Historic Articles by Authors

Nothing could have been better than Mr. Emery Walker’s lecture on Letterpress Printing and Illustration, delivered last night at the Arts and Crafts.  A series of most interesting specimens of old printed books and manuscripts was displayed on the screen by means of the magic-lantern, and Mr. Walker’s explanations were as clear and simple as…

This is from this morning’s paper: Mark Twain Letter Sold. Written to Thomas Nast, it Proposed a Joint Tour. A Mark Twain autograph letter brought $43 yesterday at the auction by the Merwin-Clayton Company of the library and correspondence of the late Thomas Nast, cartoonist. The letter is nine pages note-paper, is dated Hartford, Nov….

August 8th.—To-night, as I was trying to keep cool, sitting by a wounded soldier in Armory-square, I was attracted by some pleasant singing in an adjoining ward. As my soldier was asleep, I left him, and entering the ward where the music was, I walk’d halfway down and took a seat by the cot of…

An ancient and famous human institution is in pressing danger. Sir George Campbell has set his face against the time-honoured practice of Falling in Love. Parents innumerable, it is true, have set their faces against it already from immemorial antiquity; but then they only attacked the particular instance, without venturing to impugn the institution itself…

In anything fit to be called by the name of reading, the process itself should be absorbing and voluptuous; we should gloat over a book, be rapt clean out of ourselves, and rise from the perusal, our mind filled with the busiest, kaleidoscopic dance of images, incapable of sleep or of continuous thought. The words,…

As one enters Rome from the Via Ostiensis by the Porta San Paolo, the first object that meets the eye is a marble pyramid which stands close at hand on the left. There are many Egyptian obelisks in Rome—tall, snakelike spires of red sandstone, mottled with strange writings, which remind us of the pillars of…

Do the Phaedrus and the Symposium leave anything to be said on the relationship of love and poetry? In the last analysis, probably not. The poet, however, is not one to keep silence because of a dearth of new philosophical conceptions. As he discovers, with ever fresh wonder, the power of love as muse, each…

Silly Novels by Lady Novelists by George Elliot Silly Novels by Lady Novelists are a genus with many species, determined by the particular quality of silliness that predominates in them—the frothy, the prosy, the pious, or the pedantic.  But it is a mixture of all these—a composite order of feminine fatuity—that produces the largest class…

The Artist and his Audience by A. Clutton-Brock According to Whistler art is not a social activity at all; according to Tolstoy it is nothing else. But art is clearly a social activity and something more; yet no one has yet reconciled the truth in Whistler’s doctrine with the truth in Tolstoy’s. Each leaves out…

As concerns tobacco, there are many superstitions. And the chiefest is this—that there is a STANDARD governing the matter, whereas there is nothing of the kind. Each man’s own preference is the only standard for him, the only one which he can accept, the only one which can command him. A congress of all the…

Creating a Good Title for Your Short Story  By Charles Raymond Barrett Too often the novice considers the title of his story a matter of no import. He looks upon it as a mere handle, the result of some happy afterthought, affixed to the completed story for convenience or reference, just as numbers are placed…

Laureate It is easy to sentimentalise on the subject of “the American spirit”—what it is, may be, or should be. Exponents of various novel political and social theories are particularly given to this practice, nearly always concluding that “true Americanism” is nothing more or less than a national application of their respective individual doctrines. Slightly…

It is the fate of those who toil at the lower employments of life to be rather driven by the fear of evil than attracted by the prospect of good; to be exposed to censure without hope of praise; to be disgraced by miscarriage, or punished for neglect, where success would have been without applause,…

That which Education is to the Individual, Revelation is to the Race. 2 Education is Revelation coming to the Individual Man; and Revelation is Education which has come, and is yet coming, to the Human Race. 3 Whether it can be of any advantage to the science of instruction to contemplate Education in this point…

A Perspective on Edgar Allan Poe  by Arthur Symons The poems of Edgar Allan Poe are the work of a poet who thought persistently about poetry as an art, and would have reduced inspiration to a method. At their best they are perfectly defined by Baudelaire, when he says of Poe’s poetry that it is…