Adventures Among Books
by Andrew Lang
- Pages
- about 265
- Category
- History
- Language
- English
- Reading time
- 4.8 h at 250 wpm
From the opening
Of the Essays in this volume "Adventures among Books," and "Rab's
Friend," appeared in Scribner's Magazine; and "Recollections of Robert
Louis Stevenson" (to the best of the author's 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
Longman's Magazine; for "The Boy," and "Mrs. Radcliffe's 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 written--and 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 attempted--a 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.
A short sample. Read the whole book
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