Adventures Among Books

Adventures Among Books

Of the Essays in this volume Adventures among Books, and Rabs Friend, appeared in Scribners Magazine; and Recollections of Robert Louis Stevenson (to the best of the authors memory) in The North American Review. The Essay on Smollett was in the Anglo-Saxon, which has ceased to appear; and the shorter papers, such as The Confessions of Saint Augustine, in a periodical styled Wit and Wisdom. For The Poems of William Morris the author has to thank the Editor of Longmans Magazine; for The Boy, and Mrs. Radcliffes Novels, the Proprietors of The Cornhill Magazine; for Enchanted Cigarettes, and possibly for The Supernatural in Fiction, the Proprietors of The Idler. The portrait, after Sir William Richmond, R.A., was done about the time when most of the Essays were writtenand that was not yesterday. In an age of reminiscences, is there room for the confessions of a veteran, who remembers a great deal about books and very little about people? I have often wondered that a Biographia Literaria has so seldom been attempteda biography or autobiography of a man in his relations with other minds. Coleridge, to be sure, gave this name to a work of his, but he wandered from his apparent purpose into a world of alien disquisitions. The following pages are frankly bookish, and to the bookish only do they appeal. The habit of reading has been praised as a virtue, and has been denounced as a vice. In no case, if we except the perpetual study of newspapers (which cannot fairly be called reading), is the vice, or the virtue, common. It is more innocent than opium-eating, though, like opium-eating, it unlocks to us artificial paradises. I try to say what I have found in books, what distractions from the world, what teaching (not much), and what consolations. In beginning an autobiographia literaria, an account of how, and in what order, books have appealed to a mind, which books have ever above all things delighted, the author must pray to be pardoned for the sin of egotism. There is no other mind, naturally, of which the author knows so much as of his own. On na que soi, as the poor girl says in one of M. Paul Bourgets novels. In literature, as in love, one can only speak for himself. This author did not, like Fulke Greville, retire into the convent of literature from the strife of the world, rather he was born to be, from the first, a dweller in the cloister of a library. Among the poems which I remember best out of early boyhood is Lucy Ashtons song, in the Bride of Lammermoor: ......Buy Now (To Read More)

Product details

Ebook Number: 1994
Author: Lang, Andrew
Release Date: Dec 1, 1999
Format: eBook
Language: English