Publisher's Synopsis
Excerpt from The Choice of Books, and Other Literary Pieces
This volume consists of essays and lectures, written at various times during the last twenty years, which I have been often urged to arrange in permanent form. It deals solely with books, art, and history not with politics, philosophy, or religion; nor does it touch on any controversy but the perennial problems presented to us by literature and the study of the Past.
One-third of the volume is new. The larger part of the essay on Books, and the whole of that on St. Bernard, are now printed for the first time those on Carlyle and on the French Revolution have not been previously published in England. The other essays have appeared here in the places and at the dates noted in the Table of Contents. And I have to thank the proprietors of the various publications there mentioned for the courtesy with which I am permitted to use them. All have been revised, and some partly re-written.
Five of these pieces, in their first shape, were given as lectures to a popular audience and the colloquial manner has not been expunged from their more mature form.1 All of them are now addressed, not so much to the critic and the student, as to the general reader, who has my chief sympathies. He often needs guid ance in the vast multiplicity of literature, and in sort ing the materials offered him to study. And my aim has been the humble one to popularise a few matured judgments as to typical books, men, and epochs.
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