Classic Articles on Writing

Is it true that the sun of a man’s mentality touches noon at forty and then begins to wane toward setting? Doctor Osler is charged with saying so. Maybe he said it, maybe he didn’t; I don’t know which it is. But if he said it, I can point him to a case which proves […]

John Dyer, of whom I have no other account to give than his own letters, published with Hughes’s correspondence, and the notes added by the editor, have afforded me, was born in 1700, the second son of Robert Dyer of Aberglasney, in Caermarthenshire, a solicitor of great capacity and note. He passed through Westminster school […]

Le Monastier is the chief place of a hilly canton in Haute Loire, the ancient Velay.  As the name betokens, the town is of monastic origin; and it still contains a towered bulk of monastery and a church of some architectural pretensions, the seat of an arch-priest and several vicars.  It stands on the side […]

IN the lecture which it is my privilege to deliver before you to- night I do not desire to give you any abstract definition of beauty at all. For we who are working in art cannot accept any theory of beauty in exchange for beauty itself, and, so far from desiring to isolate it in […]

In my own case there followed my acquaintance with these authors certain Boeotian years, when if I did not go backward I scarcely went forward in the paths I had set out upon. They were years of the work, of the over-work, indeed, which falls to the lot of so many that I should be […]

This truly remarkable book is printed on dirty gray blotting paper, on each page of which is a mere dot of print over a large I of vacancy. There are seldom more than ten lines on a page, and it would be better if most of those lines were not there at all. Either Mr. […]

The Greek language is being ousted from education, here, in France, and in America.  The speech of the earliest democracies is not democratic enough for modern anarchy.  There is nothing to be gained, it is said, by a knowledge of Greek.  We have not to fight the battle of life with Hellenic waiters; and, even […]

Two things are necessary in any neighbourhood where we propose to spend a life: a desert and some living water.There are many parts of the earth’s face which offer the necessary combination of a certain wildness with a kindly variety.  A great prospect is desirable, but the want may be otherwise supplied; even greatness can […]

 I understand the idea, the BAZAR invites several of us to write upon the above text. It means the change in my life’s course which introduced what must be regarded by me as the most IMPORTANT condition of my career. But it also implies—without intention, perhaps—that that turning-point ITSELF was the creator of the new […]

1. Great men are more distinguished by range and extent, than by originality. If we require the originality which consists in weaving, like a spider, their web from their own bowels; in finding clay, and making bricks, and building the house; no great men are original. Nor does valuable originality consist in unlikeness to other […]