</a>.</li>
+
+<li>Spencer, Herbert, <a href="#Page_81">81</a>, <a href="#Page_83">83</a>.</li>
+
+<li>Steele, <a href="#Page_58">58</a>.</li>
+
+<li>Stevenson, <span class="fakesc"><a href="#Page_xii">XII</a></span>, <a href="#Page_11">11</a>, <a href="#Page_39">39</a>, <a href="#Page_40">40</a>, <a href="#Page_72">72</a>, <a href="#Page_120">120</a>, <a href="#Page_123">123 to 130</a>.</li>
+
+<li>Stones of Venice, The, <a href="#Page_87">87</a>, <a href="#Page_92">92</a>, <a href="#Page_94">94</a>, <a href="#Page_95">95</a>.</li>
+
+<li>Story of an African Farm, The, <a href="#Page_116">116</a>.</li>
+
+<li>Strafford, <a href="#Page_109">109</a>.</li>
+
+<li>Strauss&mdash;Life of Jesus, <a href="#Page_80">80</a>.</li>
+
+<li>Study of Sociology, The, <a href="#Page_83">83</a>.</li>
+
+<li>Supernatural Man, The, <a href="#Page_45">45</a></li>
+
+<li>Suspira, <a href="#Page_36">36</a>.</li>
+
+<li>Swift, <a href="#Page_3">3</a>.<br /><br /></li>
+
+
+<li>Taine, <a href="#Page_103">103</a>.</li>
+
+<li>Tales From Shakespeare, <a href="#Page_43">43</a>.</li>
+
+<li>Tales of East India Life, <a href="#Page_140">140</a>.</li>
+
+<li>Talisman, The, <a href="#Page_18">18</a>.</li>
+
+<li>Talk and Talkers, <a href="#Page_130">130</a>.</li>
+
+<li>Tennyson, Alfred, <span class="fakesc"><a href="#Page_xii">XII</a></span>, <a href="#Page_96">96 to 106</a>, <a href="#Page_113">113</a>, <a href="#Page_114">114</a>.</li>
+
+<li>Tennyson, Charles, <a href="#Page_99">99</a>.</li>
+
+<li>Tess of the d'Urbervilles, <a href="#Page_65">65</a>, <a href="#Page_132">132</a>, <a href="#Page_134">134</a>, <a href="#Page_136">136</a>, <a href="#Page_138">138</a>.</li>
+
+<li>Thackeray, William Makepeace, <span class="fakesc"><a href="#Page_xii">XII</a></span>, <span class="fakesc"><a href="#Page_xiv">XIV</a></span>, <a href="#Page_13">13</a>, <a href="#Page_48">48</a>, <a href="#Page_52">52</a>, <a href="#Page_56">56 to 66</a>, <a href="#Page_73">73</a>, <a href="#Page_99">99</a>.</li>
+
+<li>They, <a href="#Page_148">148</a>.</li>
+
+<li>Thompson-Seton, <a href="#Page_148">148</a>.</li>
+
+<li>Three Guardsmen, The, <a href="#Page_12">12</a>.</li>
+
+<li>Three Ladies of Sorrow, <a href="#Page_37">37</a>.</li>
+
+<li>Timbuctoo, <a href="#Page_99">99</a>.</li>
+
+<li>Times, London, <a href="#Page_21">21</a>, <a href="#Page_120">120</a>.</li>
+
+<li>Tolstoi, <a href="#Page_13">13</a>.</li>
+
+<li>To Mary in Heaven, <a href="#Page_113">113</a>.</li>
+
+<li>Travels With a Donkey, <a href="#Page_126">126</a>.</li>
+
+<li>Treasure Island, <a href="#Page_123">123</a>, <a href="#Page_124">124</a>, <a href="#Page_126">126</a>, <a href="#Page_128">128</a>.</li>
+
+<li>Trench, <a href="#Page_99">99</a>.</li>
+
+<li>Trevelyan, G.O., <a href="#Page_5">5</a>.</li>
+
+<li>Trinity College, Cambridge, <a href="#Page_99">99</a>.</li>
+
+<li>Turgeneff, <a href="#Page_13">13</a>.</li>
+
+<li>Turner, <a href="#Page_91">91</a>, <a href="#Page_94">94</a>.</li>
+
+<li>Two Voices, The, <a href="#Page_100">100</a>.<br /><br /></li>
+
+
+<li>Ulysses, <a href="#Page_100">100</a>.</li>
+
+<li>Under the Greenwood Tree, <a href="#Page_135">135</a>.</li>
+
+<li>Unto This Last, <a href="#Page_94">94</a>.</li>
+
+<li>Vanity Fair, <a href="#Page_56">56</a>, <a href="#Page_58">58</a>, <a href="#Page_59">59</a>, <a href="#Page_63">63</a>.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_173" id="Page_173">[173]</a></span></li>
+
+<li>Victorian Age, <a href="#Page_96">96</a>.</li>
+
+<li>Villette, <a href="#Page_66">66</a>, <a href="#Page_73">73</a>.</li>
+
+<li>Villon, <a href="#Page_129">129</a>.</li>
+
+<li>Virginians, The, <a href="#Page_60">60</a>.</li>
+
+<li>Virginibus Puerisque, <a href="#Page_40">40</a>.</li>
+
+<li>Vision of Sudden Death, The, <a href="#Page_31">31</a>.<br /><br /></li>
+
+
+<li>Waverley, <a href="#Page_15">15</a>, <a href="#Page_19">19</a>, <a href="#Page_149">149</a>.</li>
+
+<li>Weir of Hermiston, <a href="#Page_127">127</a>.</li>
+
+<li>Westminster Review, <a href="#Page_80">80</a>.</li>
+
+<li>Wessex, <a href="#Page_133">133</a>.</li>
+
+<li>Westward Ho, <a href="#Page_142">142</a>.</li>
+
+<li>Weyman, <a href="#Page_12">12</a>.</li>
+
+<li>White Company, The, <a href="#Page_12">12</a>.</li>
+
+<li>Wilhelm Meister, <a href="#Page_23">23</a>.</li>
+
+<li>William the Conqueror, <a href="#Page_147">147</a>.</li>
+
+<li>Without Benefit of Clergy, <a href="#Page_146">146</a>.</li>
+
+<li>With the Night Mail, <a href="#Page_148">148</a>.</li>
+
+<li>Woodlanders, The, <a href="#Page_136">136</a>, <a href="#Page_137">137</a>.</li>
+
+<li>Wordsworth, <a href="#Page_35">35</a>, <a href="#Page_113">113</a>.</li>
+
+<li>Wuthering Heights, <a href="#Page_67">67</a>, <a href="#Page_71">71</a>.</li>
+</ul>
+
+<br />
+<hr />
+<br />
+
+<div class="tr">
+<p class="cen"><a name="TN" id="TN"></a>Typographical errors corrected in text:</p>
+<br />
+Page &nbsp; 50: &nbsp; Curosity replaced with Curiosity<br />
+Page &nbsp; 57: &nbsp; "her mind give way" replaced with "her mind gave way"<br />
+Page 101: &nbsp; idyl replaced with idyll<br />
+Page 111: &nbsp; "Dramatic Idyls" replaced with "Dramatic Idylls"<br />
+Page 152: &nbsp; "English Men of Letter's" replaced with "English Men of Letters"<br />
+Page 152: &nbsp; Brittanica replaced with Britannica<br />
+Page 168: &nbsp; Shalot replaced with Shalott<br />
+Page 170: &nbsp; Mowglie replaced with Mowgli<br />
+</div>
+
+<br />
+<hr />
+<br />
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+<pre>
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Modern English Books of Power, by 
+George Hamlin Fitch
+
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+</pre>
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+</body>
+</html>
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@@ -0,0 +1,5142 @@
+Project Gutenberg's Modern English Books of Power, by George Hamlin Fitch
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Modern English Books of Power
+
+Author: George Hamlin Fitch
+
+Release Date: September 9, 2006 [EBook #19222]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK MODERN ENGLISH BOOKS OF POWER ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Juliet Sutherland, Jeannie Howse and the Online
+Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net
+
+
+
+
+
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+    +--------------------------------------------------------------+
+    | Transcriber's Note:                                          |
+    |                                                              |
+    | Inconsistent hyphenation in the original document has been   |
+    | preserved.                                                   |
+    |                                                              |
+    | A number of obvious typographical errors have been corrected |
+    | in this text. For a complete list, please see the end of     |
+    | this document.                                               |
+    |                                                              |
+    +--------------------------------------------------------------+
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+
+
+
+  [Illustration: CHARLES DICKENS READING "THE CHIMES" AT 58
+  LINCOLN'S INN FIELDS ON THE SECOND OF DECEMBER, 1844. FROM A
+  SKETCH BY DANIEL MACLISE, R.A.]
+
+
+
+
+MODERN
+ENGLISH BOOKS
+OF POWER
+
+BY GEORGE HAMLIN FITCH
+
+"A GOOD BOOK IS THE PRECIOUS
+LIFE-BLOOD OF A MASTER SPIRIT, EMBALMED AND TREASURED
+UP ON PURPOSE TO A LIFE BEYOND LIFE."
+MILTON: AREOPAGITICA
+
+ILLUSTRATED
+
+BARSE & HOPKINS
+NEW YORK   NEWARK
+N.Y.       N.J.
+
+
+
+
+_Copyright_, 1912
+by BARSE & HOPKINS
+
+The articles in this
+book appeared originally in the
+Sunday book-page of the San Francisco _Chronicle_.
+The privilege of reproducing them
+here is due to the courtesy of
+M.H. de Young, Esq.
+
+
+
+
+TO AMERIQUE
+WHOSE
+LOVE AND ENCOURAGEMENT
+HELPED ME TO WRITE
+THIS BOOK
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+
+                                                             PAGE
+
+INTRODUCTION                                                   ix
+
+THE VITAL QUALITY IN LITERATURE                                xi
+
+   To Get the Spiritual Essence of a Great Book One Must
+   Study the Man Who Wrote It--The Man Is the Best
+   Epitome of His Message.
+
+MACAULAY'S ESSAYS IN EUROPEAN HISTORY                           3
+
+   Foremost English Essayist--His Style and Learning
+   Have Made Macaulay a Favorite for Over a Half
+   Century.
+
+SCOTT AND HIS WAVERLEY NOVELS                                  11
+
+   Greatest Novelist the World Has Known--Made History
+   Real and Created Characters That Will Never Die.
+
+CARLYLE AS AN INSPIRER OF YOUTH                                20
+
+   Finest English Prose Writer--His Best Books, _Past
+   and Present_, _Sartor Resartus_ and the _French
+   Revolution_.
+
+DE QUINCEY AS A MASTER OF STYLE                                30
+
+   He Wrote the _Confessions of an English
+   Opium-Eater_--Dreamed Dreams and Saw Visions and
+   Pictured Them in Poetic Prose.
+
+CHARLES LAMB AND THE ESSAYS OF ELIA                            38
+
+   Best Beloved of All the English Writers--Quaintest
+   and Tenderest Essayist Whose Work Appeals to All
+   Hearts.
+
+DICKENS, THE FOREMOST OF NOVELISTS                             47
+
+   More Widely Read Than Any Other Story-Teller--The
+   Greatest of the Modern Humorists Appeals to the
+   Readers of All Ages and Classes.
+
+THACKERAY, GREATEST MASTER OF FICTION                          56
+
+   The Most Accomplished Writer of His Century--Tender
+   Pathos Under an Affectation of Cynicism and Great Art
+   in Style and Characters.
+
+CHARLOTTE BRONTE; HER TWO GREAT NOVELS                         66
+
+   _Jane Eyre_ and _Villette_ are Touched With
+   Genius--The Tragedy of a Woman's Life That Resulted
+   in Two Stories of Passionate Revolt Against Fate.
+
+GEORGE ELIOT AND HER TWO GREAT NOVELS                          76
+
+   _Adam Bede_ and _The Mill on the Floss_--Her Early
+   Stories Are Rich in Character Sketches, With Much
+   Humor and Pathos.
+
+RUSKIN, THE APOSTLE OF ART                                     87
+
+   Art Critic and Social Reformer--Best Books Are
+   _Modern Painters_, _The Seven Lamps_ and _The Stones
+   of Venice_.
+
+TENNYSON LEADS THE VICTORIAN WRITERS                           96
+
+   A Poet Who Voiced the Aspirations of His
+   Age--_Locksley Hall_, _In Memoriam_ and _The Idylls
+   of the King_ Among His Best Works.
+
+BROWNING, GREATEST POET SINCE SHAKESPEARE                     106
+
+   How to Get the Best of Browning's Poems--Read the
+   Lyrics First and Then Take Up the Longer and the More
+   Difficult Works.
+
+MEREDITH AND A FEW OF HIS BEST NOVELS                         115
+
+   One of the Greatest Masters of Fiction of the Last
+   Century--_The Ordeal of Richard Feverel_, _Diana of
+   the Crossways_ and Other Novels.
+
+STEVENSON, PRINCE OF MODERN STORY-TELLERS                     123
+
+   His Stories of Adventure and Brilliant
+   Essays--_Treasure Island_ and _Dr. Jekyll and Mr.
+   Hyde_ His Most Popular Books.
+
+THOMAS HARDY; HIS TRAGIC TALES OF WESSEX                      131
+
+   Greatest Living Writer of English Fiction--Resenting
+   Harsh Criticisms, the Prose Master Turns to Verse.
+
+KIPLING'S BEST SHORT STORIES AND POEMS                        140
+
+   Tales of East Indian Life and Character--Ideal
+   Training of the Genius That Has Produced Some of the
+   Best Literary Work of Our Day.
+
+BIBLIOGRAPHY                                                  151
+
+   Short Notes of Both Standard and Other Editions, With
+   Lives, Sketches and Reminiscences.
+
+INDEX                                                         165
+
+
+
+
+Illustrations
+
+
+                                                           FACING
+                                                             PAGE
+
+Charles Dickens Reading _The Chimes_ at 58 Lincoln's Inn
+  Fields on the Second of December, 1844. From a Sketch
+  by Daniel Maclise, R.A.                                  _Title_
+
+Thomas Babington Macaulay at the Age of Forty-nine--After
+  an Engraving by W. Holl, from a Drawing by George
+  Richmond, A.R.A.                                              6
+
+Sir Walter Scott--This Portrait is taken from Chantrey's
+  Bust now at Abbotsford, which, according to Lockhart,
+  "Alone Preserves for Posterity the Expression most
+  fondly Remembered by All who Ever Mingled in his
+  Domestic Circle."                                            12
+
+White Horse Inn--From an Illustration to _Waverley_,
+  Drawn by G. Cattermole and Engraved by E. Finden             14
+
+Thomas Carlyle--From the World-Famed Masterpiece of
+  Portraiture by James McNeill Whistler                        20
+
+Archhouse, Ecclefechan, Dumfriesshire, the Birthplace of
+  Thomas Carlyle--From a Photograph in the Possession of
+  Alexander Carlyle, M.A., on which Carlyle has Written
+  a Memorandum to Show in which Room he was Born               26
+
+Thomas De Quincey--From an old Engraving                       30
+
+De Quincey with Two Daughters and Grandchild--From a
+  Chalk Drawing by James Archer, R.S.A., made in 1855          34
+
+Charles Lamb--From the Portrait by William Hazlitt             38
+
+Mary and Charles Lamb--From the Painting by F.S. Cary
+  made in 1834                                                 44
+
+Charles Dickens at the Age of Twenty-seven--From the
+  Portrait by Daniel Maclise, R.A.                             48
+
+Original Pickwick Cover Issued in 1837 with Dickens'
+  Autograph--Most of Dickens' Novels were Issued in
+  Shilling Installments before being Published in the
+  Complete Volume                                              52
+
+William Makepeace Thackeray--From a Drawing by Samuel
+  Laurence, Engraved by J.C. Armytage                          56
+
+Title-page to _Vanity Fair_, Drawn by Thackeray, who
+  Furnished the Illustrations for Many of his Earlier
+  Editions                                                     58
+
+William Makepeace Thackeray--A Caricature Drawn by
+  Himself                                                      62
+
+Charlotte Bronte--From the Exquisitely Sympathetic Crayon
+  Portrait by George Richmond, R.A., now in the National
+  Portrait Gallery of London                                   66
+
+Mrs. Gaskell--From the Portrait by George Richmond, R.A.
+  Mrs. Gaskell's _Life of Bronte_ is one of the Finest
+  Biographies in the Language                                  72
+
+George Eliot in 1864--From the Etching by Mr. Paul
+  Rajon--Drawn by Mr. Frederick Burton--From the
+  Frontispiece to the First Edition of _George Eliot's
+  Life_, by Her Husband, J.W. Cross                            76
+
+George Eliot's Birthplace, South Farm, Arbury, Nuneaton        80
+
+John Ruskin--From a Photograph Taken on July 20, 1882, by
+  Messrs. Elliott & Fry                                        88
+
+John Ruskin--From the Semi-Romantic Portrait by Sir John
+  E. Millais                                                   92
+
+Lord Alfred Tennyson--After an Engraving by G.J. Stodart
+  From a Photograph by J. Mayall                               96
+
+Facsimile of Tennyson's Original Manuscript of _Crossing
+  the Bar_. (Copyright by the Macmillan Company)              100
+
+Robert Browning--From a Photograph by Hollyer after the
+  Portrait by G.F. Watts, R.A.                                106
+
+Elizabeth Barrett Browning--After the Portrait by Field
+  Talfourd                                                    110
+
+George Meredith with His Daughter and Grandchildren--From
+  a Photograph Taken Shortly Before His Death                 118
+
+Flint Cottage, Boxhill, the Home of George Meredith--His
+  Writing was done in a Small Swiss Chalet in the Garden      120
+
+Robert Louis Stevenson--The Author's Intimate Associates
+  Pronounce this Photograph a Perfect Presentation of His
+  Most Typical Expression                                     126
+
+Stevenson's Home at Valima, Samoa, Looking Toward Vaea        128
+
+Thomas Hardy--A Portrait Which Brings Out Strikingly the
+  Man of Creative Power, the Artist, the Philosopher and
+  the Poet                                                    132
+
+Rudyard Kipling--A Striking Likeness of the Author in a
+  Characteristic Pose                                         140
+
+Rudyard Kipling--From a Cartoon by W. Nicholson               144
+
+
+
+
+_Introduction_
+
+
+_My aim in this little book has been to give short sketches and
+estimates of the greatest modern English writers from Macaulay to
+Stevenson and Kipling. Omissions there are, but my effort has been to
+give the most characteristic writers a place and to try to stimulate
+the reader's interest in the man behind the book as well as in the
+best works of each author. Too much space is devoted in most literary
+criticism to the bare facts of biography and the details of essays or
+novels or histories written by authors. My plan has been to arouse
+interest both in the men and their books so that any reader of this
+volume may be stimulated to extend his knowledge of the modern English
+classics._
+
+_These chapters include the greatest English writers during the last
+one hundred and fifty years and they have been prepared mainly for
+those who have no thorough knowledge of modern English books or
+authors. They are of limited scope so that few quotations have been
+possible. But they have been written with an eager desire to help
+those who care to know the best works of modern English authors. In
+the same spirit the most appropriate illustrations have been secured
+and a helpful bibliography has been added. If this book helps readers
+to secure one lasting friend among these authors it will have done
+good missionary work; for to make the books of one man or woman of
+genius a part of our mental possessions is to be set on the broad
+highway to literary culture._
+
+
+
+
+_The Vital Quality in Literature_
+
+    _To Get the Spiritual Essence of a Great Book One Must Study
+    the Man Who Wrote It--The Man Is the Best Epitome His
+    Message._
+
+
+_In this volume as in its predecessor, "Comfort Found in Good Old
+Books," my aim has been to enforce the theory that behind every great
+book is a man, greater than the best book that he ever wrote. This
+strong spiritual quality which every one of the great authors puts
+into his best books is what we should strive to secure when we read
+these great classics. Unless we get this spiritual part we miss the
+essence of the book._
+
+_Hence it has been my aim in this volume to make clear what manner of
+men wrote these books which serve as the landmarks of modern English
+literature._
+
+_The scope of this book is limited, but from Macaulay to Kipling the
+effort has been to include those representative modern English
+authors who both in prose and verse best reflect the spiritual
+tendencies of their age. Whether essayists, historians, novelists or
+poets each of these writers has furnished something distinctive; each
+has caught some salient feature of his age and fixed it for all time
+in the amber of his thought._
+
+_And what a bead-roll is this of great English worthies: Macaulay, the
+most brilliant and learned of all English essayists; Scott, the finest
+story-teller of his own or any other age; Carlyle, the inspirer of
+ambitious youth; De Quincey, the greatest artist in style, whose words
+are as music to the sensitive ear; Dickens, the master painter of
+sorrows and joys of the common people; Thackeray, the best interpreter
+of human life and character; Charlotte Bronte, the brooding Celtic
+genius who laid bare the hearts of women; George Eliot, the greatest
+artist of her sex in mastery of human emotion; Ruskin, the first to
+teach the common people appreciation of art and architecture;
+Tennyson, the melodious singer who voiced the highest aspiration of
+his time; Browning, the greatest dramatic poet since Shakespeare;
+Charles Lamb, one of the tenderest of essayists; George Meredith, the
+most brilliant and suggestive novelist of the Victorian age;
+Stevenson, the best beloved and most artistic story-teller of his day;
+Hardy, the master painter of tragedies of rural life; and Kipling, the
+interpreter of Anglo-Indian life, the singer of the new age of science
+and discovery, the laureate of the gospel of blood and iron._
+
+_The work of each of these men and women who make up the splendid roll
+of English immortals varies in quality, in style, in capacity to touch
+the heart and inspire the thought of the reader of to-day. But great
+as are their differences, all meet on the common ground of a
+warm-hearted, sympathetic humanity that knows no distinctions of race
+or creed, no limitations of time or place. The splendid sermons on the
+gospel of work that Carlyle preached after long wrestlings of the
+spirit are as full of inspiration to the youth of to-day as they were
+when they came out from the mind of the man who actually lived the
+laborious life that he commended; the little lay discourses that may
+be found scattered through Thackeray's novels and essays are born of
+agony of spirit, and it is their spiritual power which keeps them
+fresh and full of inspiration in this age of doubt and materialism._
+
+_And so we might go down through the whole list. Each of these great
+writers had his Gethsemane, from which he emerged with the power of
+moving the hearts of men. So when we read that most beautiful essay of
+Lamb's on "Dream Children," our hearts ache for the lonely man who
+sacrificed the best things in life for the sake of the sister whom he
+loved better than his own happiness. And when we read Thackeray's
+eloquent words on family love we know that he wrote in his heart's
+blood, for the dearest woman in the world to him was lost forever in
+this world, when the light of her reason was clouded._
+
+_And so I have tried in these essays to show how bitter waters of
+sorrow have strengthened the spirit of all these masters of English
+thought and style, until they have poured out their hearts in eloquent
+words that can never die. Far across the gulf of years their sonorous
+voices reach our ears. Pregnant are they with the passionate
+earnestness of these men and women of genius, these bearers of the
+torch of spiritual inspiration passed from hand to hand down the
+centuries._
+
+_When our souls are moved by some great bereavement then the words of
+these inspired writers soothe our griefs. When we are beaten down in
+the dust of conflict they come with the refreshment of water from
+springs in the everlasting hills. When we are bitter over great
+losses or sore over hope deferred or stricken because friends have
+proved faithless, then they soften our hearts and give us courage to
+take up once more the battle of life._
+
+
+
+
+MODERN ENGLISH BOOKS OF POWER
+
+
+
+
+MACAULAY'S ESSAYS IN EUROPEAN HISTORY
+
+    THE FOREMOST ESSAYIST IN ENGLISH LITERATURE--HIS STYLE AND
+    LEARNING HAVE MADE MACAULAY A FAVORITE FOR OVER A HALF
+    CENTURY.
+
+
+Macaulay belonged to the nineteenth century, as he was born in 1800,
+but in his cast of mind, in his literary tastes and in his intense
+partisanship he belonged to the century that includes Swift, Johnson
+and Goldsmith. He stands alone among famous English authors by reason
+of his prodigious memory, his wide reading, his oratorical style and
+his singular ascendancy over the minds of young students. The only
+writers of modern times who can be classed with him as great personal
+forces in the development of young minds are Carlyle and Emerson, and
+of the three Macaulay must be given first place because of a certain
+dynamic quality in the man and his style which forces conviction on
+the mind of the immature reader. The same thing to a less extent is
+true of Carlyle, who suffers in his influence as one grows older.
+Emerson is in a class by himself. His appeal is that of pure reason
+and of high enthusiasm--an appeal that never loses its force with
+those who love the intellectual life.
+
+Many famous men have testified to the mental stimulus which they
+received from Macaulay's essays. Upon these essays, contributed to the
+EDINBURGH REVIEW in its prime, Macaulay lavished all the resources of
+his vast scholarship, his discursive reading in the ancient and modern
+classics, his immense enthusiasm and his strong desire to prove his
+case. He was a great advocate before he was a great writer, and he
+never loses sight of the jury of his readers. He blackens the shadows
+and heightens the lights in order to make heroes out of Clive and
+Warren Hastings; he hammers Boswell and Boswell's editor, Croker, over
+the sacred head of old Dr. Johnson; he lampoons every eminent Tory, as
+he idealizes every prominent Whig in English political history.
+Macaulay's style is declamatory; he wrote as though he were to
+deliver his essays from the rostrum; he abounds in antithesis; he
+works up your interest in the course of a long paragraph until he
+reaches his smashing climax, in which he fixes indelibly in your mind
+the impression which he desires to create. It is all like a great
+piece of legerdemain; your eyes cannot follow the processes, but your
+mind is amazed and then convinced by the triumphant proof of the
+conjuror's skill.
+
+Macaulay had one of the most successful of lives. His early advantages
+were ample. He had a memory which made everything he read his own,
+ready to be drawn upon at a moment's notice. He was famous as an
+author at the early age of twenty-five; he was already a distinguished
+Parliamentary orator at thirty; at thirty-three he had gained a place
+in the East Indian Council. He never married, but he had an ideal
+domestic life in the home of his sister, and one of his nephews,
+George Otto Trevelyan, wrote his biography, one of the best in the
+language, which reveals the sweetness of nature that lay under the
+hard surface of Macaulay's character. He made a fortune out of his
+books, and in ten years' service in India he gained another fortune,
+with the leisure for wide reading, which he utilized in writing his
+history of England. He died at the height of his fame, before his
+great mental powers had shown any sign of decay. Take it all in all,
+his was a happy life, brimful of work and enjoyment.
+
+Thomas Babington Macaulay was born October 25, 1800, the son of a
+wealthy merchant who was active in securing the abolition of the slave
+trade. His precocity is almost beyond belief. He read at three years
+of age, gave signs of his marvelous memory at four, and when only
+eight years old wrote a theological discourse. He entered Trinity
+College, Cambridge, at eighteen, but his aversion to mathematics cost
+him college honors. He showed at Cambridge great fondness for Latin
+declamation and for poetry. At twenty-four he became a fellow of
+Trinity. He studied law, but did not practice. Literature and politics
+absorbed his attention. At twenty-five he made his first hit with his
+essay on Milton in the EDINBURGH REVIEW.
+
+This was followed in rapid succession by the series of essays on which
+his fame mainly rests. In 1830 he was elected to Parliament, and in
+the following year he established his reputation as an orator by a
+great speech on the reform bill. But financial reverses came when he
+lost the lucrative post of Commissioner in Bankruptcy and his
+fellowship at Trinity lapsed. To gain an income he accepted the
+position of secretary of the Board of Control of Indian Affairs, and
+soon after was offered a seat in the Supreme Council of India at
+Calcutta at $50,000 a year. He lived in India four years, and it was
+mainly in these years that he did the reading which afterward bore
+fruit in his _History of England_.
+
+  [Illustration: THOMAS BABINGTON MACAULAY AT THE AGE OF
+  FORTY-NINE--AFTER AN ENGRAVING BY W. HOLL, FROM A DRAWING BY
+  GEORGE RICHMOND, A.R.A.]
+
+At thirty-nine Macaulay began his _History of England_, which
+continued to absorb most of his time for the next twenty years. While
+he was working on his history he published _Lays of Ancient Rome_,
+that had a success scarcely inferior to that of Scott's _Lady of the
+Lake_ or Byron's _Childe Harold_. He also published his essays, which
+had a remarkable sale. His history, the first two volumes of which
+appeared in 1848, scored a success that astounded all the critics.
+When the third volume appeared in 1855, no less than twenty-six
+thousand, five hundred copies were sold in ten weeks, which broke all
+records of that day. Macaulay received royalties of over $150,000 on
+history, a sum which would have been trebled had he secured payment
+on editions issued in the United States, where his works were more
+popular than in his own country. His last years were crowded with
+honors. He accepted a peerage two years before his death. When the end
+came he was given a public funeral and a place in Westminster Abbey.
+
+With Carlyle, Macaulay shares the honor of being the greatest of
+English essayists. While he cannot compare with Carlyle in insight
+into character and in splendor of imagination, he appeals to the wider
+audience because of his attractive style, his wealth of ornament and
+illustration and his great clearness. Carlyle's appeal is mainly to
+students, but Macaulay appeals to all classes of readers.
+
+Macaulay's style has been imitated by many hands, but no one has ever
+worked such miracles as he wrought with apparent ease. In the first
+place, his learning was so much a part of his mind that he drew on its
+stores without effort. Scarcely a paragraph can be found in all his
+essays which is not packed with allusions, yet all seem to illustrate
+his subject so naturally that one never looks upon them as used to
+display his remarkable knowledge.
+
+Macaulay is a master of all the literary arts. Especially does he love
+to use antithesis and to make his effects by violent contrasts. Add to
+this the art of skilful climax, clever alliteration, happy
+illustration and great narrative power and you have the chief features
+of Macaulay's style. The reader is carried along on this flood of
+oratorical style, and so great is the author's descriptive power that
+one actually beholds the scenes and the personages which he depicts.
+
+Of all his essays Macaulay shows his great powers most conspicuously
+in those on Milton, Clive, Warren Hastings and Croker's edition of
+Boswell's Johnson. In these he is always the advocate laboring to
+convince his hearers; always the orator filled with that passion of
+enthusiasm which makes one accept his words for the time, just as
+one's mind is unconsciously swayed by the voice of an eloquent
+speaker. It is this intense earnestness, this fierce desire to
+convince, joined to this prodigal display of learning, which stamps
+Macaulay's words on the brain of the receptive reader. Only when in
+cold blood we analyze his essays do we escape from this literary
+hypnotism which he exerts upon every reader.
+
+The essays of Macaulay are full of meat and all are worth reading,
+but, of course, every reader will differ in his estimate of them
+according to his own tastes and sympathies. It is fine practice to
+take one of these essays and look up the literary and historical
+allusions. No more attractive work than this can be set before a
+reading club. It will give rich returns in knowledge as well as in
+methods of literary study. Macaulay's _History_ is not read to-day as
+it was twenty years ago, mainly because historical writing in these
+days has suffered a great change, due to the growth of religious and
+political toleration. Macaulay is a partisan and a bigot, but if one
+can discount much of his bias and bitterness it will be found
+profitable to read portions of this history. Macaulay's verse is not
+of a high order, but his _Lays_ are full of poetic fire, and they
+appeal to a wider audience than more finished verse.
+
+Of all the English writers of the last century Macaulay has preserved
+the strongest hold on the reading public, and whatever changes time
+may make in literary fashions, one may rest assured that Macaulay will
+always retain his grip on readers of English blood.
+
+
+
+
+SCOTT AND HIS WAVERLEY NOVELS
+
+    THE GREATEST NOVELIST THE WORLD HAS KNOWN--HE MADE HISTORY
+    REAL AND CREATED CHARACTERS THAT WILL NEVER DIE.
+
+
+It is as difficult to sum up in a brief article the work and the
+influence of Sir Walter Scott as it is to make an estimate of
+Shakespeare, for Scott holds the same position in English prose
+fiction that Shakespeare holds in English poetry. In neither
+department is there any rival. In sheer creative force Scott stands
+head and shoulders above every other English novelist, and he has no
+superior among the novelists of any other nation. He has made Scotland
+and the Scotch people known to the world as Cervantes made Spain and
+the Spaniards a reality for all times.
+
+But he did more than Cervantes, for his creative mind reached over the
+border into England and across the channel to France and Germany, and
+even to the Holy Land, and found there historical types which he made
+as real and as immortal as his own highland clansmen. His was the
+great creative brain of the nineteenth century, and his work has made
+the world his debtor. His work stimulated the best story teller of
+France and gave the world _Monte Cristo_ and _The Three Guardsmen_. It
+fired the imaginations of a score of English historical novelists; it
+was the progenitor of Weyman's _A Soldier of France_ and Conan Doyle's
+_Micah Clarke_ and _The White Company_.
+
+Scott's mind was Shakespearean in its capacity for creating characters
+of real flesh and blood; for making great historical personages as
+real and vital as our next-door neighbors, and for bursts of sustained
+story telling that carry the reader on for scores of pages without an
+instant's drop in interest. Only the supreme masters in creative art
+can accomplish these things. And the wonder of it is that Scott did
+all these things without effort and without any self-consciousness. We
+can not imagine Scott bragging about any of his books or his
+characters, as Balzac did about Eugenie Grandet and others of his
+French types. He was too big a man for any small vanities. But he was
+as human as Shakespeare in his love of money, his desire to gather his
+friends about him and his hearty enjoyment of good food and drink.
+
+  [Illustration: SIR WALTER SCOTT THIS PORTRAIT IS TAKEN FROM
+  CHANTREY'S BUST NOW AT ABBOTSFORD, WHICH, ACCORDING TO LOCKHART,
+  "ALONE PRESERVES FOR POSTERITY THE EXPRESSION MOST FONDLY
+  REMEMBERED BY ALL WHO EVER MINGLED IN HIS DOMESTIC CIRCLE"]
+
+It has become the fashion among some of our hair-splitting critics to
+decry Scott because of his carelessness in literary style, his
+tendency to long introductions, and his fondness for description.
+These critics will tell you that Turgeneff and Tolstoi are greater
+literary artists than Scott, just as they tell you that Thackeray and
+Dickens do not deserve a place among the foremost of English
+novelists. This petty, finical criticism, which would measure
+everything by its own rigid rule of literary art, loses sight of the
+great primal fact that Scott created more real characters and told
+more good stories than any other novelist, and that his work will
+outlive that of all his detractors. It ignores the fact that
+Thackeray's wit, pathos, tenderness and knowledge of human nature make
+him immortal in spite of many defects. It forgets that Dickens' humor,
+joy of living and keen desire to help his fellow man will bring him
+thousands of readers after all the apostles of realism are buried
+under the dust of oblivion.
+
+Scott had the ideal training for a great historical novelist. Yet his
+literary successes in verse and prose were the result of accident. It
+is needless here to review his life. The son of a mediocre Scotch
+lawyer, he inherited from his father his capacity for work and his
+passion for system and order. From his mother he drew his love of
+reading and his fondness for old tales of the Scotch border. Like so
+many famous writers, his early education was desultory, but he had the
+free run of a fine library, and when he was a mere schoolboy his
+reading of the best English classics had been wider and more thorough
+than that of his teachers.
+
+Forced by boyish illness to live in the country, he early developed a
+great love for the Scotch ballads and the tales of the romantic past
+of his native land. These he gathered mainly by word of mouth. Later
+he was a diligent student and collector of all the old ballads. In
+this way his mind was steeped in historical lore, while by many
+walking tours through the highlands he came to know the common people
+as very few have ever known them.
+
+  [Illustration: WHITE HORSE INN FROM AN ILLUSTRATION TO "WAVERLEY"
+  DRAWN BY G. CATTERMOLE AND ENGRAVED BY E. FINDEN]
+
+Thus for forty years, while he was a working lawyer and a sheriff of
+his county, he was really laying up stores of material upon which he
+drew for his many novels. His literary tastes were first developed by
+study of German and by the translation of German ballads and plays.
+This practice led him to write _The Lay of the Last Minstrel_, and its
+success was responsible for _Marmion_, and _The Lady of the Lake_. But
+great as was his triumph in verse, he dropped the writing of poems
+when Byron's work eclipsed his own.
+
+Then, in his forty-third year, he turned to prose and began with
+_Waverley_; that series of novels which is the greatest ever produced
+by one man. The success of his first story proved a great stimulus to
+his imagination, and for years he continued to produce these novels,
+three of which may be ranked as the best in English literature. The
+element of mystery in regard to the authorship added to Scott's
+literary success. It was his habit to crowd his literary work into the
+early hours from four to eight o'clock in the morning; the remainder
+of the day was given up to legal duties and the evening to society.
+His tremendous energy and his power of concentration made these four
+hours equal to an ordinary man's working day. His mind was so full of
+material that the labor was mainly that of selection. Creative work,
+when once seated at his desk, was as natural as breathing. Scott came
+to his desk with the zest of a boy starting on a holiday, and this
+pleasure is reflected in the ease and spontaneity of his stories.
+
+But much as he liked his literary work, Scott would not have produced
+so great a number of fine novels had he not been impelled by the
+desire to retrieve large money losses. His old school friend,
+Ballantyne, forced into bankruptcy the printing firm in which Scott
+was a secret partner. The novelist was not morally responsible for
+these debts, but his keen sense of honor made him accept all the
+responsibility, and it drove him to that unceasing work which
+shortened his life. He paid off nearly all the great debt, and he gave
+in this task an example of high courage and power of work that has
+never been surpassed and seldom equaled. You may read the record of
+those last years in Lockhart's fine _Life of Scott_. Get the one
+volume edition, for the full work is too long for these busy days, and
+follow the old author in his heroic struggle. It will bring tears to
+your eyes, but it will make you a lover of Scott, the man, who was as
+great as Scott, the poet and novelist.
+
+Ruskin, when he was making up a list of great authors, put opposite
+Scott's name, "Every line." That bit of advice cannot be followed in
+these strenuous times, but one must make a selection of the best, and
+then, if he have time and inclination, add to this number. To my mind,
+the four great novels of Scott are _Ivanhoe_, _Quentin Durward_, _The
+Talisman_ and _The Heart of Midlothian_. The first gives you feudal
+England as no one else has painted it, with a picture of Richard the
+Lion-Hearted which no historian has ever approached. It contains some
+of the most thrilling scenes in all fiction.
+
+James Payn, who was a very clever novelist, relates the story that he
+and two literary friends agreed to name the scene in all fiction that
+they regarded as the most dramatic. When they came to compare notes
+they found that all three had chosen the same--the entry of the
+unknown knight at Ashby de la Zouch, who passes by the tents of the
+other contestants and strikes with a resounding clash the shield of
+the haughty Templar. This romance also contains one of Scott's finest
+women, the Jewess Rebecca, who atones for the novelist's many insipid
+female characters. Scott was much like Stevenson--he preferred to draw
+men, and he was happiest when in the clash of arms or about to
+undertake a desperate adventure.
+
+_Quentin Durward_ is memorable for its splendid picture of Louis XI,
+one of the ablest as well as one of the meanest men who ever sat on a
+throne. The early chapters of this novel, which describe the
+adventures of the young Scotch soldier at the court of France, have
+never been surpassed in romantic interest. _The Talisman_ gives the
+glory and the romance of the Crusades as no other imaginative work has
+done. It stands in a class by itself and is only approached by Scott's
+last novel, _Count Robert of Paris_, which gives flashes of the same
+spirit.
+
+Of the Scotch novels it is difficult to make a choice, but it seems to
+me _The Heart of Midlothian_ has the widest appeal, although many
+would cast their votes for _Old Mortality_, _The Antiquary_ or _Rob
+Roy_ because of the rich humor of those romances. Scott's dialect,
+although true to nature, is not difficult, as he did not consider it
+necessary to give all the colloquial terms, like the modern "kailyard"
+writers.
+
+If you read three or four of Scott's novels you are pretty apt to read
+more. It is an easy matter to skip the prolix passages and the
+unnecessary introductions. This done, you have a body of romance that
+is far richer than any present-day fiction. And their great merit is
+that, though written in a coarse age, the _Waverley_ novels are sweet
+and wholesome. One misses a great source of enjoyment and culture who
+fails to read the best of Scott's novels. Take them all in all, they
+are the finest fiction that has ever been written, and their continued
+popularity, despite their many faults, is the best proof of their
+sterling merit.
+
+
+
+
+CARLYLE AS AN INSPIRER OF YOUTH
+
+    THE FINEST ENGLISH PROSE WRITER OF THE LAST CENTURY--HIS BEST
+    BOOKS, "PAST AND PRESENT," "SARTOR RESARTUS" AND THE "FRENCH
+    REVOLUTION."
+
+
+As an influence in stimulating school and college students, Macaulay
+must be given a foremost place, but greater than Macaulay, because of
+his spiritual fervor and his moral force, stands Thomas Carlyle, the
+great prophet and preacher of the nineteenth century, whose influence
+will outlast that of all other writers of his time. And this spiritual
+potency, which resides in his best work, is not weakened by his love
+of the Strong Man in History or his fear of the rising tide of popular
+democracy, in which he saw a dreadful repetition of the horrors of the
+French Revolution. It was the Puritan element in his granite
+character which gave most of the flaming spiritual ardor to
+Carlyle's work. It was this which made him the greatest preacher of
+his day, although he had left behind him all the old articles of faith
+for which his forefathers went cheerfully to death on many a bloody
+field.
+
+  [Illustration: THOMAS CARLYLE FROM THE WORLD-FAMED MASTERPIECE OF
+  PORTRAITURE BY JAMES MCNEILL WHISTLER]
+
+Carlyle believed a strong religious faith was vital to any real and
+lasting work in this world, and from the day he gave out _Sartor
+Resartus_ he preached this doctrine in all his books. He was born into
+a generation that was content to accept the forms of religion, so long
+as it could enjoy the good things of this world, and much of Carlyle's
+speech sounded to the people of his day like the warnings of the
+prophet Isaiah to the Israelites of old. But Carlyle was never daunted
+by lack of appreciation or by any ridicule or abuse. These only made
+him more confident in his belief that the spiritual life is the
+greatest thing in this world. And he actually lived the life that he
+preached.
+
+For years Carlyle failed to make enough to support himself and his
+wife, yet he refused a large income, offered by the LONDON TIMES for
+editorial work, on the ground that he could not write to order nor
+bend his opinions to those of others. He put behind him the
+temptation to take advantage of great fame when it suddenly came to
+him. When publishers were eager for his work he spent the same time in
+preparing his books as when he was poor and unsought. He labored at
+the smallest task to give the best that was in him; he wrote much of
+his work in his heart's blood. Hence it is that through all of his
+books, but especially through _Past and Present_ and _Heroes and Hero
+Worship_, one feels the strong beat of the heart of this great man,
+who yearned to make others follow the spiritual life that he had found
+so full of strength and comfort.
+
+Carlyle's life was largely one of work and self-denial. He was born of
+poor parents at the little village of Ecclefechan, in Dumfriesshire,
+Scotland. His father, though an uneducated stone-mason, was a man of
+great mental force and originality, while his mother was a woman of
+fine imagination, with a large gift of story telling. The boy received
+the groundwork of a good education and then walked eighty miles to
+Edinburgh University. Born in 1795, Carlyle went to Edinburgh in 1809.
+His painful economy at college laid the foundation of the dyspepsia
+which troubled him all his days, hampered his work and made him take a
+gloomy view of life. At Edinburgh he made a specialty of mathematics
+and German. He remained at the university five years.
+
+The next fifteen years were spent in tutoring, hack writing for the
+publishers and translation from the German. His first remunerative
+work was the translation of Goethe's _Wilhelm Meister_, a version
+which still remains the best in English. After his marriage to Jane
+Welsh he was driven by poverty to take refuge on his wife's lonely
+farm at Craigenputtock, where he did much reading and wrote the early
+essays which contain some of his best work. The EDINBURGH REVIEW and
+FRASER'S were opened to him.
+
+Finally, in 1833, when he was nearly forty years old, he made his
+first literary hit with _Sartor Resartus_ which called out a storm of
+caustic criticism. The Germanic style, the elephantine humor, the
+strange conceits and the sledge-hammer blows at all which the smug
+English public regarded with reverence--all these features aroused
+irritation. Four years later came _The French Revolution_, which
+established Carlyle's fame as one of the greatest of English writers.
+From this time on he was freed from the fear of poverty, but it was
+only in his last years, when he needed little, that he enjoyed an
+income worthy of his labors.
+
+Carlyle's great books, beside those I have mentioned, are the lives of
+_Cromwell_ and of _Frederick the Great_. These are too long for
+general reading, but a single volume condensation of the _Frederick_
+gives a good idea of Carlyle's method of combining biography and
+history. Carlyle outlived all his contemporaries--a lonely old man,
+full of bitter remorse over imaginary neglect of his wife, and full
+also of despair over the democratic tendencies of the age, which he
+regarded as the outward signs of national degeneracy.
+
+Carlyle's fame was clouded thirty years ago by the unwise publication
+of reminiscences and letters which he never intended for print. Froude
+was chosen as his biographer. One of the great masters of English,
+Froude was a bachelor who idealized Mrs. Carlyle and who regarded as
+the simple truth an old man's bitter regrets over opportunities
+neglected to make his wife happier. Everyone who has studied Carlyle's
+life knows that he was dogmatic, dyspeptic, irritable, and given to
+sharp speech even against those he loved the best. But over against
+these failings must be placed his tenderness, his unfaltering
+affection, his self-denial, his tremendous labors, his small rewards.
+
+When separated from his wife Carlyle wrote her letters that are like
+those of a young lover, an infinite tenderness in every line. One of
+her great crosses was the belief that her husband was in love with the
+brilliant Lady Ashburton. Her jealousy was absurd, as this great lady
+invited Carlyle to her dinners because he was the most brilliant
+talker in all England, and he accepted because the opportunity to
+indulge in monologue to appreciative hearers was a keener pleasure to
+him than to write eloquent warnings to his day and generation.
+Froude's unhappy book, with a small library of commentary that it
+called forth, is practically forgotten, but Carlyle's fame and his
+books endure because they are real and not founded on illusion.
+
+Carlyle opens a new world to the college student or the ambitious
+youth who may be gaining an education by his own efforts. He sounds a
+note that is found in no other author of our time. Doubtless some of
+this attraction is due to his singular style, formed on a long study
+of the German, but most of it is due to the tremendous earnestness of
+the man, which lays hold of the young reader. Never shall I forget
+when in college preparatory days I devoured _Past and Present_ and was
+stirred to extra effort by its trumpet calls that work is worship and
+that the night soon cometh when no man can work.
+
+His fine chapter on _Labor_ with its splendid version of the _Mason's
+Song_ of Goethe has stimulated thousands to take up heavy burdens and
+go on with the struggle for that culture of the mind and the soul
+which is the more precious the harder the fight to secure it. I
+remember copying in a commonplace book some of Carlyle's sonorous
+passages that stir the blood of the young like a bugle call to arms.
+Reading them over years after, I am glad to say that they still
+appealed to me, for it seems to me that the saddest thing in this
+world is to lose one's youthful enthusiasms. When you can keep these
+fresh and strong, after years of contact with a selfish world, age
+cannot touch you.
+
+  [Illustration: ARCHHOUSE, ECCLEFECHAN, DUMFRIESSHIRE THE
+  BIRTHPLACE OF THOMAS CARLYLE--FROM A PHOTOGRAPH IN THE POSSESSION
+  OF ALEXANDER CARLYLE, M.A. ON WHICH CARLYLE HAS WRITTEN A
+  MEMORANDUM TO SHOW IN WHICH ROOM HE WAS BORN]
+
+In this appeal to all that is best and noblest in youth, Carlyle
+stands unrivaled. He has far more heart, force and real warm blood
+than Emerson, who saw just as clearly, but who could not make his
+thought reach the reader. A course in Carlyle should be compulsory in
+the freshman year at every college. If the lecturer were a man still
+full of his early enthusiasms it could not fail to have rich results.
+Take, for instance, those two chapters in _Past and Present_ that are
+entitled "Happy" and "Labor." In a dozen pages are summed up all
+Carlyle's creed. In these pages he declares that the only enduring
+happiness is found in good, honest work, done with all a man's heart
+and soul. And after caustic words on the modern craving for happiness
+he ends a noble diatribe with these words, which are worth framing and
+hanging on the wall, where they may be studied day by day:
+
+    Brief brawling Day, with its noisy phantasms, its poor
+    paper-crown's tinsel-gilt, is gone; and divine everlasting
+    Night, with her star-diadems, with her silences and her
+    veracities, is come! What hast thou done, and how? Happiness,
+    unhappiness; all that was but wages thou hadst; thou hast
+    spent all that, in sustaining thyself hitherward; not a coin
+    of it remains with thee; it is all spent, eaten; and now thy
+    work, where is thy work? Swift, out with it; let us see thy
+    work!
+
+_Sartor Resartus_ is very hard reading, but if you make up your mind
+to go through it you will be repaid by many fine thoughts and many
+noble passages of impassioned prose. Under the guise of Herr Diogenes
+Teufelsdrockh, Carlyle tells the story of his early religious doubts,
+his painful struggles that recall Bunyan's wrestlings with despair,
+and his final entry upon a new spiritual life. He wrote to let others
+know how he had emerged from the Valley of the Shadow of Pessimism
+into the delectable Mountains of Faith. Carlyle was the first of his
+day to proclaim the great truth that the spiritual life is far more
+important than the material life, and this he showed by the humorous
+philosophy of clothes, which he unfolded in the style of the German
+pedants. Carlyle evidently took great pleasure in developing this
+satire on German philosophy, which is full of broad humor.
+
+_The French Revolution_ has been aptly called "history by lightning
+flashes." One needs to have a good general idea of the period before
+reading Carlyle's work. Then he can enjoy this series of splendid
+pictures of the upheaval of the nether world and the strange moral
+monsters that sated their lust for blood and power in those evil
+days, which witnessed the terrible payment of debts of selfish
+monarchy. Carlyle reaches the height of his power in this book, which
+may be read many times with profit.
+
+The sources of Carlyle's strength as a writer are his moral and
+spiritual fervor and his power of making the reader see what he sees.
+The first insures him enduring fame, as it makes what he wrote eighty
+years ago as fresh and as full of fine stimulus as though it were
+written yesterday. The other faculty was born in him. He had an eye
+for pictures; he described what he saw down to the minutest detail; he
+made the men of the French Revolution as real as the people he met on
+his tour of Ireland. He made Cromwell and Frederick men of blood and
+iron, not mere historical lay figures. And over all he cast the
+glamour of his own indomitable spirit, which makes life look good even
+to the man who feels the pinch of poverty and whose outlook is dreary.
+You can't keep down the boy who makes Carlyle his daily companion; he
+will rise by very force of fighting spirit of this dour old
+Scotchman.
+
+
+
+
+DE QUINCEY AS A MASTER OF STYLE
+
+    HE WROTE "CONFESSIONS OF AN ENGLISH OPIUM-EATER"--DREAMED
+    DREAMS AND SAW VISIONS AND PICTURED THEM IN POETIC PROSE.
+
+
+Of all the English writers Thomas De Quincey must be given the palm
+for rhythmical prose. He is as stately as Milton, with more than
+Milton's command of rhythm. If you read aloud his best passages, which
+are written in what he calls his bravura style, you have a near
+approach to the music of the organ. De Quincey was so nice a judge of
+words, he knew so well how to balance his periods, that one of his
+sentences gives to the appreciative ear the same delight as a stanza
+of perfect verse.
+
+Ruskin had much of De Quincey's command of impassioned prose, but he
+never rose to the same sustained heights as the older author. In
+fact, De Quincey stands alone in these traits: the mass and accuracy
+of his accumulated knowledge; the power of making the finest
+distinctions clear to any reader, and the gorgeous style, thick with
+the embroidery of poetical figures, yet never giving the impression of
+over-adornment. And above all these merits is the supreme charm of
+melodious, rhythmical sentences, which give the same enjoyment as fine
+music.
+
+  [Illustration: THOMAS DE QUINCEY FROM AN OLD ENGRAVING]
+
+Forty years ago De Quincey's _Confessions of an English Opium-Eater_
+was read by everyone who professed any knowledge of the masters of
+English literature. To-day it is voted old-fashioned, and few are
+familiar with its splendid imagery. His other works, which fill over a
+dozen volumes, are practically forgotten, mainly because his style is
+very diffuse and his constant digressions weary the reader who has
+small leisure for books.
+
+No one, however, should miss reading the _Confessions_, the
+_Autobiography_ and some one essay, such, for instance, as "Murder as
+One of the Fine Arts," or "The Flight of a Tartar Tribe," or "The
+Vision of Sudden Death" in _An English Mail Coach_. All these contain
+passages of the greatest beauty buried in prolix descriptions. The
+reader must be warned not to drop De Quincey because of his
+digressions. With a little practice you may skip those which do not
+appeal to you, and there is ample sweetness at the heart of his work
+to repay one for removing a large amount of husk.
+
+De Quincey has always impressed me as a fine example of the defects of
+the English school and college training. Although he could write and
+speak Greek fluently at thirteen, and although he had equally perfect
+command of Latin and German, he was absolutely untrained in the use of
+his knowledge and he knew no more about real life when he came out of
+college than the average American boy of ten. With a splendid
+scholarly equipment at seventeen, when thrown upon his own resources
+in London, he came to the verge of starvation, and laid the seeds of
+disease of the stomach, which afterward drove him to the use of opium.
+
+All his training was purely theoretical; in the practical affairs of
+life he remained to the day of his death a mere child. As he says in
+his _Confessions_, he could have earned a good living as a corrector
+of Greek proofs in any big London publishing house, but it never
+occurred to his schoolboy mind that his mastery of this difficult
+classical language was of any practical value. In our day De Quincey
+would have been the greatest magazinist of the age, because his best
+work was in the short essay; but it is to be feared that the
+publishers of his time fattened on the good things which he produced
+and gave small sums to the man who turned out these masterpieces with
+so little effort.
+
+De Quincey was born in 1785 and died in 1859. His life was peculiar
+and its facts became very well known even in his own time because in
+his _Autobiography_ and his _Confessions_ he disclosed its details
+with the frankness of a child. These works are surcharged with some
+exaggeration, but in the main they ring true. As precocious as
+Macaulay, he had much of that author's fondness for books, and when he
+first went to public school at eleven years of age he had read as much
+as most men when they take a college degree. His mind absorbed
+languages without effort. At fifteen he could write Greek verse, and
+his tutor once remarked, "That boy could harangue an Athenian mob
+better than you or I could address an English one."
+
+He lost his father at the age of seven, and his mother seems to have
+given little personal attention to him. He was in nominal charge of
+four guardians, and at seventeen, when his health had been seriously
+reduced by lack of exercise and overdosing of medicines, the sensitive
+boy ran away from the Manchester Grammar school and wandered for
+several months in Wales. He was allowed a pound a week by one of his
+guardians, and he made shift with this for months; but finally the
+hunger for books, which he had no money to buy, sent him to London.
+There he undertook to get advances from money-lenders on his
+expectations. This would have been easy, as he was left a substantial
+income in his father's will, but these Shylocks kept the boy waiting.
+
+In his _Confessions_ he tells of his sufferings from want of food, of
+his nights in an unfurnished house in Soho with a little girl who was
+the "slavey" of a disreputable lawyer, of his wanderings in the
+streets, of the saving of his life by an outcast woman whom he has
+immortalized in the most eloquent passages of the book. Finally, he
+was restored to his friends and went to Oxford. His mental
+independence prevented him from taking a degree, and chronic
+neuralgia of the face and teeth led him to form the habit of taking
+opium, which clung to him for life.
+
+  [Illustration: DE QUINCEY WITH TWO DAUGHTERS AND GRANDCHILD--FROM
+  A CHALK DRAWING BY JAMES ARCHER, R.S.A. MADE IN 1855.]
+
+De Quincey was a close associate of Coleridge, Wordsworth, Southey,
+Lamb and others. He was a brilliant talker, especially when stimulated
+with opium, but he was incapable of sustained intellectual work. Hence
+all his essays and other work first appeared in periodicals and were
+then published in book form. It is noteworthy that an American
+publisher was the first to gather his essays in book form, and that
+his first appreciation, like that of Carlyle, came from this country.
+
+Much of De Quincey's work is now unreadable because it deals with
+political economy and allied subjects, in which he fancied he was an
+expert. He is a master only when he deals with pure literature, but he
+has a large vein of satiric humor that found its best expression in
+the grotesque irony of "Murder as One of the Fine Arts." In this essay
+he descants on the greatest crime as though it were an accomplishment,
+and his freakish wit makes this paper as enjoyable as Charles Lamb's
+essay on the origin of roast pig.
+
+De Quincey's fame, however, rests upon _The Confessions of an English
+Opium-Eater_. This is a record unique in English literature. It tells
+in De Quincey's usual style, with many tedious digressions, the story
+of his neglected boyhood, his revolt at school discipline and monotony
+that had shattered his health, his wanderings in Wales, his life as a
+common vagrant in London, his college life, his introduction to opium
+and the dreams that came with indulgence in the drug. The gorgeous
+beauty of De Quincey's pictures of these opium visions has probably
+induced many susceptible readers to make a trial of the drug, with
+deep disappointment as the result. No common mind can hope to have
+such visions as De Quincey records.
+
+His imagination has well been called Druidic; it played about the
+great facts and personages of history and it invested these with a
+background of the most solemn and imposing natural features. These
+dreams came to have with him the very semblance of reality. Read the
+terrible passages in the _Confessions_ in which the Malay figures;
+read the dream fugues in "Suspira," the visions seen by the boy when
+he looked on his dead sister's face, or the noble passages that
+picture the three Ladies of Sorrow. Here is a passage on the vision of
+eternity at his sister's death bier, which gives a good idea of De
+Quincey's style:
+
+    Whilst I stood, a solemn wind began to blow--the saddest that
+    ear ever heard. It was a wind that might have swept the fields
+    of mortality for a thousand centuries. Many times since upon
+    summer days, when the sun is about the hottest, I have
+    remarked the same wind arising and uttering the same hollow,
+    solemn, Memnonian, but saintly swell; it is in this world the
+    one great audible symbol of eternity.
+
+It is a great temptation to quote some of De Quincey's fine passages,
+but most of them are so interwoven with the context that the most
+eloquent bits cannot be taken out without the loss of their beauty. De
+Quincey was a dreamer before he became a slave to opium. This drug
+intensified a natural tendency until he became a visionary without an
+equal in English literature. And these visions, evoked by his splendid
+imagination, are worth reading in these days as an antidote to the
+materialism of present-day life; they demonstrate the power of the
+spiritual life, which is the potent and abiding force in all
+literature.
+
+
+
+
+CHARLES LAMB AND THE ESSAYS OF ELIA
+
+    THE BEST BELOVED OF ALL THE ENGLISH WRITERS--QUAINTEST AND
+    TENDEREST ESSAYIST WHOSE WORK APPEALS TO ALL HEARTS.
+
+
+Of all the English writers of the last century none is so well beloved
+as Charles Lamb. Thirty years ago his _Essays of Elia_ was a book
+which every one with any claim to culture had not only read, but read
+many times. It was the traveling companion and the familiar friend,
+the unfailing resource in periods of depression, the comforter in time
+of trouble. It touched many experiences of life, and it ranged from
+sunny, spontaneous humor to that pathos which is too deep for tears.
+Into it Lamb put all that was rarest and best in his nature, all that
+he had gleaned from a life of self-sacrifice and spiritual culture.
+
+  [Illustration: CHARLES LAMB FROM THE PORTRAIT BY WILLIAM
+  HAZLITT]
+
+Such men as he were rare in his day, and not understood by the
+literary men of harder nature who criticised his peculiarities and
+failed to appreciate the delicacy of his genius. Only one such has
+appeared in our time--he who has given us a look into his heart in _A
+Window in Thrums_ and in that beautiful tribute to his mother,
+_Margaret Ogilvie_. Barrie, in his insight into the mind of a child
+and in his freakish fancy that seems brought over from the world of
+fairyland to lend its glamour to prosaic life, is the only successor
+to Lamb.
+
+Lamb can endure this neglect, for were he able to revisit this earth
+no one would touch more whimsically than he upon the fads and the
+foibles of contemporary life; but it's a great pity that in the
+popular craze about the new writers, all redolent with the varnish of
+novelty, we should consign to the dust of unused shelves the works of
+Charles Lamb. All that he wrote which the world remembers is in Elia
+and his many letters--those incomparable epistles in which he quizzed
+his friends and revealed the tenderness of his nature and the delicacy
+of his fancy.
+
+Robert Louis Stevenson is justly regarded as the greatest essayist of
+our time, but I would not exchange the _Essays of Elia_ for the best
+things of the author of _Virginibus Puerisque_. Stevenson always,
+except in his familiar early letters, suggests the literary artist who
+has revised his first draft, with an eye fixed on the world of readers
+who will follow him when he is gone. But Lamb always wrote with that
+charming spontaneous grace that comes from a mind saturated with the
+best reading and mellow with much thought. You fancy him jotting down
+his thoughts, with his quizzical smile at the effect of his quips and
+cranks. You cannot figure him as laboriously searching for the right
+word or painfully recasting the same sentence many times until he
+reached the form which suited his finical taste. This was Stevenson's
+method, and it leaves much of his work with the smell of the lamp upon
+it. Lamb apparently wrote for the mere pleasure of putting his
+thoughts in form, just as he talked when his stammering tongue had
+been eased with a little good old wine.
+
+It is idle to expect another Lamb in our strenuous modern life, so we
+should make the most of this quaint Englishman of the early part of
+the last century, who seemed to bring over into an artificial age all
+the dewy freshness of fancy of the old Elizabethan worthies. Can
+anything be more perfect in its pathos than his essay on "Dream
+Children," the tender fancy of a bachelor whom hard fate robbed of the
+domestic joys that would have made life beautiful for him? Can
+anything be more full of fun than his "Dissertation on Roast Pig," or
+his "Mrs. Battle's Opinion on Whist"? His style fitted his thought
+like a glove; about it is the aroma of an earlier age when men and
+women opened their hearts like children. Lamb lays a spell upon us
+such as no other writer can work; he plays upon the strings of our
+hearts, now surprising us into wholesome laughter, now melting us to
+tears. You may know his essays by heart, but you can't define their
+elusive charm.
+
+Lamb had one of the saddest of lives, yet he remained sweet and
+wholesome through trials that would have embittered a nature less fine
+and noble. He came of poor people and he and his sister Mary inherited
+from their mother a strain of mental unsoundness. Lamb spent seven
+years in Christ's Hospital as a "Blue Coat" boy, and the chief result,
+aside from the foundations of a good classical scholarship, was a
+friendship for Coleridge which endured through life. From this school
+he was forced to go into a clerkship in the South Sea house, but after
+three years he secured a desk in the East India house, where he
+remained for thirty years.
+
+Four years later his first great sorrow fell upon Lamb. His sister
+Mary suddenly developed insanity, attacked a maid servant, and when
+the mother interfered the insane girl fatally wounded her with a
+knife. In this crisis Lamb showed the fineness of his nature. Instead
+of permitting poor Mary to be consigned to a public insane asylum, he
+gave bonds that he would care for her, and he did care for her during
+the remainder of her life. Although in love with a girl, he resolutely
+put aside all thoughts of marriage and domestic happiness and devoted
+himself to his unfortunate sister, who in her lucid periods repaid his
+devotion with the tenderest affection.
+
+Lamb's letters to Coleridge in those trying days are among the most
+pathetic in the language. To Coleridge he turned for stimulus in his
+reading and study, and he never failed to get help and comfort from
+this great, ill-balanced man of genius. Later he began a
+correspondence with Southey, in which he betrayed much humor and great
+fancy. In his leisure he saturated his mind with the Elizabethan poets
+and dramatists; practically he lived in the sixteenth century, for his
+only real life was a student's dream life. He contributed to the
+London newspapers, but his first published work to score any success
+was his _Tales From Shakespeare_, in which his sister aided him. Then
+followed _Poets Contemporary With Shakespeare_, selections with
+critical comment, which at once gave Lamb rank among the best critics
+of his time. He wrote, when the mood seized him, recollections of his
+youth, essays and criticisms which he afterward issued in two volumes.
+
+Twenty-five essays that he contributed to the LONDON MAGAZINE over the
+signature of Elia were reprinted in a book, the _Essays of Elia_, and
+established Lamb's reputation as one of the great masters of English.
+Another volume of _Essays of Elia_ was published in 1833. In 1834 Lamb
+sorrowed over the death of Coleridge, and in November of the same year
+death came to him. Of all English critics Carlyle is the only one who
+had hard words for Lamb, and the Sage of Chelsea probably wrote his
+scornful comment because of some playful jest of Elia.
+
+Charles Lamb's taste was for the writers of the Elizabethan age, and
+even in his time he found that this taste had become old-fashioned. He
+complained, when only twenty-one years old, in a letter to Coleridge,
+that all his friends "read nothing but reviews and new books." His
+letters, like his essays, reflect the reading of little-known books;
+they show abundant traces of his loiterings in the byways of
+literature.
+
+Here there is space only to dwell on some of the best of the _Essays
+of Elia_. In these we find the most pathetic deal with the sufferings
+of children. Lamb himself had known loneliness and suffering and lack
+of appreciation when a boy in the great Blue Coat School. Far more
+vividly than Dickens he brings before us his neglected childhood and
+all that it represented in lonely helplessness. Then he deals with
+later things, with his love of old books, his passion for the play,
+his delight in London and its various aspects, his joy in all strange
+characters like the old benchers of the Inner Temple.
+
+  [Illustration: MARY AND CHARLES LAMB FROM THE PAINTING BY F.S.
+  CARY MADE IN 1834]
+
+The essay opens with that alluring picture of the South Sea house, and
+is followed by the reminiscences of Christ's Hospital, where Lamb
+was a schoolboy for seven years. These show one side of Lamb's
+nature--the quaintly reminiscent. Another side is revealed in "Mrs.
+Battle's Opinions on Whist," with its delicate irony and its playful
+humor, while still another phase is seen in the exquisite phantasy of
+"Dream Children," with its tender pathos and its revelation of a heart
+that never knew the joys of domestic love and care. Yet close after
+this beautiful reverie comes "A Dissertation On Roast Pig," in which
+Lamb develops the theory that the Chinese first discovered the virtues
+of roast suckling pig after a fire which destroyed the house of Ho-ti,
+and that with the fatuousness of the race they regularly burned down
+their houses to enjoy this succulent delicacy.
+
+_The Last Essays of Elia_, a second series which Lamb brought out with
+a curious preface "by a friend of the late Elia," do not differ from
+the earlier series, save that they are shorter and are more devoted to
+literary themes. Perfect in its pathos is "The Superannuated Man,"
+while "The Child Angel" is a dream which appeals to the reader more
+than any of the splendid dreams that De Quincey immortalized in his
+florid prose. Lamb in these essays gives some wise counsel on books
+and reading, urging with a whimsical earnestness the claims of the
+good old books which had been his comfort in many dark hours. It is in
+such confidences that we come very close to this man, so richly
+endowed with all endearing qualities that the world will never forget
+Elia and his exquisite essays.
+
+
+
+
+DICKENS THE FOREMOST OF NOVELISTS
+
+    MORE WIDELY READ THAN ANY OTHER STORY TELLER--THE GREATEST OF
+    THE MODERN HUMORISTS APPEALS TO THE READERS OF ALL AGES AND
+    CLASSES.
+
+
+Charles Dickens is the greatest English novelist since Scott, and he
+and Scott, to my mind, are the greatest English writers after
+Shakespeare. Many will dissent from this, but my reason for giving him
+this foremost place among the modern writers is the range, the
+variety, the dramatic power, the humor and the pathos of his work. He
+was a great caricaturist rather than a great artist, but he was
+supreme in his class, and his grotesque characters have enough in them
+of human nature to make them accepted as real people.
+
+To him belongs the first place among novelists, after Scott, because
+of his splendid creative imagination, which has peopled the world of
+fiction with scores of fine characters. His genial humor which has
+brightened life for so many thousands of readers; his tender pathos
+which brings tears to the eyes of those who seldom weep over imaginary
+or even real grief or pain; his rollicking gayety which makes one
+enjoy good food and good drink in his tales almost as much as if one
+really shared in those feasts he was so fond of describing; his keen
+sympathy with the poor and the suffering; his flaming anger against
+injustice and cruelty that resulted in so many great public reforms;
+his descriptive power that makes the reader actually see everything
+that he depicts--all these traits of Dickens' genius go to make him
+the unquestioned leader of our modern story tellers. Without his humor
+and his pathos he would still stand far above all others of his day;
+with these qualities, which make every story he ever wrote throb with
+genuine human feeling, he stands in a class by himself.
+
+Many literary critics have spent much labor in comparing Dickens with
+Thackeray, but there seems to me no basis for such comparison. One was
+a great caricaturist who wrote for the common people and brought tears
+or laughter at will from the kitchen maid as freely as from the
+great lady; from the little child with no knowledge of the world as
+readily as from the mature reader who has known wrong, sorrow and
+suffering. The other was the supreme literary artist of modern times,
+a gentleman by instinct and training, who wrote for a limited class of
+readers, and who could not, because of nature and temperament, touch
+at will the springs of laughter and tears as Dickens did. Dickens has
+created a score of characters that are household words to one that
+Thackeray has given us.
+
+  [Illustration: CHARLES DICKENS AT THE AGE OF TWENTY-SEVEN--FROM
+  THE PORTRAIT BY DANIEL MACLISE, R.A.]
+
+Both were men of the rarest genius, English to the core, but each
+expressed his genius in his own way, and the way of Dickens touched a
+thousand hearts where Thackeray touched but one. Personally, Thackeray
+appeals to me far more than Dickens does, but it is foolish to permit
+one's own fancies to blind or warp his critical judgments. Hence I set
+Dickens at the head of modern novelists and give him an equal place
+with Scott as the greatest English writer since Shakespeare.
+
+Take it all in all, Dickens had a successful and a happy life. He was
+born in 1812 and died in 1870. His boyhood was hard because of his
+father's thriftlessness, and it always rankled in his memory that at
+nine years of age he was placed at work pasting labels on boxes of
+shoe blacking. But he had many chances in childhood and youth for
+reading and study, and his keen mind took advantage of all these. He
+was a natural mimic, and it was mere blind chance that kept him from
+the stage and made him a great novelist. He drifted into newspaper
+work as a shorthand reporter, wrote the stories that are known as
+_Sketches by Boz_, and in this way came to be engaged to write the
+_Pickwick Papers_, to serve as a story to accompany drawings by
+Seymour, a popular artist. But Dickens from the outset planned the
+story and Seymour lived only to illustrate the first number.
+
+The tale caught the fancy of the public, and Dickens developed
+Pickwick, the Wellers and other characters in a most amusing fashion.
+Great success marked the appearance of the _Pickwick Papers_ in book
+form, and the public appreciation gave Dickens confidence and
+stimulus. Soon appeared _Oliver Twist_, _Nicholas Nickleby_, _Old
+Curiosity Shop_ and the long line of familiar stories that ended with
+_The Mystery of Edwin Drood_, left unfinished by the master's hand.
+
+All these novels were originally published in monthly numbers. In
+these days, when so many new novels come from the press every month,
+it is difficult to appreciate the eagerness with which one of these
+monthly parts of Dickens' stories was awaited in England as well as in
+this country. My father used to tell of the way these numbers of
+Dickens' novels were seized upon in New England when he was a young
+man and were worn out in passing from hand to hand. Dickens first
+developed the Christmas story and made it a real addition to the joy
+of the holiday season. His _Christmas Carol_ and _The Cricket on the
+Hearth_ still stand as the best of these tales that paint the simple
+joys of the greatest of English Holidays. Dickens was also a great
+editor, and in HOUSEHOLD WORDS and ALL THE YEAR ROUND he found a means
+of giving pleasure to hosts of readers as well as a vehicle for the
+monthly publication of his novels.
+
+Dickens was the first to make a great fortune by giving public
+readings from his own works. His rare dramatic ability made him an
+ideal interpreter of his own work, and those who were fortunate enough
+to hear him on his two trips to this country speak always of the
+light which these readings cast on his principal characters and of the
+pleasure that the audience showed in the novelist's remarkable powers
+as a mimic and an elocutionist.
+
+Most of the great English writers have labored until forty or over
+before fame came to them. Of such were Scott, Thackeray, Carlyle and
+George Eliot. But Dickens had an international fame at twenty-four,
+and he was a household word wherever English was spoken by the time he
+was thirty. From that day to the day of his death, fame, popularity,
+wealth, troops of friends, were his portion, and with these were
+joined unusual capacity for work and unusual delight in the exercise
+of his great creative powers.
+
+In taking up Dickens' novels it must always be borne in mind that you
+will find many digressions, many bits of affectation, some mawkish
+pathos. But these defects do not seriously injure the stories. You
+cannot afford to leave _Pickwick Papers_ unread, because this novel
+contains more spontaneous humor than any other of Dickens' work, and
+it is also quoted most frequently. The boy or girl who cannot follow
+with relish the amusing incidents in this book is not normal. Older
+readers will get more from the book, but it is doubtful whether they
+will enjoy its rollicking fun with so keen a zest. Mr. Pickwick, Sam
+Weller and his father, Bob Sawyer and the others, how firmly they are
+fixed in the mind! What real flesh and blood creatures they are,
+despite their creator's exaggeration of special traits and
+peculiarities!
+
+  [Illustration: ORIGINAL PICKWICK COVER ISSUED IN 1837 WITH
+  DICKENS' AUTOGRAPH--MOST OF DICKENS' NOVELS WERE ISSUED IN
+  SHILLING INSTALLMENTS BEFORE BEING PUBLISHED IN THE COMPLETE
+  VOLUME]
+
+After the _Pickwick Papers_ the choice of the most characteristic of
+Dickens' novels is difficult, but my favorites have always been _David
+Copperfield_ and _A Tale of Two Cities_, the one the most spontaneous,
+the freshest in fancy, the most deeply pathetic of all Dickens' work;
+the other absolutely unlike anything he ever wrote, but great in its
+intense descriptive passages, which make the horrors of the French
+Revolution more real than Carlyle's famous history, and in the sublime
+self-sacrifice of Sidney Carton, which Henry Miller, in "The Only
+Way," has impressed on thousands of tearful playgoers. That _David
+Copperfield_ is not autobiographical we have the positive assertion of
+Charles Dickens the younger, yet at the same time every lover of this
+book feels that the boyhood of David reproduces memories of the
+novelist's childhood and youth, and that from real people and real
+scenes are drawn the humble home and the loyal hearts of the
+Peggottys, the great self-sacrifice of Ham, the woes of Little Emily
+and the tragedy of Steerforth's fate. One misses much who does not
+follow the chief actors in this great story, the masterpiece of
+Dickens.
+
+Other fine novels, if you have time for them, are _Nicholas Nickleby_,
+which broke up the unspeakably cruel boarding schools for boys in
+Yorkshire, in one of which poor Smike was done to death; or _Our
+Mutual Friend_ which Dickens attacked the English poor laws; or
+_Dombey and Son_, that paints the pathos of the child of a rich man
+dying for the love which his father was too selfish to give him; or
+_Bleak House_, in which the terrible sufferings wrought by the law's
+delay in the Court of Chancery are drawn with so much pathos that the
+book served as a valuable aid in removing a great public wrong, while
+the satire on foreign missions served to draw the English nation's
+attention to the wretched heathen at home in the East Side of London,
+of whom Poor Jo was a pitiable specimen. In other novels other good
+purposes were also served.
+
+But several pages could be filled with a mere enumeration of Dickens'
+stories and their salient features. You cannot go wrong in taking up
+any of his novels or his short stories, and when you have finished
+with them you will have the satisfaction of having added to your
+possessions a number of the real people of fiction, whom it is far
+better to know than the best characters of contemporary fiction,
+because these will be forgotten in a twelvemonth, if not before. The
+hours that you spend with Dickens will be profitable as well as
+pleasant, for they will leave the memory of a great-hearted man who
+labored through his books to make the world better and happier.
+
+
+
+
+THACKERAY GREATEST MASTER OF FICTION
+
+    THE MOST ACCOMPLISHED WRITER OF HIS CENTURY--TENDER PATHOS
+    UNDER AN AFFECTATION OF CYNICISM AND GREAT ART IN STYLE AND
+    CHARACTERS.
+
+
+Of all modern English authors, Thackeray is my favorite. Humor,
+pathos, satire, ripe culture, knowledge of the world and of the human
+heart, instinctive good taste and a style equaled by none of his
+fellows in its clearness, ease, flexibility and winning charm--these
+are some of the traits that make the author of _Vanity Fair_ and
+_Esmond_ incomparably the first literary artist as well as the
+greatest writer of his age. Whether he would have been as fine a
+writer had he been given a happy life is a question that no one can
+answer. But to my mind it has always seemed as though the dark shadow
+that rested on his domestic life for thirty years made him
+infinitely tender to the grief and pain of others. Probably it came
+as a shock to most lovers of Thackeray to read in a news item from
+London only three or four years ago that the widow of Thackeray was
+dead, at the great age of ninety years. She had outlived her famous
+husband nearly a full half century, but of her we had heard nothing in
+all this time. When a beautiful young Irish girl she was married to
+the novelist, and she made him an ideal wife for a few years. Then her
+mind gave way, and the remainder of her long career was spent within
+the walls of a sanatorium--more lost to her loved ones than if she had
+been buried in her grave. The knowledge of her existence, which was a
+ghastly death in life, the fact that it prevented him from giving his
+three young girls a real home, as well as barred him under the English
+law from marrying again--all these things to Thackeray were an
+ever-present pain, like acid on an open wound. It was this sorrow,
+from which he could never escape that gave such exquisite tenderness
+to his pathos; and it was this sorrow, acting on one of the most
+sensitive natures, that often sharpened his satire and made it
+merciless when directed against the shams and hypocrisies of life.
+
+  [Illustration: WILLIAM MAKEPEACE THACKERAY FROM A DRAWING BY
+  SAMUEL LAURENCE, ENGRAVED BY J.C. ARMYTAGE]
+
+Thackeray's fame rests mainly on two great books--_Vanity Fair_ and
+_Henry Esmond_. The first has been made very real to thousands of
+readers by the brilliant acting of Mrs. Fiske in Becky Sharp. The
+other is one of the finest historical novels in the language and the
+greatest exploit in bringing over into our century the style, the mode
+of thought, the very essence of a previous age. Thackeray was
+saturated with the literature of the eighteenth century, and in
+_Esmond_ he reproduced the time of Addison and Steele as perfectly as
+he made an imitation of a number of the SPECTATOR. This literary _tour
+de force_ was made the more noteworthy by the absolute lack of all
+effort on the novelist's part. The style of Queen Anne's age seemed a
+part of the man, not an assumed garment. While in the heroine of
+_Vanity Fair_ Thackeray gave the world one of the coldest and most
+selfish of women, he atoned for this by creating in _Esmond_ the
+finest gentleman in all English literature, with the single exception
+of his own Colonel Newcome.
+
+Strict injunctions Thackeray left against any regulation biography,
+and the result is that the world knows less of his life before fame
+came to him than it does of any other celebrated author of his age.
+The scanty facts show that he was born in Calcutta in 1811; that he
+was left a fortune of $100,000 by his father, who died when he was
+five years old; that, like most children of Anglo-Indians, he was sent
+to school in England; that he was prepared for college at the old
+Charter House School; that he was graduated from Trinity College,
+Cambridge, and that while in college he showed much ability as a
+writer of verse and prose, although he took no honors and gained no
+prizes. After reading law he was moved to become an artist and spent
+some time in travel on the Continent.
+
+  [Illustration: TITLE-PAGE TO "VANITY FAIR" DRAWN BY THACKERAY, WHO
+  FURNISHED THE ILLUSTRATIONS FOR MANY OF HIS EARLIER EDITIONS]
+
+But this delightful life was rudely cut short by the loss of his
+fortune and he was forced to earn his living by literature and
+journalism. Under various pseudonyms he soon gained a reputation as a
+satirist and humorist, his first success being _The Great Hoggarty
+Diamond_. Then years of work for PUNCH and other papers followed
+before he won enduring fame by _Vanity Fair_, which he styled "a novel
+without a hero."
+
+Charlotte Bronte, who gained a great reputation by _Jane Eyre_, added
+to Thackeray's vogue by dedicating to him in rarely eloquent words the
+second edition of her novel, against which preachers fulminated
+because of what they called its immoral tendencies. Then in rapid
+succession Thackeray wrote _Pendennis_, _Henry Esmond_, _The
+Newcomes_, _The Virginians_, _Lovel the Widower_ and _The Adventures
+of Philip_. All these are masterpieces of wit, satire and humor, cast
+in a perfect style that never offends the most fastidious taste, yet
+they are neglected to-day mainly because they do not furnish exciting
+incidents.
+
+Thackeray, like Dickens in his readings, made a fortune by his
+lectures, first on "The English Humorists," and later on "The Four
+Georges," and, like Dickens, he received the heartiest welcome and the
+largest money returns from this country.
+
+He died alone in his room on Christmas eve in the fine new home in
+London which he had recently made for himself and his three daughters.
+
+Thackeray was a giant physically, with a mind that worked easily, but
+he was indolent and always wrote under pressure, with the printer's
+devil waiting for his "copy." He was a thorough man of the world, yet
+full of the freshness of fancy and the tenderness of heart of a little
+child. All children were a delight to him, and he never could refrain
+from giving them extravagant tips. The ever-present grief that could
+not be forgotten by fame or success made him very tender to all
+suffering, especially the suffering of the weak and the helpless. Yet,
+like many a sensitive man, he concealed this kindness of heart under
+an affectation of cynicism, which led many unsympathetic critics to
+style him hard and ferocious in his satire.
+
+Like Dickens, Thackeray was one of the great reporters of his day,
+with an eye that took in unconsciously every detail of face, costume
+or scene and reproduced it with perfect accuracy. The reader of his
+novels is entertained by a series of pen pictures of men and women and
+scenes in high life and life below stairs that are photographic in
+their clearness and fidelity. Dickens always failed when he came to
+depict British aristocratic life; but Thackeray moved in drawing-rooms
+and brilliant assemblages with the ease of a man familiar from youth
+with good society, and hence free from all embarrassment, even in the
+presence of royalty.
+
+Thackeray's early works are written in the same perfect, easy,
+colloquial style, rich in natural literary allusions and frequently
+rhythmic with poetic feeling, which marked his latest novel. He also
+had perfect command of slang and the cockney dialect of the Londoner.
+No greater master of dialogue or narrative ever wrote than he who
+pictured the gradual degradation of Becky Sharp or the many
+self-sacrifices of Henry Esmond for the woman that he loved.
+
+Howells and other critics have censured Thackeray severely because of
+his tendency to preach, and also because he regarded his characters as
+puppets and himself as the showman who brought out their
+peculiarities. There is some ground for this criticism, if one regards
+the art of the novelist as centered wholly in realism; but such a hard
+and fast rule would condemn all old English novelists from Richardson
+to Thackeray.
+
+It ought not to disturb any reader that Defoe turns aside and gives
+reflections on the acts of his characters, for these remarks are the
+fruit of his own knowledge of the world. In the same way Thackeray
+keeps up a running comment on his men and women, and these bits of
+philosophy make his novels a storehouse of apothegms, which may be
+read again and again with great profit and pleasure. The modern novel,
+with its comparative lack of thought and feeling, its insistence
+upon the absolute effacement of the author, is seldom worth reading a
+second time. Not so with Thackeray. Every reading reveals new beauties
+of thought or style. An entire book has been made up of brief extracts
+from Thackeray's novels, and it is an ideal little volume for a pocket
+companion on walks, as Thackeray fits into any mood and always gives
+one material for thought.
+
+  [Illustration: WILLIAM MAKEPEACE THACKERAY A CARICATURE DRAWN BY
+  HIMSELF]
+
+Of all Thackeray's novels _Vanity Fair_ is the best known and most
+popular. It is a remarkable picture of a thoroughly hard, selfish
+woman whom even motherhood did not soften; but it is something more
+than the chronicle of Becky Sharp's fortunes. It is a panoramic sketch
+of many phases of London life; it is the free giving out by a great
+master of fiction of his impressions of life. Hence _Vanity Fair_
+alone is worth a hundred books filled merely with exciting adventures,
+which do not make the reader think. The problems that Thackeray
+presents in his masterpiece are those of love, duty, self-sacrifice;
+of high aims and many temptations to fall below those aspirations; of
+sordid, selfish life, and of fine, noble, generous souls who light up
+the world and make it richer by their presence.
+
+Thackeray, in _Vanity Fair_, has sixty characters, yet each is drawn
+sharply and clearly, and the whole story moves on with the ease of
+real life. Consummate art is shown in the painting of Becky's gradual
+rise to power and the great scene at the climax of her success, when
+Rawdon Crawley strikes down the Marquis of Steyne, is one of the
+finest in all fiction. Though Becky knows that this blow shatters her
+social edifice, she is still woman enough to admire her husband in the
+very act that marks the beginning of the decadence of her fortunes.
+_Vanity Fair_, read carefully a half-dozen times, is a liberal
+education in life and in the art of the novelist.
+
+Personally, I rank _Pendennis_ next to _Vanity Fair_ for the pleasure
+to be derived from it. From the time when the old Major receives the
+letter from his sister telling of young Arthur's infatuation for the
+cheap actress, Miss Fotheringay, the story carries one along in the
+leisurely way of the last century. All the people are a delight, from
+Captain Costigan to Fowker, and from the French chef, who went to the
+piano for stimulus in his culinary work, to Blanche Amory and her
+amazing French affectations. But _Pendennis_ is not popular.
+
+Nor is _Henry Esmond_ popular, although it is worthy to rank with _The
+Cloister and the Hearth_, _Adam Bede_ and _Tess of the D'Urbervilles_.
+There is little relief of humor in _Esmond_, but the story has a
+strong appeal to any sympathetic reader, and it is the one supreme
+achievement in all fiction in which the hero tells his own story.
+Thackeray's art is flawless in this tale, and it sometimes rises to
+great heights, as in the scenes following the death of Lord
+Castlewood, the exposure of the Prince's perfidy, the selfishness of
+Beatrice and the great sacrifice of Esmond.
+
+Space is lacking to take up Thackeray's other works, but it is safe to
+say if you read the three novels here hastily sketched you cannot go
+amiss among his minor works. Even his lighter sketches and his essays
+will be found full of material that is so far above the ordinary level
+that the similar work of to-day seems cheap and common. Happy is the
+boy or girl who has made Thackeray a chosen companion from childhood.
+Such a one has received unconsciously lessons in life and in culture
+that can be gained from few of the great authors of the world.
+
+
+
+
+CHARLOTTE BRONTE AND HER TWO GREAT NOVELS
+
+    "JANE EYRE" AND "VILLETTE" ARE TOUCHED WITH GENIUS--TRAGEDY OF
+    A WOMAN'S LIFE THAT RESULTED IN TWO STORIES OF PASSIONATE
+    REVOLT AGAINST FATE.
+
+
+Charlotte Bronte is always linked in my memory with Thackeray because
+of her visit to the author of _Vanity Fair_ and its humorous and
+pathetic features. She went to London from her lonely Yorkshire home,
+and the great world, with its many selfish and unlovely features, made
+a painful impression on her. Even Thackeray, her idol, was found to
+have feet of clay. But this "little Puritan," as the great man called
+her, was endowed with the divine genius which was forced to seek
+expression in fiction, and nowhere in all literature will one find an
+author who shows more completely the compelling force of a powerful
+creative imagination than this little, frail, self-educated woman,
+who had none of the advantages of her fellow writers, but who
+surpassed them all in a certain fierce, Celtic spirit which forces the
+reader to follow its bidding.
+
+  [Illustration: CHARLOTTE BRONTE FROM THE EXQUISITELY SYMPATHETIC
+  CRAYON PORTRAIT BY GEORGE RICHMOND, R.A. NOW IN THE NATIONAL
+  PORTRAIT GALLERY OF LONDON]
+
+He who would get a full realization of the importance of this Celtic
+element in English literature cannot afford to neglect _Jane Eyre_ and
+_Villette_, the best of Charlotte Bronte's works. Old-fashioned these
+romances are in many ways, oversentimental, in parts poorly
+constructed, but in all English fiction there is nothing to surpass
+the opening chapters of _Jane Eyre_ for vividness and pathos, and few
+things to equal the greater part of _Villette_, the tragedy of an
+English woman's life in a Brussels boarding school.
+
+Who can explain the mystery of the flowering of a great literary style
+among the bleak and desolate moors of Yorkshire? Who can tell why
+among three daughters of an Irish curate of mediocre ability but
+tremendously passionate nature one should have developed an abnormal
+imagination that in _Wuthering Heights_ is as powerful as Poe's at his
+best, and another should have matured into the ablest woman novelist
+of her day and her generation? These are freaks of heredity which
+science utterly fails to explain.
+
+Charlotte Bronte was born in 1816 and died in 1855. She was one of six
+children who led a curiously forlorn life in the old Haworth parsonage
+in the midst of the desolate Yorkshire moors. The outlook on one side
+was upon a gloomy churchyard; on the other three sides the eye ranged
+to the horizon over rolling, dreary moorland that looked like a
+heaving ocean under a leaden sky. One brother these five sisters had,
+a brilliant but superficial boy, with no stable character, who became
+a drunkard and died after lingering on for years, a source of intense
+shame to his family. The girls were left motherless at an early age.
+Four were sent to a boarding school for clergymen's daughters, but two
+died from exposure and lack of nutritious food, and the others,
+starved mentally and physically, returned to their home. This was the
+school that Charlotte held up to infamy in _Jane Eyre_.
+
+The three sisters who were left, in the order of their ages, were
+Emily, Charlotte and Anne. They, with their brother, lived in a kind
+of dream world. Charlotte was the natural story-teller, and she wove
+endless romances in which figured the great men of history who were
+her heroes. She also told over and over many weird Yorkshire legends.
+These children devoured every bit of printed matter that came to the
+parsonage, and they were as thoroughly informed on all political
+questions as the average member of Parliament.
+
+At an age when normal girls were playing with their dolls these
+precocious children were writing poems and stories. Their father
+developed the ways of a recluse and never took his meals with his
+children. Living in this dream world of their own, these children
+could not understand normal girls. They were terribly unhappy at
+school and came near to death of homesickness. Finally Emily and
+Charlotte found a congenial school and in a few years they both made
+great strides in education. Charlotte tried teaching and also the work
+of governess, but finally both decided to open a girls' school of
+their own. To prepare themselves in French, Emily and Charlotte went
+to a boarding school in Brussels.
+
+This was the turning point in Charlotte's life. Intensely ambitious,
+she worked like a galley slave and soon mastered French so that she
+wrote it with ease and vigor. There is no question that she had a
+girlish love for her teacher, as passionate as it was brief, and that
+her whole outlook was broadened by this experience of a world so
+unlike the only one that she had known.
+
+The story of Charlotte's life is told beautifully by Mrs. Gaskell, the
+well-known author of _Cranford_. It is one of the finest biographies
+in the language, and also one of the most stimulating. The reader who
+follows Charlotte's stormy youth is made ashamed of his own lack of
+application when he reads of the girl's tireless work in self-culture
+in the face of much bodily weakness and great unhappiness.
+
+Read of her experiences in Brussels and you will get some idea of the
+tremendous vitality of this frail girl with the luminous eyes and the
+fiery spirit that no labor could tire. Mrs. Gaskell has drawn largely
+upon Charlotte's letters, which are as vivid and full of character as
+any of her fiction. Genius flashes from them; one feels drawn very
+close to this woman who raged against her physical infirmities, but
+overcame them bravely. When the spirit moved her she poured out her
+soul to her friend in words that grip the heart after all these
+years.
+
+The boarding-school project fell through, and for some years the three
+sisters lived at home and devoted themselves to literary work. The
+first fruits of their pen was a small volume of poems by Currer, Ellis
+and Acton Bell, the pseudonyms of Charlotte, Emily and Anne. This book
+fell practically stillborn from the press, but the sisters were
+undaunted and each began a novel. Without experience of life it is not
+strange that these stories lacked merit.
+
+Charlotte drew her novel from her Brussels experience and called it
+_The Professor_. Though it was far the best, it was rejected, but
+Emily's _Wuthering Heights_ and Anne's _Agnes Gray_ were published.
+Emily's novel revealed a powerful but ill-regulated imagination, with
+scenes of splendid imaginative force, yet morbid and unreal as an
+opium dream. It received some good notices, but Anne's was mediocre
+and fell flat. Nothing daunted by the refusal of the publishers to
+bring out her first book, Charlotte began _Jane Eyre_, largely
+autobiographical in the early chapters, and this book was promptly
+accepted and published in August, 1847.
+
+_Jane Eyre_ was a great success from the day it came from the press.
+It was an epoch-making novel because it dragged into the fierce light
+of publicity many questions which the English public of that day had
+decided to leave out of print. To us of today it contains nothing
+unusual, for modern women writers have gone far beyond Charlotte
+Bronte in their demands for freedom from many strict social
+conventions. What makes the book valuable is the glimpse which it
+gives of the wild revolt of a passionate nature against the coldness,
+the hypocrisy and the many shams of the social life of England in the
+middle of the last century.
+
+This novel is also noteworthy for its intense picture of the
+sufferings of a lonely, unappreciated girl, who felt in herself the
+stirrings of genius and who hungered and thirsted for appreciation.
+The terrible pictures of Lowood, the fiction name of the Cowan's
+Bridge School, where her two sisters contracted their fatal illness,
+are stamped upon the brain of every reader, as are those of the
+humiliations of the governess. The style of this book was a revelation
+in that period of formal writing. Like Stevenson, Charlotte Bronte
+wrought with words as a great artist works with his colors, and many
+of her descriptions in _Jane Eyre_ have never been surpassed. Hers was
+that brooding Celtic imagination which, when given full play, takes
+the reader by the hand and shows him the heights and depths of human
+love and suffering.
+
+  [Illustration: MRS. GASKELL FROM THE PORTRAIT BY GEORGE RICHMOND,
+  R.A. MRS. GASKELL'S "LIFE OF BRONTE" IS ONE OF THE FINEST
+  BIOGRAPHIES IN THE LANGUAGE]
+
+The success of _Jane Eyre_ opened wide the doors of London to the
+unknown author. For a time her identity was hidden, but when it was
+revealed she was induced to go up to London and see the great world.
+Thackeray was especially kind to her, but his efforts to entertain
+this Yorkshire recluse were dismal failures. Nothing is more amusing
+than his daughter's story of the great novelist, slipping out of the
+house one night, when he had asked several celebrities to meet
+Charlotte Bronte. The party was a terrible fiasco, and so he escaped,
+putting his finger to his lips as he opened the front door to warn his
+daughter that she must not reveal his flight. Charlotte's
+correspondence with her publisher is also full of pathos. It shows how
+keenly she felt her aloofness from the world, which she could not
+overcome.
+
+The story of _Villette_ is the real story of Charlotte's experiences
+in a Brussels boarding school, where she first tasted the delights of
+literary study and her genius first found adequate expression. The
+original draft of this novel was called _The Professor_. Charlotte
+knew that it contained good material. So, after the death of her
+sisters, she took up the subject, and with all her mature power
+produced _Villette_--one of those novels struck off at a white heat,
+like George Sand's _Indiana_ or Balzac's _Seraphita_. The story is
+largely autobiographical, but the episodes of Charlotte's life are
+touched with romance when they appear as the experiences of Lucy Snow,
+the forlorn English girl in the Continental school, among people of
+alien natures and strange speech.
+
+In _Shirley_, Charlotte Bronte revealed much genuine humor in the
+malicious portraits of the three curates, who were drawn from real
+life. In fact, throughout her books one will find most of the
+characters sketched from real people. Hence, if one reads the story of
+her life he can trace her from her return from her Continental life
+down through the cruel years almost to the end. Back she came to her
+gloomy home from Brussels only to watch in succession the lingering
+death of her brother and her two sisters. Think of these three
+sisters, two marked for sure and early death, laboring at literary
+work every day with the passion and intensity that come to few men.
+Think of Emily, the eldest, with fierce pride refusing help to climb
+the steep stairway of the parsonage home when her strength was almost
+spent and her racking cough struck cold on the hearts of her sisters.
+And think of Charlotte in her terrible grief turning to fiction as the
+only resource from unbearable woe and loneliness. It is one of the
+great tragedies of literature, but out of it came the flowering of a
+brilliant genius.
+
+
+
+
+GEORGE ELIOT AND HER TWO GREAT NOVELS
+
+    "ADAM BEDE" AND "THE MILL ON THE FLOSS"--HER EARLY STORIES ARE
+    RICH IN CHARACTER SKETCHES, WITH MUCH PATHOS AND HUMOR.
+
+
+George Eliot is a novelist in a class by herself. She never impressed
+me as a natural story-teller, save when she lived over again that
+happy girlhood which served to relieve the sadness of her mature life.
+In parts of _Adam Bede_ and throughout _The Mill on the Floss_ she
+seems to tell her stories as though she really enjoyed the work. All
+the scenes of her beautiful girlhood in the pleasant Warwickshire
+country, when she drove through the pleasant sweet-scented lanes and
+enjoyed the lovely views that she has made immortal in her
+books--these she dwelt upon, and with the touch of poetry that
+redeemed the austerity of her nature she makes them live again,
+even for us in an alien land. So, too, the English rustics live for
+us in her pages with the same deathless force as the villagers in
+Hardy's novels of Wessex life. And George Eliot and Thomas Hardy are
+the two English writers who have made these villagers, with their
+peculiar dialect and their insular prejudices, serve the purpose of
+the Greek chorus in warning the reader of the fate that hangs over
+their characters.
+
+  [Illustration: GEORGE ELIOT IN 1864 FROM THE ETCHING BY MR. PAUL
+  RAJON--DRAWN BY MR. FREDERICK BURTON--FROM THE FRONTISPIECE TO THE
+  FIRST EDITION OF "GEORGE ELIOT'S LIFE," BY HER HUSBAND, J.W.
+  CROSS]
+
+Of all English novelists, George Eliot was probably the best equipped
+in minute and accurate scholarship. Trained as few college graduates
+are trained, she was impelled for several years to take up the study
+of German metaphysics. Her mind, like her face, was masculine in its
+strength, and though she suffered in her youth from persistent
+ill-health, she conquered this in her maturity and wrought with
+passionate ardor at all her literary tasks. So keen was her conscience
+that she often defeated her own ends by undue labor, as in the
+preparation for _Romola_, whose historical background swamps the
+story.
+
+Above all she was a preacher of a stern morality. She laid down the
+moral law that selfishness, like sin, corrodes the best nature, and
+that the only happiness lies in absolute forgetfulness of self and in
+working to make others happy. Thus all her books are full of little
+sermons on life, preached with so much force that they cannot fail to
+make a profound impression even upon the careless reader.
+
+George Eliot impresses one as a very sad woman, with an eager desire
+to recapture the lost religious faith of her happy, unquestioning
+childhood and a still more passionate desire to believe in that
+immortality which her cold agnostic creed rejected as illogical. It
+was pitiful, this strong-minded woman reaching out for the things that
+less-endowed women accept without question. It was even more pitiful
+to see her, with her keen moral sense, violate all the conventions of
+English law and society in order to take up life with the man who
+stimulated her mind and actually made her one of the greatest of
+English novelists.
+
+Left alone, it is very doubtful whether George Eliot ever would have
+found herself, ever would have developed that mine of reminiscence
+which produced those perfect early stories of English country life. To
+George Henry Lewes, the man for whose love and companionship she
+incurred social ostracism, readers in all English-speaking countries
+owe a great debt of gratitude, for it was his wise counsel and his
+constant stimulus and encouragement which resulted in making George
+Eliot a writer of fine novels instead of an essayist on ethical and
+religious subjects. It detracts little from this debt that Lewes was
+also responsible for the stimulus of George Eliot's bent toward
+philosophical speculation and to that cold if clear scientific
+thought, which spoiled parts of _Middlemarch_ and ruined _Daniel
+Deronda_.
+
+Marian Evans was born at Ashbury farm in Warwickshire in 1819 and died
+in 1880. Her father was the agent for a large estate, and the happiest
+hours of her girlhood were spent in driving about the country with
+him. Those keen eyes which saw so deeply into human nature were early
+trained to observe all the traits of the English rustic, and those
+childish impressions gave vitality to her humorous characters. Before
+she was ten years old Marian had read Scott and Lamb, as well as
+_Pilgrim's Progress_ and _Rasselas_. When thirteen years old she
+revealed unusual musical gifts. She had the misfortune at seventeen to
+lose her mother, and for years after she managed her father's house.
+
+Evidently the old farmer, whom his daughter has sketched with loving
+hand in _Adam Bede_, took great pride in the mental superiority of his
+daughter, for he hired tutors for her in Latin, Greek, Italian and
+German. All four languages she mastered as few college men master
+them. She read everything, both old and new, and her intimacy with the
+wife of Charles Bray of Coventry led her to refuse to go to church.
+This free thinking angered her father and caused him to demand that
+she leave his house. After three weeks her love and her keen sense of
+duty led her to conform to her father's wishes and to resume the
+church-going, which in his eyes was a part of life that could not be
+dropped.
+
+But that early departure from the established religion carried her
+into the field of German skepticism. She translated Strauss' _Life of
+Jesus_. For three years her studies were interrupted by the serious
+illness of her father. When he died she went to Geneva and remained on
+the Continent a year. Then she came home and took up her residence
+with the Brays. The development of her mind was very rapid. She served
+for some time as editor of the WESTMINSTER REVIEW. She then formed
+a strong friendship with Herbert Spencer, and through Spencer she met
+George Henry Lewes, who made a special study of Goethe and the German
+philosophers, and who was the editor of the LEADER, the organ of the
+Free Thinkers.
+
+  [Illustration: GEORGE ELIOT'S BIRTHPLACE, SOUTH FARM, ARBURY,
+  NUNEATON]
+
+Lewes and Marian Evans soon became all the world to each other, but
+Lewes had an insane wife, and the foolish law of England forbade him
+to get a divorce or to marry again. So the two decided to live
+together and to be man and wife in everything except the sanction of
+the law. The result was disastrous for a time to the woman. There is
+no question that the social isolation that resulted hurt her deeply.
+Her close friends like Spencer remained loyal, and her husband was
+always the devoted lover as well as the ideal companion.
+
+Two years after this new connection Lewes induced his wife to try
+fiction. Her first story was _The Sad Adventures of the Rev. Amos
+Barton_ which was followed by _Janet's Repentance_. These stories
+appeared under the pen name of George Eliot, which she never
+relinquished. Gathered into book form under the title _Scenes From
+Clerical Life_, these stories in a minor key made a profound
+impression on Charles Dickens, who divined they were the work of a
+woman of unusual gifts.
+
+The praise of Lewes and the appreciation of Dickens and other experts
+gave great stimulus to her mind, and she produced _Adam Bede_, perhaps
+her best work, which had a great success. In the following year came
+_The Mill on the Floss_, an even greater success. Then in quick
+succession came the other early novels, _Silas Marner_, _Romola_ and
+_Felix Holt_. A break of six years follows, and then came
+_Middlemarch_ and _Daniel Deronda_.
+
+Lewes died in 1878, and two years later this woman, almost exhausted
+by her tremendous literary labors, married J.W. Cross, an old friend,
+but, like Charlotte Bronte, she had only short happiness, for she died
+in the following year. The nations praised her, but she never
+recovered from the shock of Lewes' death.
+
+Of George Eliot's work the things that impress one most are her fine
+descriptions of natural scenes, her keen analyses of character and her
+many little moral sermons on life and conduct. With an abnormal
+conscience and a keen sense of duty, life proved very hard for her.
+This is reflected in the somberness of her stories and in the dread
+atmosphere of fate that hangs over her characters. But over against
+this must be placed her joy in depicting the rustic character and
+humor and her delight in reproducing the scenes of her childhood in
+one of the most beautiful counties of England.
+
+Herbert Spencer, who was long associated with George Eliot, and for a
+time contemplated the possibility of a union with that remarkable
+woman, pays her a high tribute in _The Study of Sociology_. After
+explaining the origin in women of the ability to distinguish quickly
+the passing feelings of those around, he says: "Ordinarily, this
+feminine faculty, showing itself in an aptitude for guessing the state
+of mind through the external signs, ends simply in intuitions formed
+without assignable reasons; but when, as happens in rare cases, there
+is joined with it skill in psychological analysis, there results in
+extremely remarkable ability to interpret the mental states of others.
+Of this ability we have a living example (George Eliot) never hitherto
+paralleled among women, and in but few, if any, cases exceeded among
+men."
+
+Perhaps the reader who does not know George Eliot would do well to
+begin with _The Mill on the Floss_, her finest work, which is full of
+humor, lovely pictures of English rural life and an analysis of soul
+in Maggie Tolliver that has never been surpassed. Yet the end is cruel
+and unnatural, as hard and as unsatisfying as the author's own
+religious creed. Next read _Adam Bede_, one of the saddest books in
+all literature, with comic relief in Mrs. Poyser, one of the most
+humorous characters in English fiction.
+
+George Eliot drew Dinah Morris from her favorite aunt, who was a
+Methodist exhorter, and the power and spontaneity of this novel came
+from the sharpness and clearness of her early impressions, joined to
+her love of living over again her girlhood days, before doubt had
+clouded her sky. Also read _Silas Marner_ with its perfect picture of
+Raveloe, "an English village where many of the old echoes lingered,
+undrowned by new voices." These descriptions are instinct with poetry,
+and they affect one like Wordsworth's best poems or like Tennyson's
+vignettes of rural life. The pale weaver of Raveloe will always remain
+as one of the great characters in English fiction.
+
+Of George Eliot's more elaborate work it is impossible to speak in
+entire praise. If you have the leisure, and these books I have named
+please you, then by all means read _Romola_, which is a remarkable
+study of the degeneracy of a young Greek and of the noble strivings of
+a great-hearted woman. The pictures of Florence in the time of
+Savonarola are splendid, but they smell of the lamp. _Middlemarch_ is
+also worth careful study for its fine analysis of character and
+motive. In all George Eliot's books her characters develop before our
+eyes, and this is especially true in this elaborate study of the
+pathos and the tragedy of human life.
+
+George Eliot wrote little poetry, but one piece may be commended to
+careful attention, "The Choir Invisible." It sums up with impassioned
+force her ethical creed, which she put in these fine lines:
+
+    Oh, may I join the choir invisible
+    Of those immortal dead who live again
+    In minds made better by their presence: live
+    In pulses stirred to generosity,
+    In deeds of daring rectitude, in scorn
+    For miserable aims that end in self.
+           *       *       *       *       *
+                       This is life to come
+    Which martyred men have made more glorious
+    For us who strive to follow. May I reach
+    That purest heaven, be to other souls
+    The cup of strength in some great agony,
+    Enkindle generous ardor, feed pure love.
+    Beget the smiles that have no cruelty--
+    Be the sweet presence of a good diffused,
+    And in diffusion ever more intense.
+    So shall I join the choir invisible,
+    Whose music is the gladness of the world.
+
+This was the creed of George Eliot, which she preached in her books
+and which she followed in her life. This was the only hope of
+immortality that she cherished--to "live again" in minds that she
+stimulated.
+
+
+
+
+RUSKIN THE APOSTLE OF ART
+
+    HIS WORK AS ART CRITIC AND SOCIAL REFORMER--BEST BOOKS ARE
+    "MODERN PAINTERS," "THE SEVEN LAMPS" AND "THE STONES OF
+    VENICE."
+
+
+John Ruskin deserves a place among the great English writers of the
+last century, not only because of his superb style and the amount of
+his work, but because he was the first to encourage the study of art
+and nature among the people. So enormous have been the strides made in
+the last twenty years in popular knowledge of art and architecture,
+and so great the growth of interest in the beauties of nature that it
+is difficult to appreciate that a little over a half century ago, when
+Ruskin first came into prominence as a writer, the English public was
+densely ignorant of art, and was equally ignorant of the world of
+pleasure to be derived from beautiful scenery.
+
+It was Ruskin's great service to the world that he opened the eyes of
+the public to the glories of the art of all countries, and that he
+also revealed the wonders of architecture. Many critics have laid bare
+his infirmities as a critic, but a man of colder blood and less
+emotional nature would never have reached the large public to which
+Ruskin appealed. Like a great orator he was swayed by the passion of
+convincing his audience, and the very extravagance of his language and
+the ardor of his nature served to make a profound impression upon
+readers who are not usually affected by such appeals as his.
+
+Ruskin was one of the most impractical men that ever lived, but in the
+exuberance of his nature and in his rare unselfishness he started a
+dozen social reforms in England, any one of which should have given
+fame to its founder. He gave away a great fortune in gifts to the
+public and in private generosity. He founded museums, established
+scholarships, tried to put into practical working order his dream of a
+New Life founded on the union of manual labor and high intellectual
+aims, labored to induce the public to read the good old books that
+help one to make life worth living.
+
+  [Illustration: JOHN RUSKIN FROM A PHOTOGRAPH TAKEN ON JULY 20,
+  1882, BY MESSRS. ELLIOTT & FRY]
+
+That much of his good work was neutralized by his lack of common sense
+detracts nothing from the world's debt to Ruskin. The simple truth is
+that he was a reformer as well as a great writer, and the very fervor
+of his religious and social beliefs, his contempt of mere money
+getting, his hatred of falsehood, his boundless generosity and his
+childlike simplicity of mind--all these traits at which the world
+laughed lifted Ruskin above the other men of genius of his time and
+placed him among the world's great reformers.
+
+Among this small body of men whose spiritual force continues to live in
+their books or through the influence of their great self-sacrifices,
+Ruskin deserves a place, for he gave fortune, work and a splendid
+enthusiasm to the common people's cause.
+
+Ruskin's whole life was abnormal, and his early training served to
+accentuate those weaknesses of mind and will that made failures of so
+many schemes for the public good. If Ruskin had been trained in the
+English public schools he would have learned common sense in boyhood.
+As it was, his father and mother shielded the boy in every way from
+all contact with the world. Ruskin's father was a prosperous wine
+merchant with much culture; his mother was a religious fanatic, whose
+passion for the Bible imposed upon her boy the daily reading of the
+Scriptures and the daily memorizing of scores of verses.
+
+Such training in most cases causes a revolt against religion, but in
+Ruskin's case it resulted in training his boyish ear to the cadences
+of the Bible writers and in filling his mind with the sublime imagery
+of the prophets, with the result that when he began to write he had
+already formed a style, the richest and most varied of the last
+century.
+
+The boy was a mental prodigy, for he taught himself to read when four
+years old, and at five he had devoured hundreds of books and was
+already writing poems and plays. At ten, when he had his first tutor,
+his knowledge was wide and he had become a passionate lover of natural
+scenery, as well as no mean artist with pen and pencil. Scott's novels
+and Byron's _Childe Harold_ formed much of his reading at a time when
+most boys are content with the stories of Ballantyne or Mayne Reid.
+The range of his mental activity until he entered Oxford at eighteen
+was very wide. He was interested in mineralogy, meteorology,
+mathematics, drawing and painting. What probably expanded his mind
+more than all else was the education of travel. His father spent about
+half his time journeying through England and the Continent in an
+old-fashioned chaise and John always shared in these expeditions. At
+Oxford he competed for the Newdigate prize in poetry, and after being
+twice defeated won the coveted honor. He never gained any high
+scholarship, but he received valuable training in writing.
+
+There is no space here to chronicle more than a few of his many
+activities after leaving college. He first came into prominence by his
+passionate defense of the painter Turner against the art critics, and
+his study of Turner led him to adopt art criticism as his life work.
+At twenty-three years of age, when most youths are puzzled about their
+vocation, Ruskin had completed the first volume of _Modern Painters_,
+the publication of which gave him fame and made him a social lion in
+London. Other volumes of this great work followed swiftly and caused a
+great commotion in the world of art and letters because of the radical
+views of the author and the remarkable qualities of his style.
+
+This was followed by _The Seven Lamps of Architecture_, in which
+Ruskin expounded his radical views on this kindred art; _The Stones of
+Venice_, an eloquent book enforcing the argument that Gothic
+architecture sprang from a pure national faith and the domestic
+virtues; _King's Treasuries_, a noble plea for good books; _Fors
+Clavigera_, a series of ninety-six parts published in eight volumes,
+the record of his social experiments; _Preterita_, one of the most
+charming books of youthful reminiscences in any language, and many
+others. Ruskin's mental activity was enormous. He had to his credit in
+his fifty-five active years no less than seventy-two volumes and one
+hundred magazine articles, as well as thousands of lectures.
+
+This outline sketch of Ruskin's life would be incomplete without
+mention of the great sorrows that darkened his days but gave eloquence
+to his writings. The first was the desertion of his wife, who married
+the painter Millais, and the second was the loss by death of Rose La
+Touche, a beautiful Irish girl whom he had known from childhood. She
+refused to marry him because of their differences of religion; even
+refused to see him in her fatal illness unless he could say that he
+loved God better than he loved her. Her death brought bitter despair
+to Ruskin, but the world profited by it, for grief gave his work
+maturity and force. The last ten years of Ruskin's life were spent at
+his beautiful home at Brantwood, surrounded by the pictures that he
+loved and served faithfully by devoted relatives.
+
+  [Illustration: JOHN RUSKIN FROM THE SEMI-ROMANTIC PORTRAIT OF SIR
+  JOHN E. MILLAIS]
+
+Ruskin's books are not to be read continuously. Many dreary passages
+may be found in all of them, which the judicious reader skips. But his
+best works are more full of intellectual stimulus than those of any
+writer of his time with the single exception of Carlyle. _Modern
+Painters_ overflows with the enthusiasm of a lover of art and of
+nature who preaches the gospel of sincerity and truth. It is marked,
+like all his work, by eloquent digressions on human life and conduct,
+for Ruskin held that the finest art was simply the flowering of a
+great soul nurtured on all that was highest and best. _The Seven
+Lamps_ does for architecture what his first work did for painting. The
+book is written in more ornate style than any other, but he who loves
+impassioned prose will find many specimens here that can only by
+equaled in De Quincey's best work. Read the peroration of the "Lamp
+of Sacrifice" and you will not need to be told that this is the finest
+tribute to the work of the builders of the mediaeval cathedral. Here is
+a part of this eloquent passage:
+
+    It is to far happier, far higher exaltation that we owe those
+    fair fronts of variegated mosaic, charged with wild fancies
+    and dark hosts of imagery, thicker and quainter than ever
+    filled the depth of midsummer dream; those vaulted gates,
+    trellised with close leaves; those window labyrinths of
+    twisted tracery and starry light; those misty masses of
+    multitudinous pinnacle and diademed tower; the only witnesses,
+    perhaps, that remain to us of the faith and fear of nations.
+    All else for which the builders sacrificed has passed away.
+    * * * But of them and their life and their toil upon earth,
+    one reward, one evidence, is left to us in those great heaps
+    of deep-wrought stone. They have taken with them to the grave
+    their powers, their honors and their errors; but they have
+    left us their adoration.
+
+No space is left here to mention in detail Ruskin's other works, but
+_Unto This Last_, _The Stones of Venice_, _Sesame and Lilies_ and _The
+Crown of Wild Olive_ may be commended as well worth careful reading.
+Also _Preterita_ is alive with noble passages, such as the pen-picture
+of the view from the Dale in the Alps, or of the Rhone below Geneva.
+Read also Ruskin's description of Turner's "Slave Ship" or the
+impressive passage on the mental slavery of the modern workman in the
+sixth chapter of the second volume of _The Stones of Venice_. Read
+these things and you will have no doubt of the genius of Ruskin or of
+his command of the finest impassioned prose in the English language.
+
+
+
+
+TENNYSON LEADS THE VICTORIAN WRITERS
+
+    THE POET WHO VOICED THE ASPIRATIONS OF HIS AGE--"LOCKSLEY
+    HALL," "IN MEMORIAM" AND "THE IDYLLS OF THE KING" AMONG HIS
+    BEST WORKS.
+
+
+Of all the great English writers of the Victorian age it is probable
+that the next century will give the foremost place to Tennyson. Better
+than any other poet of his day, he stands as a type of the English
+people in obedience to law, in strong religious faith, in splendid
+imaginative force and in a certain unyielding cast of mind that made
+him bide his time during the dark years when he was bitterly
+criticized or coldly neglected. Tennyson had to the full the poet's
+temperament, but he had also a superb physique, which carried him into
+his eighty-fourth year. From a boy he was a lover of nature, and in
+nearly every poem that he wrote are found many proofs of his close
+observation in English woods and fields. Through a period of general
+skepticism he kept unimpaired his strong faith in God and in
+immortality that lends so much force to his best verse.
+
+  [Illustration: ALFRED, LORD TENNYSON AFTER AN ENGRAVING BY G.J.
+  STODART FROM A PHOTOGRAPH BY J. MAYALL]
+
+Tennyson's genius found its natural expression in verse, and it is his
+distinction that while he explored many realms of thought he was
+always clear and always musical. Browning had more passion, but it was
+the misfortune of the author of _The Ring and the Book_ that he could
+not refrain from a cramped and obscure style of verse that makes much
+of his work very hard reading. Many Browning societies have been
+formed to study the works of the poet whom they are proud to call
+master; but Tennyson needs no societies, as the man in the street and
+the woman whose soul is troubled can understand every line he has
+written. Nor is Tennyson lacking in passion, as any one may see by
+reading _Locksley Hall_ or _Maud_.
+
+Tennyson summed up in his poetry all the spiritual aspiration and the
+eager search for knowledge of his time. He explored all domains of
+thought, and he enriched his verse with the fruit of his studies. All
+the great elemental forces are found in his poems: he is the laureate
+of love and sorrow, of grief and aspiration. Throughout his verse runs
+the great natural law that the man who is not pure in heart can never
+see the glory of the poet's vision.
+
+The purity of his own life was reflected in his verse, just as the mad
+license and the furious self-indulgence of Byron are mirrored in _Don
+Juan_, _Manfred_ and _Cain_. Even to extreme old age Tennyson
+preserved that high poetic faculty which he manifested in early youth.
+One of his latest poems, _Crossing the Bar_, is also one of the finest
+in the language, breathing the old man's assurance of a life beyond
+the grave and a reunion with the dear friend of his youth, whom he
+mourned and immortalized in _In Memoriam_.
+
+Alfred Tennyson had one of the finest lives in the roll of English
+authors. He was born in 1809 and lived to 1892. He spent his early
+years in one of the most beautiful parts of Lincolnshire. He enjoyed
+the personal training of his father, a very accomplished clergyman,
+and much of his boyhood and youth was spent in the open air. In this
+way he absorbed that knowledge of birds and animals, trees and flowers
+and all the aspects of nature which is reflected in his verse. As a
+youth he experimented in many styles of verse, and when only eighteen
+he issued, with his brother Charles, _Poems by Two Brothers_. The next
+year he and Charles entered Trinity College, Cambridge. There they
+received the greatest impulse toward culture in a society of
+undergraduates known as the "Apostles." Its membership included
+Thackeray, Trench, Spedding, Monckton Milnes and Alfred and Arthur
+Henry Hallam, sons of the famous author of _The Middle Ages_.
+
+In his second year at college Tennyson won the Chancellor's gold medal
+with his prize poem, _Timbuctoo_, and in the following year he
+published his first volume, _Poems, Chiefly Lyrical_. He left college
+without a degree, and in 1833 he issued another volume of poems which
+contained some of his best work--_The Lady of Shalott_, _The Lotos
+Eaters_, _The Palace of Art_ and _A Dream of Fair Women_. Any one of
+these poems if issued to-day would make the reputation of a poet, but
+this book made little impression on the Victorian public which had
+lost its taste for poetry and was devoted mainly to prose fiction. The
+world has yet to catch the note of this master singer.
+
+In 1837 Arthur Hallam, Tennyson's friend and other self, the one man
+who predicted that he would be the greatest poet of his age, died
+suddenly in Vienna while traveling abroad. The shock made a profound
+impression on Tennyson. For ten years he put forth no work. Finally,
+in 1842, he issued two volumes of poems that at once caught the public
+fancy. Among the poems that brought him fame were _Locksley Hall_,
+_Lady Godiva_, _Ulysses_, _The Two Voices_ and _Morte d' Arthur_. The
+latter was the seed of the splendid _Idylls of the King_. Five years
+later he published _The Princess_, with its beautiful songs, and three
+years after _In Memoriam_ the greatest elegiac poem in the language,
+in which he lamented the fate of Arthur Hallam and poured forth his
+own grief over this irreparable loss. In the same year he married Miss
+Emily Sellwood, who made his home a haven of rest and of whom he once
+said that with her "the peace of God came into my life."
+
+_Maud_, his most dramatic poem, was issued in 1855. As early as 1859
+he published the first part of _The Idylls of the King_, but it was
+not until 1872 that the complete sequence of the _Idylls_ was given
+to the public. These Arthurian legends are cast by Tennyson in his
+most musical blank verse, and he has given to them a tinge of
+mysticism that seems to lift them above the everyday world into a
+realm of pure romance and chivalry.
+
+  [Illustration: FACSIMILE OF TENNYSON'S ORIGINAL MANUSCRIPT OF
+  "CROSSING THE BAR" COPYRIGHT BY THE MACMILLAN COMPANY]
+
+_Enoch Arden_, a domestic idyll, written in 1864, made a great hit. It
+was followed by several plays--_Queen Mary_, _Harold_, _Becket_ and
+others--all finely written, but none appealing to the great public. Up
+to his last years Tennyson remained the real laureate of his people,
+his words always tinged with the fire of inspiration. Only three years
+before his death he wrote _Crossing the Bar_, a poem which met with
+instant response from the English-speaking world because of its signs
+of courage in the face of death and its proofs of steadfast faith in
+the life beyond the grave.
+
+No adequate estimate of Tennyson's work can be made in the small space
+allotted to this article. All that can be done is to mention a few of
+his best works and to quote a few of his stirring lines. If the reader
+will study these poems he will be pretty sure to read more of
+Tennyson. To my mind, _Locksley Hall_ is Tennyson's finest poem, as
+true to-day as when it was written seventy years ago. The long,
+rolling, trochaic verse, like the billows on the coast that it
+pictures, suits the thought. The poem is the passionate lament of a
+returned soldier from India over the mercenary marriage of the cousin
+whom he loved. Here are a few of the lines that will never die:
+
+    Many a night I saw the Pleiades, rising through the mellow shade,
+    Glitter like a swarm of fireflies tangled in a silver braid.
+    Love took up the harp of Life, and smote on all the chords with might;
+    Smote the chord of Self, that, trembling, pass'd in music out of sight.
+    Cursed be the sickly forms that err from honest Nature's rule!
+    Cursed be the gold that gilds the straiten'd forehead of a fool!
+    Comfort? Comfort scorn'd of devils! this is truth the poet sings,
+    That a sorrow's crown of sorrow is remembering happier things.
+    But the jingling of the guinea helps the hurt that Honor feels,
+    And the nations do but murmur, snarling at each other's heels.
+    Mated with a squalid savage--what to me were sun or clime?
+    I the heir of all the ages in the foremost files of time.
+    Not in vain the distance beacons. Forward, forward, let us range,
+    Let the great world spin forever down the ringing grooves of change.
+    Thro' the shadow of the globe we sweep into the younger day:
+    Better fifty years of Europe than a cycle of Cathay.
+
+It would be difficult among the poets of the last century to parallel
+these passages for their imaginative sweep and magnetic appeal to the
+reader. The new criticism that disparages Tennyson and raises Browning
+to the seventh heaven calls _Locksley Hall_ old-fashioned and
+sentimental, but to me it is the greatest poem of its age. Next to
+this I would place _In Memoriam_, which has never received its just
+recognition. Readers of Taine will recall his flippant Gaelic comment
+on Tennyson's conventional but cold words of lament. Nothing, it seems
+to me, is further from the truth. The many beautiful lines in the poem
+depict the changing moods of the man who mourned for his dead and
+finally found comfort in the words of the Bible--the only source of
+comfort in this world for the sorely wounded heart. The whole poem, as
+his son Hallam says, emphasizes the poet's belief "in an omnipotent
+and all-loving God, who has revealed himself through the highest
+self-sacrificing love in the freedom of the human will and in the
+immortality of the soul."
+
+The meter of _In Memoriam_ serves to fix the poem in the memory. It
+seems to fit the thought with perfect naturalness. It is not strange
+that Queen Victoria should have placed this poem next to the Bible as
+a means of comfort after the loss of her husband, whom she loved so
+dearly that all the attractions of power and wealth never made her
+forget him a single day.
+
+_The Idylls of the King_ are also unappreciated in these days, yet
+they contain a body of splendid poetry that cannot be duplicated. They
+represent the author's dreams from early youth, when his imagination
+was first fired by old Malory's chronicle of the good King Arthur.
+They breathe a chivalry as lofty as Sidney's, and they teach many
+ethical lessons that it would do the present-day world good to take to
+heart. These noble poems, cast in the most musical blank verse in our
+literature, were the work of thirty years, written only when the poet
+felt genuine inspiration. They represent, as the poet told his son,
+"the dream of a man coming into practical life and ruined by one sin.
+It is not the history of one man or of one generation, but of a whole
+cycle of generations." And the old poet added these fine words:
+"Poetry is like shot silk with many glancing colors. Every reader must
+find his own interpretation according to his ability and according to
+his sympathy with the poet."
+
+Other fine poems of Tennyson which one should read are the noble _Ode
+on the Death of the Duke of Wellington_, _Break, Break, Break_, the
+perfect songs in _The Princess_, and _Crossing the Bar_. If you read
+these aright you will wish to know more of Tennyson, the poet who
+reconciled science and religion and kept his old faith strong to the
+end.
+
+
+
+
+BROWNING GREATEST POET SINCE SHAKESPEARE
+
+    HOW TO GET THE BEST OF BROWNING'S POEMS--READ THE LYRICS FIRST
+    AND THEN TAKE UP THE LONGER AND THE MORE DIFFICULT WORKS.
+
+
+The greatest of English poets since Shakespeare, is the title given to
+Robert Browning by many admirers of recognized ability as critics. For
+his dramatic force and his insight into human nature there is no
+question that Browning deserves this high rank. In these two qualities
+he stands above Tennyson. But a large part of his work is written in a
+style so crabbed that it acts as a bar to one's enjoyment of many fine
+poems. Only the most resolute reader can go through _Sordello_ or _The
+Ring and the Book_, the latter, with its interminable discussions of
+motive and its curious descriptions of half-forgotten legal and church
+methods of the seventeenth century. If one-half this long poem of
+over twenty thousand lines had been cut out, it would have been vastly
+improved.
+
+  [Illustration: ROBERT BROWNING FROM A PHOTOGRAPH BY HOLLYER AFTER
+  THE PORTRAIT BY G.F. WATTS, R.A.]
+
+The advocates of Browning hold that the study of the poet's
+obscurities is good mental discipline, but I am of the belief that
+poetry, like music, should not demand too great exertion of the mind
+to appreciate its beauty. Wagner's "Seigfried" and "Parsifal" are
+altogether too long to be enjoyed thoroughly. The composer would have
+done well to eliminate a third of each, for as they are produced they
+strain the attention to the point of fatigue, and no work of art
+should ever tire its admirers.
+
+In the same way Browning offends against this primal canon of art. A
+man who was capable of writing the most melodious verse, as is shown
+in some of his lyrics, he refused to put his thoughts in simple form,
+and often clothed them in obscurity. The result is that the great
+public which would have enjoyed his studies of character and his
+powerful dramatic faculty is repelled at the outset by the
+difficulties of understanding his poems. Browning added to this
+obscurity by constant reference to little-known authors. This was not
+pedantry, any more than Milton's use of classic mythology was
+pedantry. Both men possessed unusual knowledge of rare books, and both
+were much given to quoting authors who are unknown to the general
+reading public.
+
+But with all these difficulties in the way, there still remains a body
+of verse in Browning's work which will richly repay any reader. The
+lyrics and short poems like _The Pied Piper of Hamelin_, _Pippa
+Passes_, _Prospice_, _O Lyric Love_, _The Last Ride_, _One Word More_,
+_How They Brought the Good News_, _Herve Riel_, the epilogue to
+_Asolando_, _The Lost Leader_, _Men and Women_, and _A Soul's Tragedy_
+will give any reader a taste of the real Browning. If you like these
+poems, then try the more ambitious poems like _A Blot in the
+'Scutcheon_, _The Inn Album_, _Fifine at the Fair_ and others.
+
+Browning, above all other English poets, seems to have had the power
+of seizing upon a character at a crucial hour in life and laying bare
+all the impulses that impel one to high achievement or great
+self-sacrifice. He seems always to have worked at the highest
+emotional stress, so that his words are surcharged with feeling. In
+many of his poems this emotional element is painful in its intensity.
+Character to him was the main feature, and his selections comprise
+some of the most picturesque in all history. That he was able to make
+these people live and move and impress us as real flesh-and-blood
+human beings shows the great creative power of the man, who ought to
+have written some of the world's finest plays.
+
+Robert Browning was born in 1812 and died in 1889. His father, though
+a clerk in the Bank of England, was a fine classical scholar and had
+dabbled in verse. His mother was an accomplished musician. Browning
+had every early advantage, and while still a lad he came under the
+spell of Byron and had his poetical faculty greatly stimulated by the
+"Napoleon of rhyme." Then came Shelley and Keats, and their influence
+set him upon the course which he followed for many years. His first
+poem was _Pauline_, which has passages of rare beauty set among dreary
+commonplaces. He followed this with _Paracelsus_ and _Strafford_,
+which opened to him the doors of all London salons and made his
+reputation. _Sordello_, one of his most difficult poems, came next,
+but he varied these dramatic tragedies with a series of short poems
+called _Bells and Pomegranates_. In this the finest thing was _Pippa
+Passes_, which was warmly praised by Elizabeth Barrett, who
+afterwards became his wife. Among the many poems that Browning
+produced in five years were _Colombe's Birthday_, _A Blot in the
+'Scutcheon_, _Dramatic Romances and Lyrics_ and _A Soul's Tragedy_.
+
+Browning, in 1846, married Elizabeth Barrett, the author of _Lady
+Geraldine's Courtship_ and other poems, a woman who had been an
+invalid, confined to her room for years. Love gave her strength to
+arise and walk, and love also gave her the courage to defy the foolish
+tyranny of her father and elope with Browning. What kind of man that
+father was may be seen in his comment after the marriage: "I've no
+objection to the young man, but my daughter should have been thinking
+of another world." They went to Italy, where for fifteen years they
+made an ideal home. Mrs. Browning's story of her love is seen in
+_Sonnets From the Portuguese_, and some of her finest work is in _Casa
+Guidi Windows_. Each stimulated the other, while there was a notable
+absence of that jealousy which has often served to turn the love of
+literary men and women into the fiercest hatred.
+
+Mrs. Browning died suddenly in 1861, and the poet for some time was
+stunned by this unlooked-for calamity. He spent two years in
+seclusion at work on poems, but then he gathered up his courage and
+once more took his old place in the social life of London. In
+_Prospice_ and _One Word More_, written in the autumn following his
+wife's death, he shows that he has overcome all doubts of the reality
+of immortality. These two poems alone would entitle Browning to the
+highest place among the world's great poets. In addition he wrote the
+memorial to his wife, _O Lyric Love_, that is the cry of the soul left
+here on this earth to the soul of the beloved in Paradise. To the
+sympathetic this poem, with its solemn rhythm, will appeal like
+splendid organ music.
+
+  [Illustration: ELIZABETH BARRETT BROWNING AFTER THE PORTRAIT BY
+  FIELD TALFOURD]
+
+Among Browning's other poems that are noteworthy are _Fifine at the
+Fair_, _Red Cotton Nightcap Country_, _The Inn Album_ and _Dramatic
+Idylls_. Browning's last poem, _Asolando_, appeared in London on the
+same day that its author died at Venice. As the great bell of San
+Marco struck ten in the evening, Browning, as he lay in bed, asked his
+son if there were any news of the new volume. A telegram was read
+saying the book was well received. The aged poet smiled and breathed
+his last.
+
+In beginning the reading of Browning it is well to understand that at
+least half or maybe two-thirds of his work should be discarded at the
+outset, as it is of interest only to scholars. My suggestion to one
+who would learn to love Browning is to get a little book, _Lyrical
+Poems of Robert Browning_, by Dr. A.J. George. The editor in a preface
+indicates the best work of Browning, and also brings out strongly the
+fact that readers, and especially young readers, must be given poems
+which interest them. His selections of lyrics have been made from this
+standpoint, and his notes will be found very helpful. He develops the
+point that Browning's great revelation to the world through his poems
+was his strong and abiding assurance that man has in him the principle
+of divinity, and that many of the experiences that the world calls
+failures are really the stepping stones of the ascent to that conquest
+of self and that development of the whole nature which means the
+highest life. He says also that Browning is one of the most eloquent
+expounders of the doctrine of the reality of a future life, in which
+those who live a noble and unselfish life will get their reward in an
+existence free from all physical ills.
+
+In this little book will be found _Pippa Passes_, a noble series of
+lyrics, which develops the idea of the silent influence of a little
+silk weaver of Asolo upon four sets of people in the great crises of
+their lives. In each episode Pippa sings a song that awakens remorse
+or kindles manhood or arouses patriotism or duty. It is a perfect
+poem. Among other lyrics given here are _Evelyn Hope_, which must be
+bracketed with Burns' _To Mary in Heaven_ or with Wordsworth's _Lucy_
+and _Prospice_, which sounds the note of deep personal love that is as
+sure of immortality as of life. It is as beautiful and as inspiring as
+Tennyson's _Crossing the Bar_. Other poems due to Browning's love for
+his wife are _My Star_ and _One Word More_.
+
+If these lyrics appeal to you, then take up some of Browning's longer
+poems, _A Blot in the 'Scutcheon_, _Colombe's Birthday_, _A Soul's
+Tragedy_, _Fra Lippo Lippi_ and _Rabbi Ben Ezra_. Very few readers in
+these days have time or patience to read _The Ring and the Book_, but
+it will repay your attention, as it is the most remarkable attempt in
+all literature to revive the tragedy of the great and innocent love of
+a woman and a priest.
+
+Among the many fine passages in Browning, I think there is nothing
+which equals these lines in _O Lyric Love_, the beautiful invocation
+to his wife:
+
+    O lyric Love, half angel and half bird
+    And all a wonder and a wild desire--
+    Boldest of hearts that ever braved the sun,
+    Took sanctuary within the holier blue
+    And sang a kindred soul out to his face--
+    Hail then, and hearken from the realms of help!
+    Never may I commence my song, my due
+    To God who best taught song by gift of thee,
+    Except with bent head and beseeching hand--
+    That shall despite the distance and the dark,
+    What was, again may be; some interchange
+    Of grace, some splendor once thy very thought,
+    Some benediction anciently thy smile.
+
+The songs in _Pippa Passes_ should be read, as they are as near
+perfect as Shakespeare's songs or the songs of Tennyson in _The
+Princess_.
+
+
+
+
+MEREDITH AND A FEW OF HIS BEST NOVELS
+
+    ONE OF THE GREATEST MASTERS OF FICTION OF LAST CENTURY--"THE
+    ORDEAL OF RICHARD FEVEREL," "DIANA OF THE CROSSWAYS" AND OTHER
+    NOVELS.
+
+
+George Meredith is acknowledged by the best critics to be among the
+greatest English novelists of the last century; yet to the general
+reader he is only a name. Like Henry James, he is barred off from
+popular appreciation by a style which is "caviare to the general."
+Thomas Hardy is recognized as the finest living English novelist, but
+there is very little comparison between himself and Meredith.
+Professor William Lyon Phelps, who is one of the best and sanest of
+American critics, says they are both pagans, but Meredith was an
+optimist, while Hardy is a pessimist. Then he adds this illuminating
+comment: "Mr. Hardy is a great novelist; whereas, to adapt a phrase
+that Arnold applied to Emerson, I should say that Mr. Meredith was not
+a great novelist; he was a great man who wrote novels."
+
+It is only within the last twenty-five years that Meredith has had any
+vogue in this country. At that time a good edition of his novels was
+issued, and critics gave the volumes generous mention in the leading
+magazines and newspapers. But the public did not respond with any
+cordiality. The novel with us has come to be looked upon mainly as a
+source of amusement, and a writer of fiction who demands too keen
+attention from his readers can never hope to be popular. Meredith, as
+Professor Phelps says, was a great man who, among other intellectual
+activities, wrote some good novels. Doubtless he did more real good to
+literature as the inspirer of other writers than he did with his
+books. For more than the ordinary working years of most men he was one
+of the chief "readers" for a large London publishing house. To him
+were submitted the manuscripts of new novels, and it was his privilege
+to recognize the genius of Thomas Hardy, of the author of _The Story
+of an African Farm_ and other now famous English novelists.
+
+Meredith was a singularly acute critic of the work of others, but when
+he came to write himself he cast his thoughts in a style that has been
+the despair of many admirers. In this he resembled Browning, who never
+would write verse that was easy reading. Meredith's thought is usually
+clear, yet his brilliant but erratic mind was impelled to clothe this
+thought in the most bizarre garments. Literary paradox he loved; his
+mind turned naturally to metaphor, and despite the protests of his
+closest friends he continued to puzzle and exasperate the public. He
+who could have written the greatest novels of his age merely wrote
+stories which serve to illustrate his theories of life and conduct. No
+man ever put more real thought into novels than he; none had a finer
+eye for the beauties of nature or the development of character. But he
+had no patience to develop his men and women in the clear, orthodox
+way. He imagined that the ordinary reader could follow his lightning
+flashes of illumination, his piling up of metaphor on metaphor, and
+the result is that many are discouraged by his methods, just as nine
+readers out of ten are wearied when they attempt to read Browning's
+longer poems. His kinship to Browning is strong in style and in
+method of thought, in his way of leaping from one conclusion to
+another, in his elimination of all the usual small connecting words
+and in his liberties with the language. He seemed to be writing for
+himself, not for the general public, and he never took into account
+the slower mental processes of those not endowed with his own vivid
+imagination.
+
+  [Illustration: GEORGE MEREDITH WITH HIS DAUGHTER AND
+  GRANDCHILDREN--FROM A PHOTOGRAPH TAKEN SHORTLY BEFORE HIS DEATH]
+
+Meredith's life was that of a scholar; it contained few exciting
+episodes. He was of Welsh and Irish stock. At an early age he was sent
+to Germany, where he remained at a Moravian school until he was
+fifteen. He then returned to England to study law, but he never
+practiced it. For a number of years he was a regular contributor to
+the London MORNING POST, and in 1866 he acted as correspondent during
+the Austro-Italian war. For many years he served as chief reader and
+literary adviser to Chapman & Hall, the English publishers, and in
+that capacity he showed an insight that led to the development of many
+authors whose first work was crude and unpromising. Meredith himself
+began his literary career with _The Shaving of Shagpat_, a series of
+Oriental tales the central idea of which is the overcoming of
+established evil. Shagpat stands for any evil or superstition, and
+Shibli Bagarag, the hero, is the reformer. This book, with its wealth
+of metaphor, opened the door for Meredith, but he did not score a
+success until he wrote _The Ordeal of Richard Feverel_, two years
+later. Despite its faults, this is his greatest book, and it is the
+one which readers should begin with. It is overloaded with aphorism in
+the famous "Pilgrim's Scrip," which is a diary kept by Sir Austin, the
+father of Richard. The boy is trained to cut women out of his life,
+and just when the father's theory seems to have succeeded Richard
+meets and falls in love with Lucy, and the whole towering structure
+founded on the "Pilgrim's Scrip" falls into ruin. The scene in which
+Richard and Lucy meet is one of the great scenes in English fiction,
+in which Meredith's passionate love of nature serves to bring out the
+natural love of the two young people. Earth was all greenness in the
+eyes of these two lovers, and nature served only to deepen the love
+that they saw in each other's gaze and felt with thrilling force in
+each other's kisses. But even stronger that this scene is that last
+terrible chapter, in which Richard returns to his home and refuses to
+stay with Lucy and her child. Stevenson declared that this parting
+scene was the strongest bit of English since Shakespeare. It certainly
+reaches great heights of exaltation, and in its simplicity it reveals
+what miracles Meredith could work when he allowed his creative
+imagination full play.
+
+Another story which is usually bracketed with this is _Diana of the
+Crossways_. This great novel was founded on a real incident in English
+history of Meredith's time. Diana Warwick was drawn from Caroline
+Norton, one of the three beautiful and brilliant granddaughters of
+Sheridan, author of _The School for Scandal_. Her marriage was
+disastrous, and her husband accused her of infidelity with Lord
+Melbourne, Prime Minister at the time. His divorce suit caused a great
+scandal, but it resulted in her vindication. Then later she was
+accused of betraying to a writer on the TIMES the secret that Sir
+Robert Peel had decided to repeal the corn laws. This secret had been
+confided to her by Sidney Herbert, one of her admirers. Meredith's
+novel, in which the results of Diana's treachery were brought out,
+resulted in a public inquiry into the charge against Caroline
+Norton, which found that she was innocent. But the fact that Meredith
+used such an incident as the climax of his story gave _Diana of the
+Crossways_ an enormous vogue, and did much to bring the novelist into
+public favor.
+
+  [Illustration: FLINT COTTAGE, BOXHILL, THE HOME OF GEORGE
+  MEREDITH--HIS WRITING WAS DONE IN A SMALL SWISS CHALET IN THE
+  GARDEN]
+
+No more brilliant woman than Diana has ever been drawn by Meredith,
+but despite the art of her creator it is impossible for the reader to
+imagine her selling for money a great party secret which had been
+whispered to her by the man she loved. She was too keen a woman to
+plead, as Diana pleaded, that she did not recognize the importance of
+this secret, for the defense is cut away by her admission that she was
+promised thousands of pounds by the newspaperman at the very time that
+her extravagances had loaded her with debts.
+
+Space is lacking here to do more than mention three or four of
+Meredith's other novels that are fine works of art. These are _Rhoda
+Fleming_, _Sandra Belloni_, _Evan Harrington_ and _The Egoist_. Each
+is a masterpiece in its way; each is full of human passion, yet tinged
+with a philosophy that lifts up the novels to what Meredith himself
+called "honorable fiction, a fount of life, an aid to life, quick with
+our blood." The novel to him was a means of showing man's spiritual
+nature, "a soul born active, wind-beaten, but ascending."
+
+A score of novels Meredith wrote in his long life. The work of his
+later years was not happy. _The Amazing Marriage_ and _Lord Ormont and
+His Aminta_ are mere shadows of his earlier work, with all his old
+mannerisms intensified. But if you like Richard and Diana, then you
+can enlarge your acquaintance with Meredith to your own exceeding
+profit, for he is one of the great masters of fiction, who used the
+novel merely to preach his doctrine of the richness and fulness of
+human life if we would but see it with his eyes.
+
+
+
+
+STEVENSON PRINCE OF MODERN STORY-TELLERS
+
+    HIS STORIES OF ADVENTURE AND HIS BRILLIANT ESSAYS--"TREASURE
+    ISLAND" AND "DR. JEKYLL AND MR. HYDE" HIS MOST POPULAR BOOKS.
+
+
+It is as difficult to criticise the work of Robert Louis Stevenson as
+it is to find faults in the friend that you love as a brother. For
+with all his faults, this young Scotchman with his appealing charm
+disarms criticism. Nowhere in all literature may one find his like for
+warming the heart unless it be Charles Lamb, of gracious memory, and
+the secret of this charm is that Stevenson remained a child to the end
+of his days, with all a child's eagerness for love and praise, and
+with all a child's passion for making believe that his puppets are
+real flesh and blood people. When such a nature is endowed with
+consummate skill in the use of words, then one gets the finest, if not
+the greatest, of creative artists.
+
+In sheer technical skill Stevenson stands head and shoulders above all
+the other literary craftsmen of his day; but this skill was not used
+to refine his meaning until it wearied the reader, as in the case of
+Henry James, nor was it used to bewilder him with the richness of his
+resources, as was too often the case with George Meredith. With
+Stevenson, style had actually become the man; he could not write the
+simplest article in any other than a highly finished literary way.
+Witness the amazingly eloquent defense of Father Damien which he
+dashed off in a few hours and read to his wife and his stepson before
+the ink was dry on the sheets.
+
+Above all other things Stevenson was a great natural story-teller.
+With him the story was the main consideration, yet in some of his
+short tales such as _Markheim_, or _A Lodging for the Night_, or _The
+Sire de Maletroit's Door_, the story itself merely serves as a thread
+upon which he has strung the most remarkable analysis of a man's soul.
+He has the distinction of having written in _Treasure Island_ the best
+piratical story of the last century. If he could have maintained the
+high level of the opening chapter he would have produced a work
+worthy to rank with _Robinson Crusoe_. As it is, he created two
+villains, the blind man Pew and John Silver, who are absolutely unique
+in literature. The blind pirate in his malevolent fury is a creature
+that chills the heart, while Silver is a cheerful villain who murders
+with a smile. In _Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde_ Stevenson has aroused that
+sense of mystery and horror which springs from the spectacle of the
+domination of an evil spirit over a nature essentially kind and good.
+
+Stevenson came of a race of Scotch men of affairs. His grandfather was
+the most distinguished lighthouse builder of his day and his father
+gained prominence in the same work that demands the highest
+engineering skill with great executive capacity. Stevenson himself
+would have been an explorer or a soldier of fortune had he been born
+with the physical strength to fit his mental endowments. His childhood
+was so full of sickness that it reads like a hospital report. His life
+was probably preserved by the assiduous care and rare devotion of an
+old Scotch nurse, Alison Cunningham, whom he has immortalized in his
+letters and in his _A Child's Garden of Verse_. The sickly boy was an
+eager reader of everything that fell in his way in romance and
+poetry. Later he devoted himself to systematic training of his powers
+of observation and his great capacity for expressing his thoughts.
+
+His youth was spent in migrations to the south in winter and in
+efforts to thrive in Scotland's dour climate in the summer. His school
+training was fitful and brief, but from the age of ten the boy had
+been training himself in the field which he felt was to be his own.
+His first literary work was essays and descriptive sketches for the
+magazines. Then came short stories in which he revealed great
+capacity. Recognition came very slowly. He was comparatively unknown
+after he had produced such charming work as _An Inland Voyage_ and
+_Travels With a Donkey_, not to mention the _New Arabian Nights_.
+Popularity came with _Treasure Island_, written as a story for boys,
+and the one work of Stevenson's in which his creative imagination does
+not flag toward the end; but fame came only after the writing of _The
+Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde_--the most remarkable story of
+a dual personality produced in the last century. After this he wrote a
+long succession of stories, not one of which can be called a
+masterpiece because of the author's inability to finish his novels as
+he planned them. Lack of patience or want of sustained creative power
+invariably made him cut short his novels or end them in a way that
+exasperates the reader.
+
+  [Illustration: ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON--THE AUTHOR'S INTIMATE
+  ASSOCIATES PRONOUNCE THIS PHOTOGRAPH A PERFECT PRESENTATION OF HIS
+  MOST TYPICAL EXPRESSION]
+
+Some months Stevenson spent in California, but this State, with its
+romantic history and its singular scenic beauty, appeared to have
+little influence on his genius. In fact, locality seemed not to color
+the work of his imagination. His closing years were spent in Somoa, a
+South Sea Island paradise, in which he reveled in the primitive
+conditions of life and recovered much of his early zest in physical
+life. Yet his best work in those last years dealt not with the
+palm-fringed atolls of the Pacific, but with the bleak Scotch moors
+which refused him a home. In his letters he dwells on the curious
+obsession of his imagination by old Scotch scenes and characters, and
+on the day of his death he dictated a chapter of _Weir of Hermiston_,
+a romance of the picturesque period of Scotland which had in it the
+elements of his best work.
+
+It is idle to deny that Stevenson appeals only to a limited audience.
+Despite his keen interest in all kinds of people, he lacked that
+sympathetic touch which brings large sales and wide circulation. About
+the time of his death his admirers declared he would supersede Scott
+or Dickens; but the seventeen years since his death have seen many
+changes in literary reputations. Stevenson has held his own remarkably
+well. As a man the interest in him is still keen, but of his works
+only a few are widely read.
+
+Among these the first place must be given to _Dr. Jekyll and Mr.
+Hyde_, partly because of the profound impression made upon the public
+mind by the dramatization of this tale, and partly because it appeals
+strongly to the sense of the mystery of conflicting personality. Next
+to this is _Treasure Island_, one of the best romances of adventure
+ever written. Readers who cannot feel a thrill of genuine terror when
+the blind pirate Pew comes tapping with his cane have missed a great
+pleasure. One-legged John Silver, in his cheerful lack of all the
+ordinary virtues, is a character that puts the fear of death upon the
+reader. The opening chapter of this story is one of the finest things
+in all the literature of adventure.
+
+Of Stevenson's other work the two Scotch stories, _Kidnaped_ and
+_David Balfour_, always seemed to me to be among his best. The
+chapter on the flight of David and Allan across the moor, the contest
+in playing the pipes and the adventures of David and Catriona in
+Holland--these are things to read many times and enjoy the more at
+every reading. Stevenson, like Jack London, is a writer for men; he
+could not draw women well, When he brings one in there is usually an
+end of stirring adventure, just as London spoiled _The Sea Wolf_ with
+his literary heroine.
+
+  [Illustration: STEVENSON'S HOME AT VALIMA, SAMOA, LOOKING TOWARD
+  VAEA]
+
+Of Stevenson's short stories the finest are _The Pavilion on the
+Links_, a tale of Sicilian vengeance and English love that is full of
+haunting mystery and the deadly fear of unknown assassins; _Markheim_,
+a brilliant example of this author's skill in laying bare the conflict
+of a soul with evil and its ultimate triumph; _The Sire de Maletroit's
+Door_, a vivid picture of the cruelty and the autocratic power of a
+great French noble of the fifteenth century, and _A Lodging for the
+Night_, a remarkable defense of his life by the vagabond poet, Villon.
+Other short stories by Stevenson are worth careful study, but if you
+like these I have mentioned you will need no guide to those which
+strike your fancy.
+
+The vogue of Stevenson's essays will last as long as that of his
+romances; for he excelled in this literary art of putting his
+personality into familiar talks with his reader. He ranks with Lamb
+and Thackeray, Washington Irving and Donald G. Mitchell. Read those
+fine short sermons, _Pulvis et Umbra_ and _Aes Triplex_, the latter
+with its eloquent picture of sudden death in the fulness of power
+which was realized in Stevenson's own fate. Read _Books Which Have
+Influenced Me_, _A Gossip on Romance_ and _Talk and Talkers_. They are
+unsurpassed for thought and feeling and for brilliancy of style.
+
+But above everything looms the man himself--a chronic invalid, who
+might well have pleaded his weakness and constant pains as an excuse
+for idleness and railings against fate. Stoic courage in the strong is
+a virtue, but how much greater the cheerful courage that laughs at
+sickness and pain! Stevenson writing in a sickbed stories and essays
+that help one to endure the blows of fate is a spectacle such as this
+world has few to offer. So the man's life and work have come to be a
+constant inspiration to those who are faint-hearted, a call to arms of
+all one's courage and devotion.
+
+
+
+
+THOMAS HARDY AND HIS TRAGIC TALES OF WESSEX
+
+    GREATEST LIVING WRITER OF ENGLISH FICTION--BECAUSE OF
+    RESENTMENT OF HARSH CRITICISMS THE PROSE MASTER TURNS TO
+    VERSE.
+
+
+No one will question the assertion that Thomas Hardy is the greatest
+living English writer of fiction, and the pity of it is that a man
+with so splendid an equipment for writing novels of the first rank
+should have failed for many years to give the world any work in the
+special field in which he is an acknowledged master. Hardy seems to
+have revolted from certain harsh criticism of his last novel, _Jude
+the Obscure_, and to have determined that he would write no more
+fiction for an unappreciative world. So he has turned to the writing
+of verse, in which he barely takes second rank. It is one of the
+tragedies of literature to think of a man of Hardy's rank as a
+novelist, who might give the world a second _Tess_ or _The Return of
+the Native_, contenting himself with a ponderous poem like _The
+Dynasts_, or wasting his powers on minor poems containing no real
+poetry.
+
+Hardy's best novels are among the few in English fiction that can be
+read again and again, and that reveal at every reading some fresh
+beauties of thought or style. The man is so big, so genuine and so
+unlike all other writers that his work must be set apart in a class by
+itself. Were he not so richly endowed his pessimism would be fatal,
+for the world does not favor the novelist who demands that his fiction
+should be governed by the same hard rules that govern real life. In
+the work of most novelists we know that whatever harsh fate may befall
+the leading characters the skies will be sunny before the story
+closes, and the worthy souls who have battled against malign destiny
+will receive their reward. Not so with Hardy. We know when we begin
+one of his tales that tragedy is in store for his people. The dark
+cloud of destiny soon obscures the heavens, and through the lowering
+storm the victims move on to the final scene in which the wreck of
+their fortunes is completed.
+
+  [Illustration: THOMAS HARDY--A PORTRAIT WHICH BRINGS OUT
+  STRIKINGLY THE MAN OF CREATIVE POWER, THE ARTIST, THE PHILOSOPHER
+  AND THE POET]
+
+Literary genius can work no greater miracle than this--to make the
+reader accept as a transcript of life stories in which generous,
+unselfish people are dealt heavy blows by fate, while the mean-souled,
+sordid men and women often escape their just deserts. Hardy is not
+unreligious; he is simply and frankly pagan. Yet he differs from the
+classical writers in the fact that he is keenly alive to all the
+strong influences of nature on a sympathetic mind, and he is also a
+believer in the power of romantic love.
+
+No one has ever equaled Hardy in making the reader feel the living
+power of trees and other objects of nature. You can not escape the
+influence of his scenic effects. These are never theatrical--in fact
+they seem to form a vital part of every story. The scenes of all his
+novels are laid in his native Dorsetshire, which he has thinly
+disguised under the old Saxon name of Wessex. In _Far From the Madding
+Crowd_ Hardy first demonstrated the tremendous possibilities of rural
+scenes as a vital background for a story, but in _The Return of the
+Native_ he actually makes Egdon heath the most absorbing feature of
+the book. All the characters seem to take life and coloring from this
+heath, which has in it the potency of transforming characters and of
+wrecking lives. And in _Tess_ the peaceful, rural scenes appear to
+accentuate the tragedy of the heroine's unavailing struggles against a
+fate that was worse than death.
+
+Hardy's parents intended him for the church, but the boy probably gave
+some indications of his pagan cast of mind, for they finally
+compromised by apprenticing him to an ecclesiastical architect. In
+this calling the youth worked with sympathy and ability; the results
+of this training may be seen in the perfection of his plots and in his
+fondness for graphic description of churches and other picturesque
+buildings. One curious feature of this training may be seen in Hardy's
+sympathy and reverence for any church building. As Professor William
+Lyon Phelps very aptly says of Hardy: "No man to-day has less respect
+for God and more devotion to his house."
+
+The antipathy of Hardy to any kind of publicity has kept the facts of
+his life in the background, but it is an open secret that much of the
+longing of Jude for a college education was drawn from his own
+boyhood. It is also a matter of record that as a boy he served as
+amanuensis for many servant maids, writing the love letters which
+they dictated. In this way, before he knew the real meaning of sex and
+the significance of life he had obtained a deep insight into the
+nature of women, which served him in good stead when he came to draw
+his heroines. All his women are made up of mingled tenderness and
+caprice, and though female critics of his work may claim that these
+traits are over-drawn, no man ever feels like dissecting Hardy's
+women, for the reason that they are so charmingly feminine.
+
+One may fancy that Hardy took great delight in his architectural work,
+for it required many excursions to old churches in Dorsetshire to see
+whether they were worth restoring. When he was thirty-one Hardy
+decided to abandon architecture for fiction. His first novel,
+_Desperate Remedies_, was crude, but it is interesting as showing the
+novelist in his first attempts to reveal real life and character. His
+second book, _Under the Greenwood Tree_, is a charming love story, and
+_A Pair of Blue Eyes_ was a forerunner of his first great story, _Far
+From the Madding Crowd_. It may have been the title, torn from a line
+of Gray's _Elegy_, or the novelty of the tale, in which English
+rustics were depicted as ably as in George Eliot's novels, that made
+it appeal to the great public. Whatever the cause, the book made a
+great popular hit. I can recall when Henry Holt brought it out in the
+pretty Leisure Hour series in 1875. Three years later Hardy produced
+his finest work, _The Return of the Native_. He followed this with
+more than a dozen novels, among which may be mentioned _The Mayor of
+Casterbridge_, _The Woodlanders_, _Tess of the d'Urbervilles_, and
+_Jude the Obscure_.
+
+In taking up Hardy one should begin with _Far From the Madding Crowd_.
+The story of Bathsheba Everdene's relations with her three lovers,
+Sergeant Troy, Boldwood and Gabriel Oak, moves one at times to some
+impatience with this charming woman's frequent change of mind, but she
+would not be so attractive or so natural if she were not so full of
+caprice. His women all have strong human passion, but they are
+destitute of religious faith. They adore with rare fervor the men whom
+they love. In this respect Bathsheba is like Eustacia, Tess, Marty
+South or Lady Constantine. Social rank, education or breeding does not
+change them. Evidently Hardy believes women are made to charm and
+comfort man, not to lead him to spiritual heights, where the air is
+thin and chill and kisses have no sweetness.
+
+In his first novel Hardy lightened the tragedy of life with rare
+comedy. These comic interludes are furnished by a choice collection of
+rustics, who discuss the affairs of the universe and of their own
+township with a humor that is infectious. In this work Hardy surpasses
+George Eliot and all other novelists of his day, just as he surpasses
+them all in such wholesome types of country life as Giles Winterbourne
+and Marty South of _The Woodlanders_. No pathos is finer than Marty's
+unselfish love for the man who cannot see her own rare spirit, and
+nothing that Hardy has written is more powerful than Marty's lament
+over the grave of Giles:
+
+    "Now, my own, my love," she whispered, "you are mine, and on'y
+    mine, for she has forgot 'ee at last, although for her you
+    died. But I--whenever I get up I'll think of 'ee, and whenever
+    I lie down I'll think of 'ee. Whenever I plant the young
+    larches I'll think none can plant as you planted; and whenever
+    I split a gad, and whenever I turn the cider-wring, I'll say
+    none could do it like you. If I forget your name, let me
+    forget home and heaven! But, no, no, my love, I never can
+    forget 'ee, for you was a good man and did good things!"
+
+_The Return of the Native_ is generally regarded as Hardy's finest
+work. Certainly in this novel of passion and despair he has conjured
+up elements that speak to the heart of every reader. The hand of fate
+clutches hold of all the characters. When Eustacia fails to go to the
+door and admit her husband's mother she sets in motion events that
+bring swift ruin upon her as well as upon others. At every turn of the
+story the somber Egdon heath looms in the background, more real than
+any character in the romance, a sinister force that seems to sweep the
+characters on to their doom. _Tess_ is more appealing than any other
+of Mr. Hardy's works, but it is hurt by his desire to prove that the
+heroine was a good woman in spite of her sins against the social code.
+What has also given this work a great vogue is the splendid acting of
+Mrs. Fiske in the play made from the novel.
+
+In _Jude the Obscure_ Hardy had a splendid conception, but he
+developed it in a morbid way, bringing out the animalism of the hero's
+wife and forcing upon the reader his curious ideas about marriage.
+
+But above and beyond everything else Thomas Hardy is one of the
+greatest story tellers the world has ever seen. You may take up any
+of his works and after reading a chapter you have a keen desire to
+follow the tale to the end, despite the fact that you feel sure the
+end will be tragic. Nothing is forced for effect; the whole story
+moves with the simplicity of fate itself, and the characters, good and
+bad, are swept on to their doom as though they were caught in the rush
+of waters that go over Niagara falls. Hardy's style is clear, simple,
+direct, and abounds in Biblical allusions and phrases. In nature study
+Hardy's novels are a liberal education, for beyond any other author of
+the last century he has brought out the beauty and the significance of
+tree and flower, heath and mountain. They may be read many times, and
+at each perusal new beauties will be discovered to reward the reader.
+
+
+
+
+KIPLING'S BEST SHORT STORIES AND POEMS
+
+    TALES OF EAST INDIAN LIFE AND CHARACTER--IDEAL TRAINING OF THE
+    GENIUS THAT HAS PRODUCED SOME OF THE BEST LITERARY WORK OF OUR
+    DAY.
+
+
+Rudyard Kipling cannot be classified with any writer of his own age or
+of any literary age in the past. His tremendous strength, his visual
+faculty, even his mannerisms, are his own. He has written too much for
+his own fame, but although the next century will discard nine-tenths
+of his work, it will hold fast to the other tenth as among the best
+short stories and poems that our age produced. Kipling is essentially
+a short-story writer; not one of his longer novels has any real plot
+or the power to hold the reader's interest to the end. _Kim_, the best
+of his long works, is merely a series of panoramic views of Indian
+life and character, which could be split up into a dozen short stories
+and sketches.
+
+  [Illustration: RUDYARD KIPLING A STRIKING LIKENESS OF THE AUTHOR
+  IN A CHARACTERISTIC POSE]
+
+But in the domain of the short story Kipling is easily the first great
+creative artist of his time. No one approaches him in vivid
+descriptive power, in keen character portraiture, in the faculty of
+making a strange and alien life as real to us as the life we have
+always known. And in some of his more recent work, as in the story of
+the two young Romans in _Puck of Pook's Hill_, Kipling reaches rare
+heights in reproducing the romance of a bygone age. In these tales of
+ancient Britain the poet in Kipling has full sway and his visual power
+moves with a freedom that stamps clearly and deeply every image upon
+the reader's mind.
+
+The first ten years of Kipling's literary activity were given over to
+a wonderful reproduction of East Indian life as seen through
+sympathetic English eyes. Yet the sympathy that is revealed in
+Kipling's best sketches of native life in India is never tinged with
+sentiment. The native is always drawn in his relations to the
+Englishman; always the traits of revenge or of gratitude or of
+dog-like devotion are brought out. Kipling knows the East Indian
+through and through, because in his childhood he had a rare
+opportunity to watch the native. The barrier of reserve, which was
+always maintained against the native Englishman, was let down in the
+case of this precocious child, who was a far keener observer than most
+adults. And these early impressions lend an extraordinary life and
+vitality to the sketches and stories on which Kipling's fame will
+ultimately rest.
+
+The early years of Kipling were spent in an ideal way for the
+development of the creative literary artist. Born at Bombay in
+December, 1865, he absorbed Hindustanee from his native nurse, and he
+saw the native as he really is, without the guard which is habitually
+put up in the presence of the Briton, even though this alien may be
+held in much esteem. The son of John Lockwood Kipling, professor of
+architectural sculpture in the British School of Art at Bombay, and of
+a sister of Edward Burne-Jones, it was not strange that this boy
+should have developed strong powers of imagination or that his mind
+should have sought relief in literary expression.
+
+The school days of Kipling were spent at Westward Ho, in Devon, where,
+though he failed to distinguish himself in his studies, he established
+a reputation as a clever writer of verse and prose. He also enjoyed
+in these formative years the friendship and counsel of Burne-Jones,
+and he had the use of several fine private libraries. His wide reading
+probably injured his school standing, but it was of enormous benefit
+to him in his future literary work. At seventeen young Kipling
+returned to India, where he secured a position on the CIVIL AND
+MILITARY GAZETTE of Lahore, where his father was principal of a large
+school of arts.
+
+The Anglo-Indian newspaper is not a model, but it afforded a splendid
+field for the development of Kipling's abilities. He was not only a
+reporter of the ordinary occurrences of his station, but he was
+constantly called upon to write short sketches and poems to fill
+certain corners in the paper, that varied in size according to the
+number and length of the advertisements. Some of the best of his short
+sketches and bits of verse were written hurriedly on the composing
+stone to satisfy such needs. These sketches and poems he published
+himself and sent them to subscribers in all parts of India, but though
+their cleverness was recognized by Anglo-Indians, they did not appeal
+to the general public. After five years' work at Lahore, Kipling was
+transferred to the ALLAHABAD PIONEER, one of the most important of the
+Anglo-Indian journals. For the weekly edition of this paper he wrote
+many verses and sketches and also served as special correspondent in
+various parts of India.
+
+It was in 1889 that the PIONEER sent him on a tour of the world and he
+wrote the series of letters afterwards reprinted under the title _From
+Sea to Sea_. Kipling, like Stevenson, had to have a story to tell to
+bring out all his powers; hence these letters are not among his best
+work.
+
+Vividly do I recall Kipling's visit to San Francisco. He came into the
+CHRONICLE office and was keenly interested in the fine collections
+which made this newspaper's library before the fire the most valuable
+on this Coast, if not in the country. He was also much impressed with
+the many devices for securing speed in typesetting and other
+mechanical work. The only feature of his swarthy face that impressed
+one was his brilliant black eyes, which behind his large glasses,
+seemed to note every detail. He talked very well, but although he made
+friends among local newspapermen, he was unsuccessful in selling any
+of his stories to the editors of the Sunday supplements. He soon
+went to New York, but there also he failed to dispose of his stories.
+
+  [Illustration: RUDYARD KIPLING FROM A CARTOON BY W. NICHOLSON]
+
+Finally Kipling reached London in September, 1889, and after several
+months of discouragement, he induced a large publishing house to bring
+out _Plain Tales From the Hills_. It scored an immediate success. Like
+Byron, the unknown young writer awoke to find himself famous; magazine
+editors clamored for his stories at fancy prices and publishers
+eagerly sought his work. It may be said to Kipling's credit that he
+did not utilize this opportunity to make money out of his sudden
+reputation. He doubtless worked over many old sketches, but he put his
+best into whatever he gave the public. He married the sister of
+Wolcott Balestier, a brilliant American who became very well known in
+London as a publishers' agent, and after Balestier's death Kipling
+moved to his wife's old home in Brattleboro, Vermont, where he built a
+fine country house; but constant trouble with a younger brother of his
+wife caused him to abandon this American home and go back to England,
+where he set up his lares at Rottingdean, in Surrey. There he has
+remained, averaging a book a year, until now he has over twenty-five
+large volumes to his credit. In 1907 Kipling was given the Nobel prize
+"for the best work of an idealist tendency."
+
+In reading Kipling it is best to begin with some of the tales written
+in his early life, for these he has never surpassed in vigor and
+interest. Take, for instance, _Without Benefit of Clergy_, _The Man
+Who Was_, _The Drums of the Fore and Aft_, _The Man Who Would Be King_
+and _Beyond the Pale_. These stories all deal with Anglo-Indian life,
+two with the British soldier and the other three with episodes in the
+lives of British officials and adventurers.
+
+_The Man Who Would Be King_, the finest of all Kipling's tales of
+Anglo-Indian life and adventure, is the story of the fatal ambition of
+Daniel Dravot, told by the man who accompanied him into the wildest
+part of Afghanistan. Daniel made the natives believe that he was a god
+and he could have ruled them as a king had he not foolishly become
+enamored of a native beauty. This girl was prompted by a native
+soothsayer to bite Dravot in order to decide whether he was a god or
+merely human. The blood that she drew on his neck was ample proof of
+his spurious claims and the two adventurers were chased for miles
+through a wild country. When captured Daniel is forced to walk upon a
+bridge, the ropes of which are then cut, and his body is hurled
+hundreds of feet down upon the rocks. The story of the survivor, who
+escaped after crucifixion, is one of the ghastliest tales in all
+literature.
+
+Other tales that Kipling has written of Indian life are scarcely
+inferior to these in strange, uncanny power. One of the weirdest
+relates the adventures of an army officer who fell into the place
+where those who have been legally declared dead, but who have
+recovered, pass their lives. As a picture of hell on earth it has
+never been surpassed. Another of Kipling's Indian tales that is worth
+reading is _William the Conqueror_, a love story that has a background
+of grim work during the famine year.
+
+One of Kipling's claims to fame is that he has drawn the British
+soldier in India as he actually lives. His _Soldiers Three_--Mulvaney,
+the Irishman, Ortheris, the cockney, and Learoyd, the Yorkshireman--are
+so full of real human nature that they delight all men and many women.
+Mulvaney is the finest creation of Kipling, and most of his stories
+are brimful of Irish wit. Of late years Kipling has written some fine
+imaginative stories, such as _The Brushwood Boy_, _They_ and _An
+Habitation Enforced_. He has also revealed his genius in such tales of
+the future as _With the Night Mail_, a remarkably graphic sketch of a
+voyage across the Atlantic in a single night in a great aeroplane.
+Another side of Kipling's genius is seen in his _Jungle Stories_, in
+which all the wild animals are endowed with speech. Mowgli, the boy who
+is suckled by a wolf, is a distinct creation, and his adventures are
+full of interest. Compare these stories with the work of Thompson-Seton
+and you get a good idea of the genius of Kipling in making real the
+savage struggle for life in the Indian jungle.
+
+Of Kipling's long novels _The Naulakha_ ranks first for interest of
+plot, but _Kim_ is the best because of its series of wonderful
+pictures of East Indian life and character. _Captains Courageous_ is a
+story of Cape Cod fishing life, with an improbable plot but much good
+description of the perils and hardships of the men who seek fortune on
+the fishing banks.
+
+As a poet Kipling appeals strongly to men who love the life of action
+and adventure in all parts of the world. In his _Departmental
+Ditties_ he has painted the life of the British soldier and the
+civilian in India, and his _Danny Dever_, his _Mandalay_ and others
+which sing themselves have passed into the memory of the great public
+that seldom reads any verse unless it be the words of a popular song.
+The range of his verse is very wide, whether it is the superb imagery
+in _The Last Chantey_ or the impressive Calvanism of _McAndrew's
+Hymn_. His _Recessional_, of course, is known to everyone. It is one
+of the finest bits of verse printed in the last twenty years.
+
+Kipling, in spite of his many volumes, is only forty-six years old,
+and he may be counted on to do much more good work.
+
+If he turns to historical fiction he may yet do for English history
+what the author of _Waverley_ has done for the history of Scotland.
+Certainly he has the finest creative imagination of his age; in
+whatever domain it may work it is sure to produce literature that will
+live.
+
+
+
+
+_Bibliography_
+
+    _Short Notes of Both Standard and Other Editions, With Lives,
+    Sketches and Reminiscences._
+
+
+_These bibliographical notes on the authors discussed in this volume
+are brief because the space allotted to them was limited. They are
+designed to mention the first complete editions--the standard
+editions--as well as the lives of authors, estimates of their works
+and sketches and personal reminiscences. A mass of good material on
+the great writers of the Victorian age is buried in the bound volumes
+of English and American reviews and magazines. The best guide to these
+articles is Poole's "Index."_
+
+_The most valuable single volumes to one who wishes to make a study of
+eighteenth and nineteenth century English writers are: "A Study of
+English Prose Writers" and "A Study of English and American Poets" by
+J. Scott Clark. (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons. Price, $2 net a
+volume.) These two volumes will give any one who wishes to make a
+study of the authors I have discussed the material for a mastery of
+their works. Under full biographical sketches the author gives
+estimates of the best critics, extracts from their works and a full
+bibliography, including the best magazine articles._
+
+
+MACAULAY
+
+    The editions of Macaulay are so numerous that it is useless to
+    attempt to enumerate them. A standard edition was collected in
+    1866 by his sister, Lady Trevelyan. Four volumes are devoted
+    to the history and three to the essays and lives of famous
+    authors which he wrote for the _Encyclopedia Britannica_.
+    Macaulay's essays, which have enjoyed the greatest popularity
+    in this country, may be found in many forms. A one-volume
+    edition, containing the principal essays, is issued by several
+    publishers. Sir George Otto Trevelyan's _The Life and Letters
+    of Lord Macaulay_ in two volumes (1876) is a more interesting
+    biography than Lockhart's _Scott_. The best single-volume
+    estimate of Macaulay is J. Cotter Morison's _Macaulay_ in the
+    English Men of Letters series. Good short critical sketches of
+    Macaulay and his work may be found in Sir Leslie Stephen's
+    _Hours in a Library_, volume 2, and in Lord Morley's _Critical
+    Miscellanies_, volume 2.
+
+
+SCOTT
+
+    The edition of Scott, which was his own favorite, was issued
+    in Edinburgh in forty-eight volumes, from 1829 to 1833. Scott
+    wrote new prefaces and notes for this edition. Another is the
+    Border edition, with introductory essays and notes by Andrew
+    Lang (forty-eight volumes, 1892-1894). The recent editions of
+    Scott are numerous for, despite all criticisms of his careless
+    style, he holds his own with the popular favorites of the day.
+    Of his poems a good edition was edited by William Minto in two
+    volumes, in 1888. _The Life of Scott_ by his son-in-law, J.G.
+    Lockhart, is the standard work. This was originally issued in
+    seven volumes but Lockhart was induced to condense it into one
+    volume, which gives about all that the ordinary reader cares
+    for. This may be found in Everyman's library. Scott's
+    _Journal_ and his _Familiar Letters_, both edited by David
+    Douglas, contain much interesting material. The best short
+    lives of Scott are by R.H. Hutton in the English Men of
+    Letters series and by George Saintsbury in the Famous Scots
+    series. Among the best sketches and estimates of Scott are by
+    Andrew Lang in _Letters to Dead Authors_; Sir Leslie Stephen
+    in _Hours in a Library_; Conan Doyle in _Through the Magic
+    Door_; Walter Bagehot in _Literary Studies_; Stevenson in
+    _Gossip on Romance_ and in _Memoirs and Portraits_, and S.R.
+    Crockett in _The Scott Country_. _Abbotsford_, by Washington
+    Irving, gives the best personal sketches of Scott at home.
+
+
+CARLYLE
+
+    Carlyle's _Essays_ and his _French Revolution_, upon which his
+    fame will chiefly rest, are issued in many editions. It would
+    be well if his longer works could be condensed into single
+    volumes by competent hands. A revised edition of his
+    _Frederick_ was issued in one short volume. For the facts of
+    Carlyle's life, the best book is his own _Reminiscences
+    issued_ in 1881 and edited by Froude, who was his literary
+    executor with the full power to publish or suppress. Froude
+    had so great an antipathy to what Carlyle himself called
+    "mealy-mouthed biography" that he erred on the side of extreme
+    frankness. In _Thomas Carlyle--The First Forty Tears of His
+    Life_, _Life in London_ and _Letters of Jane Welsh Carlyle_,
+    Froude permitted the publication of many malicious comments by
+    Carlyle on his famous contemporaries. These and morbid
+    expressions of remorse by Carlyle over imaginary neglect of
+    his wife caused a great revulsion of public sentiment and the
+    fame of Carlyle was clouded for ten years. Finally, after much
+    acrimonious controversy, the truth prevailed and Carlyle came
+    into his own again.
+
+    Among the best books on Carlyle are Lowell's _Essays_, volume
+    2; David Masson, _Carlyle Personally and in His Writings_;
+    E.P. Whipple, _Essays and Reviews_; Emerson, _English Traits_;
+    Lowell, _My Study Windows_; Morley, _English Literature in the
+    Reign of Victoria_; Greg, _Literary and Social Judgments_;
+    Moncure Conway, _Carlyle_, and Henley, _Views and Reviews_.
+
+    Among magazine and review articles may be mentioned George
+    Eliot in WESTMINSTER REVIEW, volume 57; John Burroughs in
+    ATLANTIC MONTHLY, volume 51; Emerson in SCRIBNER'S MAGAZINE,
+    volume 22; Froude in NINETEENTH CENTURY, volume 10, and Leslie
+    Stephen in CORNHILL, volume 44.
+
+
+DE QUINCEY
+
+    It is a curious fact that the first complete edition of De
+    Quincey's works was issued in Boston in twenty volumes
+    (1850-1855) by Ticknor & Fields. Much of the material was
+    gathered from English periodicals, as De Quincey was the
+    greatest magazine writer of his age. This was followed by the
+    Riverside edition in twelve volumes (Boston, 1877). The
+    standard English edition is _The Collected Writings of Thomas
+    De Quincey_, fourteen volumes, edited by David Masson
+    (1889-1890). A.H. Japp wrote the standard English _Life of De
+    Quincey_ (London, two volumes, 1879). The best short life is
+    Masson's in the English Men of Letters series. George
+    Saintsbury gives a good sketch of De Quincey in _Essays in
+    English Literature_. Other estimates may be found in the
+    following works: Leslie Stephen, _Hours in a Library_; H.A.
+    Page, _De Quincey, His Life and Writings_ and in Mrs.
+    Oliphant's _Literary History of England_.
+
+
+LAMB
+
+    Reprints of the _Essays of Elia_ have been very numerous. One
+    of the best editions of Lamb's complete works was edited by
+    E.V. Lucas in seven volumes, to which he added in 1905 _The
+    Life of Charles Lamb_ in two volumes. Another is _Complete
+    Works and Correspondence_, edited by Canon Ainger (London, six
+    volumes). Ainger also wrote an excellent short life of Lamb
+    for the English Men of Letters series. Hazlitt and Percy
+    Fitzgerald have revised Thomas Noon Talfourd's standard
+    _Letters of Charles Lamb, With a Sketch of His Life_. Among
+    sketches of the life of Charles and Mary Lamb may be noted
+    Barry Cornwall's _Charles Lamb--A Memoir_; Fitzgerald,
+    _Charles Lamb: His Friends, His Haunts and His Books_; Walter
+    Pater, _Appreciations_; R.H. Stoddard, _Personal
+    Recollections_; Augustine Birrell, _Res Judicatae_; Nicoll,
+    _Landmarks of English Literature_; Talfourd, _Final Memorials
+    of Charles Lamb_; Hutton, _Literary Landmarks of London_.
+
+
+DICKENS
+
+    The first collective edition of Dickens' works was issued in
+    1847. The standard edition is that of Chapman & Hall, London,
+    who were the original publishers of _Pickwick_. One of the
+    best of the many editions of Dickens is the Macmillan Pocket
+    edition with reproductions of the original covers of the
+    monthly parts of the novels as they appeared, the original
+    illustrations by Cruikshank, Leech, "Phiz" (Hablot Browne) and
+    others, and valuable and interesting introductions by Charles
+    Dickens the younger. Another good edition is in the World's
+    Classics, with brilliant introductions by G.K. Chesterton. In
+    buying an edition of Dickens it is well to get one with
+    reproductions of the original illustrations, as these add much
+    to the pleasure and interest of the novels.
+
+    For ready reference to Dickens' works there is a _Dickens
+    Dictionary_, giving the names of all characters and places in
+    the novels, by G.A. Pierce, and another similar work by A.J.
+    Philip. Mary Williams has also prepared a _Dickens
+    Concordance_.
+
+    Forster's _Life of Charles Dickens_, in three volumes, is the
+    standard work, as Forster was closely connected with the
+    novelist from the time he made his hit with _Pickwick_. George
+    Gissing, the novelist, made an abridgment of Forster's _Life_
+    in one volume, which is well done. Scores of shorter lives and
+    sketches have been written. Among the best of these are Dr.
+    A.W. Ward's _Charles Dickens_ in the English Men of Letters
+    series; Taine's chapter on Dickens in his _History of English
+    Literature_; Sir Leslie Stephen's article in the _Dictionary
+    of National Biography_; Mrs. Oliphant's _The Victorian Age in
+    English Literature_; F.G. Kitton's _Charles Dickens: His Life,
+    Writings and Personality_. _The Letters_, edited by Miss
+    Hogarth and Mary Dickens, are valuable for the light they
+    throw on the novelist's character and work.
+
+    In reminiscence of Dickens, the best books are Mary Dickens'
+    _My Father as I Recall Him_; J.T. Fields' _In and Out of Doors
+    With Charles Dickens_ and G. Dolby's _Charles Dickens as I
+    Knew Him_, the last devoted to the famous reading tours.
+    Edmund Yates, Anthony Trollope, James Payn, R.H. Haine and
+    many others have written readable reminiscences.
+
+    For the home life of Dickens and his haunts see F.G. Kitton's
+    _The Dickens Country_; Thomas Fort's _In Kent With Charles
+    Dickens_ and H.S. Ward's _The Real Dickens Land_. Of poems on
+    Dickens' death the very best is Bret Harte's _Dickens in
+    Camp_. _The Wisdom of Dickens_, compiled by Temple Scott, is a
+    good collection of extracts.
+
+
+THACKERAY
+
+    Almost as many editions of Thackeray's works have been
+    published as of Dickens' novels, and the reader in his
+    selection must be guided largely by his own taste. In choosing
+    an edition, however, always get one that contains Thackeray's
+    own illustrations, as, though the drawing is frequently crude,
+    the sketches are full of humor and help one to understand the
+    author's conception of the characters. The best general
+    edition is _The Biographical_, with introductions by his
+    daughter, Mrs. Richmond Ritchie (London, 1897-1900). The
+    Charterhouse edition of Thackeray in twenty-six volumes,
+    published in England by Smith, Elder & Co. and in this country
+    by Lippincott, is an excellent library set containing all the
+    original illustrations.
+
+    No regular biography of Thackeray has ever been written
+    because of his expressed wish, but his daughter, Mrs. Richmond
+    Ritchie, has supplied this lack with many sketches and
+    introductions to various editions of her father's works.
+    Anthony Trollope in his autobiography gives many charming
+    glimpses of Thackeray but his sketch of Thackeray in the
+    English Men of Letters series is not warmly appreciative.
+
+    One of the best short estimates of Thackeray is Charles
+    Whibley's _Thackeray_ (1905). Also valuable are sketches by
+    Frederic Harrison in _Early Victorian Literature_; Brownell,
+    _Early Victorian Masters_; Whipple, _Character and
+    Characteristic Men_; R.H. Stoddard, _Anecdote Biography of
+    Thackeray_; Andrew Lang, _Letters to Dead Authors_; G.T.
+    Fields, _Yesterdays With Authors_; Jeaffreson, _Novels and
+    Novelists_ and W.B. Jerrold, _The Best of All Good Company_.
+
+    The reviews and magazines, especially in the last ten years,
+    have abounded in articles on Thackeray. Among these the best
+    have appeared in SCRIBNER'S MAGAZINE. A small volume, _The
+    Sense and Sentiment of Thackeray_ (Harper's, 1909), gives
+    numerous good extracts from the novels as well as from the
+    essays.
+
+
+CHARLOTTE BRONTE
+
+    Smith, Elder & Co. of London were the publishers of _Jane
+    Eyre_ and they also issued the first collected edition of
+    Charlotte Bronte's works. This firm still publishes the
+    standard English edition, the Haworth edition, with admirable
+    introductions by Mrs. Humphrey Ward and with many
+    illustrations from photographs of the places and people made
+    memorable in Charlotte's novels. A good American edition is
+    the Shirley edition, with excellent illustrations, many of
+    them reproductions of rare daguerreotypes.
+
+    The standard life of Charlotte Bronte until fifteen years ago
+    was Mrs. Gaskell's, one of the most appealing stories in all
+    literature. Clement K. Shorter's _Charlotte Bronte and Her
+    Circle_ is now indispensable because of the mass of facts that
+    the author has gathered in regard to the life of the sisters
+    in the lonely parsonage and their remarkable literary
+    development. Augustine Birrell has written a good short life
+    of Charlotte, while A.M.F. Robinson (Mme. Duclaux) has a
+    volume on Emily Bronte in the Famous Women series.
+
+    T. Wemyss Reid was the first writer to make original research
+    among the Bronte material and his book, _Charlotte Bronte--A
+    Monograph_, paved the way for the exhaustive study of this
+    strange family of genius by Clement Shorter. Other books that
+    give much original material are _The Brontes in Ireland_, by
+    Rev. Dr. William Wright, and _Charlotte Bronte and Her
+    Sisters_, by Clement Shorter. Mr. Shorter also in _The
+    Brontes--Life and Letters_ gives all of Charlotte's letters in
+    the order of their dates.
+
+
+GEORGE ELIOT
+
+    The first collected edition of George Eliot's works was
+    brought out in 1878-1880 in London and Edinburgh. Many
+    editions have since appeared in England and in this country,
+    the best one being the English Cabinet edition, published by
+    A. & C. Black.
+
+    The standard life of George Eliot is _George Eliot's Life as
+    Related in Her Letters and Journals_, edited by her husband,
+    J.W. Cross, who served for ten years as curate of Haworth.
+    Leslie Stephen has written a remarkably good short life of
+    George Eliot in the English Men of Letters series.
+
+    Among critical articles on George Eliot may be mentioned Henry
+    James in _Partial Portraits_; Mathilde Blind, _George Eliot_;
+    Oscar Browning, _Life of George Eliot_ in Great Writers
+    series; Dowden, _Studies in Literature_; Oscar Browning,
+    _Great Writers_; Mayo W. Hazeltine, _Chats About Books_; R.H.
+    Hutton, _Modern Guides of Religious Thought_; R.E. Cleveland,
+    _George Eliot's Poetry_; Frederic Harrison, _The Choice of
+    Books_ and Sydney Lanier, _The Development of the English
+    Novel_.
+
+
+RUSKIN
+
+    The great edition of Ruskin is the Library edition by E.T.
+    Cook and A. Wedderburn, begun in 1903. It is splendidly
+    illustrated and is a superb specimen of book-making. English
+    and American editors of Ruskin are numerous.
+
+    The standard life of Ruskin is by W.G. Collingwood, his
+    secretary and ardent disciple. One of his pupils, E.T. Cook,
+    published _Studies in Ruskin_, which throws much light on his
+    methods of teaching art. J.A. Hobson in _John Ruskin, Social
+    Reformer_ discusses his economic and social teaching. Dr.
+    Charles Waldstein of Cambridge in _The Work of John Ruskin_
+    develops his art theories. Good critical studies may also be
+    found in W.M. Rossetti's _Ruskin_ and Frederic Harrison's
+    _Tennyson, Ruskin, Mill and Other Literary Estimates_; Justin
+    McCarthy, _Modern Leaders_; Mary R. Mitford, _Recollections of
+    a Literary Life_ and R.H. Hutton, _Contemporary Thought and
+    Thinkers_.
+
+    Among magazine articles may be noted W.J. Stillman in the
+    CENTURY, volume 13; Charles Waldstein in HARPER'S, volume 18;
+    Justin McCarthy in the GALAXY, volume 13, and Leslie Stephen
+    in FRAZER'S, volumes 9 and 49.
+
+
+TENNYSON
+
+    The best edition of Tennyson is the Eversley in six volumes,
+    published by the Macmillans and edited by his son Hallam,
+    which contains a mass of notes left by the poet and many
+    explanations of peculiar words and metaphors which the father
+    gave to the son in discussing his work. This edition also
+    gives the changes made by the poet in his constant revision of
+    his works, some of which were not improvements.
+
+    A mass of critical commentary and reminiscence has been
+    published on Tennyson and his poetical work. Among the best of
+    these volumes are _Tennyson, Ruskin and Mill_, by Frederic
+    Harrison; _Tennyson and His Friends_, by Mrs. Richmond
+    Ritchie; _The Homes and Haunts of Tennyson_, by Napier;
+    _Tennyson, His Art and Relation to Modern Life_, by Stopford
+    A. Brooke; _The Poetry of Tennyson_, by Henry Van Dyke; the
+    chapter on Tennyson in Stedman's _Victorian Poets_; a
+    commentary on Tennyson's _In Memoriam_ by Prof. A.C. Bradley;
+    _Alfred Tennyson_, by Andrew Lang; _Views and Reviews_, by
+    W.E. Henley; _Yesterdays With Authors_, by J.T. Fields; _The
+    Victorian Age_, by Mrs. Oliphant. Dr. Henry Van Dyke
+    contributed five articles on Tennyson to SCRIBNER'S MAGAZINE,
+    volume 6.
+
+
+BROWNING
+
+    An enormous literature of comment, appreciation and
+    interpretation has grown up around Browning, largely due to
+    the work of various Browning societies in this country and in
+    Europe. The London Browning Society especially has brought out
+    many papers that will be of interest to Browning students.
+    Other works are Arthur Symons, _Introduction to the Study of
+    Browning_ (London, 1886); G.W. Cooke, _Browning Guide Book_
+    (New York, 1901); Fotheringham, _Studies_ (London, 1898);
+    Stedman, _Victorian Poets_; Prof. Hiram Corson, _Introduction
+    to Browning_; George E. Woodberry, _Studies in Literature and
+    Life_; Hamilton W. Mabie, _Essays in Literary
+    Interpretation_; A. Birrell, _Obiter Dicta_; George
+    Saintsbury, _Corrected Impressions_.
+
+    The first edition of Browning's poems appeared in two volumes
+    in 1849, a second in three volumes in 1863 and a third in six
+    volumes in 1868. A revised edition containing all the poems
+    was issued in sixteen volumes in 1888-1889. A fine complete
+    edition in two volumes, edited by Augustine Birrell and F.G.
+    Kenyon, was issued in 1896, and Smith, Elder & Co., London,
+    brought out a two-volume edition in 1900. In this country the
+    Riverside edition of _Browning's Poetical Works_ in six
+    volumes, issued by Houghton, Mifflin & Co., and the Camberwell
+    edition in twelve handy volumes, with notes by Charlotte
+    Porter and Helen A. Clarke, published by Crowell, are valuable
+    for Browning students.
+
+    The standard life is _The Life and Letters of Robert
+    Browning_, by Mrs. Sutherland Orr, but valuable are _The Love
+    Letters of Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Browning_,
+    issued by Browning's son in 1899. For Edmund Gosse's _Robert
+    Browning--Personalia_ the poet supplied much of the material
+    in notes. Good short sketches and estimates are Chesterton's
+    _Browning_ in the English Men of Letters series and Waugh's
+    _Robert Browning_.
+
+
+GEORGE MEREDITH
+
+    The standard edition of Meredith's works is the Boxhill
+    edition in seventeen volumes, with photogravure frontispieces,
+    issued in this country by the Scribners. The same text is used
+    in the Pocket Edition in sixteen volumes, which does not
+    include the unfinished novel, _Celt and Saxon_. A mass of
+    comment on Meredith may be found in the English and American
+    reviews and magazines, to which Poole's _Index_ furnishes the
+    best guide.
+
+    Mrs. M.S. Henderson, _George Meredith: Novelist, Poet,
+    Reformer_; George Macaulay Trevelyan, _The Poetry and
+    Philosophy of George Meredith_; John Lane, _Biography of
+    George Meredith_, and R. Le Gallienne, _Characteristics of
+    George Meredith_.
+
+
+STEVENSON
+
+    Robert Louis Stevenson's early work appeared in fugitive form
+    in magazines and reviews and even after he had written _The
+    New Arabian Nights_ and _Travels With a Donkey_ he was forced
+    to see such excellent matter as _The Silverado Squatters_ cut
+    up into magazine articles and more than half of it discarded.
+    The vogue of Stevenson was greater in this country than in
+    England until he had fully established his reputation. In 1878
+    _An Inland Voyage_ appeared and in 1879 _Travels With a
+    Donkey_, but it was not until 1883 that _Treasure Island_ made
+    him well known. The standard edition of Stevenson is the
+    Thistle edition, beautifully printed and illustrated, and
+    issued at Edinburgh and New York, 1894-1898. _The Letters of
+    Stevenson to His Family_, originally issued in 1899, have now
+    been incorporated with _Vailima Letters_ and issued in four
+    volumes. They are arranged chronologically, with admirable
+    biographical commentary by Sydney Colvin, to whom a great part
+    of them was written. Stevenson's personality was so attractive
+    that a mass of reminiscence and comment has been produced
+    since his death in 1894. The best books are Graham Balfour,
+    _Life of Robert Louis Stevenson_; Walter Raleigh, _R.L.
+    Stevenson_; Simpson, _Stevenson's Edinburgh Days_, and
+    _Memoirs of Vailima_, by Isobel Strong and Lloyd Osbourne, the
+    novelist's stepchildren. Henry James in _Partial Portraits_
+    has a fine appreciation of Stevenson and _Robert Louis
+    Stevenson in California_, by Katharine D. Osbourne is rich in
+    reminiscence.
+
+
+THOMAS HARDY
+
+    Since 1895, Thomas Hardy has written no fiction. The standard
+    edition of his works is published in this country by the
+    Harpers. Recently this firm has issued Hardy in a convenient
+    thin paper edition which may be slipped into the coat pocket.
+    His first novel, _Desperate Remedies_, appeared in 1871 but it
+    was not until the issue of _Far From the Madding Crowd_ in
+    1874 that he gained popular fame. Many magazine articles have
+    been written on the "corner of Dorsetshire" which Hardy calls
+    Wessex. Good books on the Hardy country are _The Wessex of
+    Romance_, by W. Sherren, and _The Wessex of Thomas Hardy_, by
+    Windle.
+
+
+KIPLING
+
+    The standard edition of Kipling is the Outward Bound edition,
+    published in this country by the Scribners. It contains a
+    general introduction by the author and special prefaces to
+    each volume, with illustrations from bas reliefs made by the
+    novelist's father. Doubleday, Page & Co. are issuing a pocket
+    edition of Kipling, on thin paper with flexible leather
+    binding, which is very convenient. Any additional books will
+    be added to each of these editions. Kipling has told of his
+    early life in India and of his precocious literary activity in
+    _My First Book_ (1894). Richard Le Gallienne made a study of
+    the novelist in _Rudyard Kipling--A Criticism_ and Edmund
+    Gosse in _Questions at Issue_ discusses his short stories.
+    Prof. William Lyon Phelps in _Essays on Modern Novelists_ has
+    a fine chapter on Kipling. Andrew Lang in _Essays in Little_
+    treats of "Mr. Kipling's Stories" and Barrie has an
+    appreciation in CONTEMPORARY REVIEW for March, 1891. A useful
+    _Kipling Index_ is issued by Doubleday, Page & Co. All titles
+    are indexed so that one may locate any story or character.
+
+
+
+
+_Index_
+
+
+A Blot on the 'Scutcheon, 108, 110, 113.
+
+A Child's Garden of Verse, 125.
+
+Adam Bede, 65, 76, 82, 84.
+
+Addison, 58.
+
+A Dissertation on Roast Pig, 41, 71.
+
+A Dream of Fair Women, 99.
+
+Adventures of Philip, The, 60.
+
+Aes Triplex, 130.
+
+Agnes Gray, 71.
+
+A Gossip on Romance, 130.
+
+A Lodging for the Night, 124, 129.
+
+Alison Cunningham, 125.
+
+Allahabad Pioneer, 144.
+
+Amazing Marriage, The, 122.
+
+An English Mail Coach, 31.
+
+An Habitation Enforced, 148.
+
+An Inland Voyage, 126.
+
+Anglo-Indian Life, 146.
+
+Antiquary, The, 18.
+
+A Pair of Blue Eyes, 135.
+
+Apostles, 99.
+
+Arnold, 116.
+
+Arthurian Legends, 101.
+
+Ashburton, Lady, 25.
+
+Ashby de la Zouch, 17.
+
+Asolando, 108, 111.
+
+A Soldier of France, 12.
+
+Asolo, 113.
+
+A Soul's Tragedy, 108, 110, 113.
+
+A Tale of Two Cities, 53.
+
+Austro-Italian War, 118.
+
+A Window in Thrums, 39.
+
+
+Balestier, Wolcott, 145.
+
+Ballantyne, 16, 90.
+
+Balzac, 12.
+
+Balzac's Seraphita, 74.
+
+Bank of England, 109.
+
+Barrett, Elizabeth, 110.
+
+Barrie, 39.
+
+Bathsheba Everdene, 136.
+
+Becket, 101.
+
+Bells and Pomegranates, 109.
+
+Beyond the Pale, 146.
+
+Biblical Allusions, 139.
+
+Bleak House, 54.
+
+Blue Coat School, 44.
+
+Boldwood, 136.
+
+Boswell, 4.
+
+Bray, Charles, of Coventry, 80.
+
+Brantwood, 93.
+
+Break, Break, Break, 105.
+
+Bronte, Charlotte, XII, 66 to 72.
+
+Bronte, Emily, 68.
+
+Browning, Robert, XII, 97, 103, 106 to 115, 117, 118.
+
+Browning, Mrs., 110.
+
+Brushwood Boy, The, 148.
+
+Bunyan, 28.
+
+Burne-Jones, 142, 143.
+
+Burns, 113.
+
+Byron, 7, 98, 109, 145.
+
+
+Cain, 98.
+
+California, 127.
+
+Calvanism, 149.
+
+Cape Cod, 148.
+
+Captains Courageous, 148.
+
+Carlyle, Thomas, XII, XIII, 3, 4, 8, 20 to 30, 43, 52, 53, 93.
+
+Casa Guidi Windows, 110.
+
+Cervantes, 11.
+
+Chapman & Hall, 118.
+
+Charlotte, 68.
+
+Child Angel, The, 45.
+
+Childe Harold, 7, 90.
+
+Choir Invisible, The, 85.
+
+Christmas Carol, 51.
+
+Christmas Story, 51.
+
+Chronicle, 144.
+
+Clive, 4, 9.
+
+Cloister and the Hearth, The, 65.
+
+Coleridge, 35, 42, 43.
+
+Colombe's Birthday, 110, 113.
+
+Colonel Newcome, 58.
+
+Confessions of an English Opium Eater, 36.
+
+Count Robert of Paris, 18.
+
+Court of Chancery, 54.
+
+Cricket on the Hearth, The, 51.
+
+Croker, 4.
+
+Cromwell, 24.
+
+Cross, J.W., 82.
+
+Crossing the Bar, 98, 101, 105, 113.
+
+Crown of Wild Olives, The, 94.
+
+
+Dale in the Alps, 94.
+
+Daniel Deronda, 79, 82.
+
+Daniel Dravot, 146.
+
+Danny Dever, 149.
+
+David and Allan, 129.
+
+David and Catriona in Holland, 129.
+
+David Balfour, 128.
+
+David Copperfield, 53, 128.
+
+David Warwick, 120.
+
+Defoe, 62.
+
+Departmental Ditties, 149.
+
+De Quincey, Thomas, XII, 30 to 38, 45, 93.
+  Autobiography, 31.
+  Confessions, 31, 32.
+
+Desperate Remedies, 135.
+
+Dickens, Charles, XII, 13, 44, 47 to 55, 61, 128.
+
+Dinah Morris, 84.
+
+Diana of the Crossways, 115, 120, 121, 122.
+
+Dombey and Son, 54.
+
+Don Juan, 98.
+
+Doyle, Conan, 12.
+
+Dramatic Idylls, 111.
+
+Dramatic Romances and Lyrics, 110.
+
+Dream Children, XIV, 41, 45.
+
+Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, 125, 126, 128.
+
+Drums of the Fore and Aft, The, 146.
+
+Dynasts, The, 132.
+
+
+East India Life, 141.
+
+Edinburgh Review, 4, 23.
+
+Egdon Heath, 133, 138.
+
+Egoist, The, 121.
+
+Eliot, George, XII, 52, 76 to 86, 136, 137.
+
+Emerson, 27, 116.
+
+English History, 120.
+
+English Humorists, The, 60.
+
+Enoch Arden, 101.
+
+Esmond, 56.
+
+Essays of Elia, 40, 43.
+
+Eugenie Grandet, 12.
+
+Eustacia, 136, 138.
+
+Evan Harrington, 121.
+
+Evelyn Hope, 113.
+
+
+Far From the Madding Crowd, 133, 135, 136.
+
+Father Damien, 124.
+
+Felix Holt, 82.
+
+Fifine at the Fair, 108, 111.
+
+Fiske, Mrs., in Becky Sharp, 58, 138.
+
+Flight of the Tartar Tribe, The, 31.
+
+Fors Clavigera, 92.
+
+Four Georges, The, 60.
+
+Fra Lippo Lippi, 113.
+
+Fraser's Magazine, 23.
+
+Frederick the Great, 24.
+
+French Revolution, The, 23, 27.
+
+From Sea to Sea, 144.
+
+Froude, 24.
+
+
+Gabriel Oak, 136.
+
+Gaelic Comment, 103.
+
+Gaskell, Mrs., 70.
+
+Gethsemane, XIV.
+
+Giles Winterbourne, 137.
+
+Goethe, 23, 26.
+
+Goldsmith, 3.
+
+Gray's Elegy, 135.
+
+Great Hoggarty Diamond, The, 59.
+
+
+Hallam, Alfred, 99.
+
+Hallam, Arthur, 99, 100, 103.
+
+Hardy, Thomas, XIII, 77, 115, 116, 131 to 140.
+
+Harold, 101.
+
+Hastings, Warren, 4, 9.
+
+Heart of the Midlothian, The, 17, 18.
+
+Henry Esmond, 60.
+
+Herbert, Sidney, 120.
+
+Heroes and Hero Worship, 22.
+
+Herve Riel, 108.
+
+History of England, 7.
+
+Holt, Henry, 136.
+
+Household Words and All the Year Round, 51.
+
+Howells' Criticism of Thackeray, 62.
+
+How They Brought the Good News, 108.
+
+
+Idylls of the King, The, 96, 100, 104.
+
+India, 102.
+
+Indian Life, 140.
+
+In Memoriam, 96, 98, 100, 103, 104.
+
+Inn Album, The, 108, 111.
+
+Irving, Washington, 130.
+
+Ivanhoe, 17.
+
+
+James, Henry, 115, 124.
+
+Jane Eyre, 59, 66, 68, 71, 73.
+
+Janet's Repentance, 81.
+
+John Silver, 125, 128.
+
+Johnson, 3.
+
+Jude the Obscure, 131, 134, 136, 138.
+
+Jungle Stories, 148.
+
+
+Keats, 109.
+
+Kidnaped, 128.
+
+King Arthur, 104.
+
+King's Treasures, 92.
+
+Kim, 140, 148.
+
+Kipling, John Lockwood, 142.
+
+Kipling, Rudyard, XIII, 140 to 149.
+
+
+Labor, 26.
+
+Lacy, 113.
+
+Lady Constantine, 136.
+
+Lady Geraldine's Courtship, 110.
+
+Lady Godiva, 100.
+
+Lady of Shalott, The, 99.
+
+Lady of the Lake, The, 7, 15.
+
+Lahore, 144.
+
+Lamb, Mary, 41, 42.
+
+Lamb, Charles, XII, 35, 38 to 46, 123, 130.
+
+Lamp of Sacrifice, 94.
+
+Last Chantey, The, 149.
+
+Last Essays of Elia, The, 45.
+
+Last Ride, The, 108.
+
+Lay of the Last Minstrel, The, 15.
+
+Lays of Ancient Rome, 7.
+
+Leader, Organ of the Free Thinkers, 81.
+
+Learoyd, 147.
+
+Leisure Hour Series, 136.
+
+Lewes, George Henry, 78, 81, 82.
+
+Lincolnshire, 98.
+
+Lockhart, 16.
+
+Locksley Hall, 96, 97, 100, 101, 103.
+
+London, Jack, 129.
+
+London Magazine, 43.
+
+Lord Ormont and His Aminta, 122.
+
+Lotus Eaters, The, 99.
+
+Lovel, the Widower, 60.
+
+Lucy, 119, 120.
+
+Lyrical Poems of Robert Browning, by Dr. A.J. George, 112.
+
+
+Macaulay, Thomas Babington, 3 to 11, 20.
+
+Malory's Chronicle, 104.
+
+Manchester Grammar School, 34.
+
+Mandalay, 149.
+
+Manfred, 98.
+
+Man Who Was, The, 146.
+
+Man Who Would be King, The, 146.
+
+Margaret Ogilvie, 39.
+
+Marion Evans, 79.
+
+Markheim, 124, 129.
+
+Marmion, 15.
+
+Marty South, 136, 137.
+
+Mason's Song, 26.
+
+Maud, 97, 100.
+
+Mayor of Casterbridge, The, 136.
+
+McAndrew's Hymn, 149.
+
+Melbourne, Lord, 120.
+
+Men and Women, 108.
+
+Meredith, George, XII, 115 to 123, 124.
+
+Micah Clarke, 12.
+
+Middle Ages, The, 99.
+
+Middlemarch, 79, 82, 85.
+
+Millais, 92.
+
+Miller, Henry, in The Only Way, 53.
+
+Mill on the Floss, The, 76, 82, 84.
+
+Milnes, 99.
+
+Milton, 9, 107.
+
+Mitchell, 130.
+
+Modern Painters, 87, 91, 93.
+
+Monckton, 99.
+
+Monte Cristo, 12.
+
+Moravian School, 118.
+
+Morning Post, London, 118.
+
+Morte d' Arthur, 100.
+
+Mowgli, 148.
+
+Mrs. Battle's Opinion on Whist, 41, 45.
+
+Mulvaney, the Irishman, 147.
+
+Murder As One of the Fine Arts, 31, 35.
+
+My Star, 113.
+
+Mystery of Edwin Drood, The, 50.
+
+
+Napoleon of Rhyme, 109.
+
+Naulakha, The, 148.
+
+New Arabian Nights, 126.
+
+Newcomes, The, 60.
+
+Newdigate Prize, 91.
+
+Niagara Falls, 139.
+
+Nicholas Nickleby, 50, 54.
+
+Nobel Prize, 146.
+
+Norton, Caroline, 120.
+
+
+Ode on the Death of the Duke of Wellington, 105.
+
+Old Curiosity Shop, 50.
+
+Old Mortality, 18.
+
+Oliver Twist, 50.
+
+O Lyric Love, 108, 111, 114.
+
+One Word More, 108, 111, 113.
+
+Ordeal of Richard Feverel, The, 115, 119.
+
+Our Mutual Friend, 54.
+
+Oxford, 90.
+
+
+Palace of Art, The, 99.
+
+Past and Present, 22, 26, 27.
+
+Paracelsus, 109.
+
+Parsifal, 107.
+
+Pauline, 109.
+
+Pavilion on the Links, The, 129.
+
+Payn, James, 17.
+
+Peel, Sir Robert, 120.
+
+Pendennis, 60, 64.
+
+Pew, 125, 128.
+
+Pickwick Papers, 50, 52.
+
+Pied Piper of Hamelin, The, 108.
+
+Pilgrim's Progress, 79.
+
+Pilgrim's Scrip, 119.
+
+Pippa Passes, 108, 109, 113, 114.
+
+Phelps, Prof. William Lyon, 115, 116, 134.
+
+Plain Tales from the Hills, 145.
+
+Poems by Two Brothers, 99.
+
+Poems, Chiefly Lyrical, 99.
+
+Preterita, 92, 94.
+
+Princess, The, 100, 105, 114.
+
+Professor, The, 71.
+
+Prospice, 108, 111, 113.
+
+Puck of Pook's Hill, 141.
+
+Pulvis et Umbra, 130.
+
+Punch, 59.
+
+
+Queen Mary, 101.
+
+Queen Victoria, 104.
+
+Quentin Durward, 17, 18.
+
+
+Rabbi Ben Ezra, 113.
+
+Rasselas, 79.
+
+Recessional, 149.
+
+Red Cotton Nightcap Country, 111.
+
+Reid, Mayne, 90.
+
+Return of the Native, The, 132, 133, 136, 138.
+
+Rhoda Fleming, 121.
+
+Rhone below Geneva, 94.
+
+Richardson, 62.
+
+Richard the Lion-Hearted, 17.
+
+Ring and the Book, The, 97, 106, 113.
+
+Robinson Crusoe, 125.
+
+Rob Roy, 18.
+
+Romola, 77, 82, 85.
+
+Rose La Touche, 92.
+
+Rottingdean, 145.
+
+Ruskin, John, XII, 17, 30, 87 to 95.
+
+
+Sad Adventures of the Rev. Amos Barton, The, 81.
+
+Sandra Belloni, 121.
+
+Sands, George, 74.
+
+San Marco, 111.
+
+Sartor Resartus, 21, 23, 28.
+
+Scenes From Clerical Life, 81.
+
+School of Scandal, The, 120.
+
+Scotch Moors, 127.
+
+Scotch Scenes, 127.
+
+Scotch Stories, 128.
+
+Scott, Sir Walter, 11 to 19, 47, 52, 90, 128.
+
+Sea Wolf, The, 129.
+
+Seigfried, Wagner's, 107.
+
+Sellwood, Miss Emily, 100.
+
+Sesame and Lilies, 94.
+
+Seven Lamps, The, 87, 92, 93.
+
+Seymour, 50.
+
+Shakespeare, 47, 106, 114, 120.
+
+Shaving of Shagpat, The, 118.
+
+Shelley, 109.
+
+Sheridan, 120.
+
+Shibli Bagarag, 119.
+
+Shirley, 74.
+
+Sicilian vengeance, 129.
+
+Sidney, 104.
+
+Silas Marner, 82, 84.
+
+Sir Austin, 119.
+
+Sire de Maletroit's Door, The, 124, 129.
+
+Sketches by Boz, 50.
+
+Soldiers Three, 147.
+
+Somoa, 127.
+
+Sonnets From the Portuguese, 110.
+
+Sordello, 106, 109.
+
+Southey, 43.
+
+South Sea Islands, 127.
+
+Spectator, 58.
+
+Spedding, 99.
+
+Spencer, Herbert, 81, 83.
+
+Steele, 58.
+
+Stevenson, XII, 11, 39, 40, 72, 120, 123 to 130.
+
+Stones of Venice, The, 87, 92, 94, 95.
+
+Story of an African Farm, The, 116.
+
+Strafford, 109.
+
+Strauss--Life of Jesus, 80.
+
+Study of Sociology, The, 83.
+
+Supernatural Man, The, 45
+
+Suspira, 36.
+
+Swift, 3.
+
+
+Taine, 103.
+
+Tales From Shakespeare, 43.
+
+Tales of East India Life, 140.
+
+Talisman, The, 18.
+
+Talk and Talkers, 130.
+
+Tennyson, Alfred, XII, 96 to 106, 113, 114.
+
+Tennyson, Charles, 99.
+
+Tess of the d'Urbervilles, 65, 132, 134, 136, 138.
+
+Thackeray, William Makepeace, XII, XIV, 13, 48, 52, 56 to 66, 73, 99.
+
+They, 148.
+
+Thompson-Seton, 148.
+
+Three Guardsmen, The, 12.
+
+Three Ladies of Sorrow, 37.
+
+Timbuctoo, 99.
+
+Times, London, 21, 120.
+
+Tolstoi, 13.
+
+To Mary in Heaven, 113.
+
+Travels With a Donkey, 126.
+
+Treasure Island, 123, 124, 126, 128.
+
+Trench, 99.
+
+Trevelyan, G.O., 5.
+
+Trinity College, Cambridge, 99.
+
+Turgeneff, 13.
+
+Turner, 91, 94.
+
+Two Voices, The, 100.
+
+
+Ulysses, 100.
+
+Under the Greenwood Tree, 135.
+
+Unto This Last, 94.
+
+Vanity Fair, 56, 58, 59, 63.
+
+Victorian Age, 96.
+
+Villette, 66, 73.
+
+Villon, 129.
+
+Virginians, The, 60.
+
+Virginibus Puerisque, 40.
+
+Vision of Sudden Death, The, 31.
+
+
+Waverley, 15, 19, 149.
+
+Weir of Hermiston, 127.
+
+Westminster Review, 80.
+
+Wessex, 133.
+
+Westward Ho, 142.
+
+Weyman, 12.
+
+White Company, The, 12.
+
+Wilhelm Meister, 23.
+
+William the Conqueror, 147.
+
+Without Benefit of Clergy, 146.
+
+With the Night Mail, 148.
+
+Woodlanders, The, 136, 137.
+
+Wordsworth, 35, 113.
+
+Wuthering Heights, 67, 71.
+
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+    +--------------------------------------------------------------+
+    | Typographical errors corrected in text:                      |
+    |                                                              |
+    | Page  50: Curosity replaced with Curiosity                   |
+    | Page  57: "her mind give way" replaced with                  |
+    |           "her mind gave way"                                |
+    | Page 101: idyl replaced with idyll                           |
+    | Page 111: "Dramatic Idyls" replaced with "Dramatic Idylls"   |
+    | Page 152: "English Men of Letter's" replaced with            |
+    |           "English Men of Letters"                           |
+    | Page 152: Brittanica replaced with Britannica                |
+    | Page 168: Shalot replaced with Shalott                       |
+    | Page 170: Mowglie replaced with Mowgli                       |
+    |                                                              |
+    +--------------------------------------------------------------+
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Modern English Books of Power, by
+George Hamlin Fitch
+
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