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Excerpt: Vanity Fair: Volume Three (Chapters Fifty-one through Sixty-seven) by William Makepeace Thackeray.

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Excerpt: Othello by William Shakespeare.

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Excerpt: An Outcast of the Islands by Joseph Conrad.

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Excerpt: Underwoods by Robert Louis Stevenson.

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Contents DEDICATION................................................................................................................................... 6 BOOK I. In English ........................................................................................8 I ? ENVOY ........................................................................................................................................ 8 II ? A SONG OF THE ROAD .......................................................................................................... 8 III ? THE CANOE SPEAKS ............................................................................................................ 9 IV...................................................................................................................................................... 10 V ? THE HOUSE BEAUTIFUL .....................................................................................................11 VI ? A VISIT FROM THE SEA .................................................................................................... 12 VII ? TO A GARDENER..........................................

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Excerpt: The Palimpsest Review is the student literary publication for the Pennsylvania State University campuses outside the University Park main campus. All the short stories and poems published herein are the products of students enrolled on those campuses during the academic year prior to the semester of publication....

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Contents From the Editor?s Desk ................................................................. 5 Poetry ............................................................................................ 9 Evelyn Brady ?Safeguard? .....................................................................................10 Jenna Boyle ?Last Night? .......................................................................................12 Kate F. Van Schaick (Judge?s Selection for Best Poem) ?Ruskie? ............................. 14 Michael Riedl ?Little Round Top, Since July 1863? ................................................16 Nancy Nottingham ?In Pursuit of Scholarship? ......................................................17 Arturo Zilleruelo ?On Haven Fair Road? ................................................................18 Bryan Dondero ?Dandelion Sutra? ........................................................................20 Arturo Zilleruelo ?Girl? .........................................................................................21 Laura Guthrie ?night?s flight of fancy? ......................................................

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Excerpt: Welcome to the second volume of the Best of Four. We hope you enjoy reading it as much as we have enjoyed bringing it to you. The primary purpose of Best of Four is to bring the best writing produced in English 004 to the widest possible audience. Our students have important stories to tell and powerful voices waiting to be harnessed. The students who read these essays will learn that they too have permission to state what is important to them in a public voice....

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Contents 5 ............................................................................................... How to Use This Magazine 6 .................................................................................................... What Is College Writing? 7 ........................................................................................................... The Writing Process 8 ............................................................................................................. Writing for a Public 10 .............................................................................. Boston?s Treasure by Julio Rodriguez 11 ..................................................................................... Life is a Beach by Gerard Delisio 13 ................................................................................................ Dreamland by Mat Ciprich 14 ............................................................................... The Central Hotel by Jacob Gerhard 15 ....................................................................... My Hero, Uncle Bob by Deirdre Haubert 16 .............................

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Excerpt: The writer of a book which copies the manners and language of Queen Anne?s time, must not omit the Dedication to the Patron; and I ask leave to inscribe this volume to your Lordship, for the sake of the great kindness and friendship which I owe to you and yours. My volume will reach you when the Author is on his voyage to a country where your name is as well known as here. Wherever I am, I shall gratefully regard you; and shall not be the less welcomed in America because I am, Your obliged friend and servant....

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Contents PREFACE. ........................................................................................................................................ 6 BOOK I THE EARLY YOUTH OF HENRY ESMOND, UP TO THE TIME OF HIS LEAVING TRINITY COLLEGE, IN CAMBRIDGE.....................................................................................11 CHAPTER I AN ACCOUNT OF THE FAMILY OF ESMOND OF CASTLEWOOD HALL ..................................... 14 CHAPTER II RELATES HOW FRANCIS, FOURTH VISCOUNT, ARRIVES AT CASTLEWOOD........................... 19 CHAPTER III WHITHER IN THE TIME OF THOMAS, THIRD VISCOUNT, I HAD PRECEDED HIM AS PAGE TO ISABELLA ............................................................................................................................................................. 26 CHAPTER IV I AM PLACED UNDER A POPISH PRIEST AND BRED TO THAT RELIGION.?VISCOUNTESS CASTLEWOOD .................................................................................................................................................... 36 CHAPTER V MY SUPERIORS ARE ENGAGED IN PLOTS FOR THE RESTORATION OF KING JAMES II. ...... 42 CH...

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Excerpt: Advertisement. The story of ?Catherine,? which appeared in Fraser?s Magazine in 1839-40, was written by Mr. Thackeray, under the name of Ikey Solomons, Jun., to counteract the injurious influence of some popular fictions of that day, which made heroes of highwaymen and burglars, and created a false sympathy for the vicious and criminal....

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Excerpt: It was about the beginning of September, 1664, that I, mong the rest of my neighbors, heard in ordinary dis course that the plague was returned again in Holland; for it had been very violent there, and particularly at Amsterdam and Rotterdam, in the year 1663, whither, they say, it was brought, some said from Italy, others from the Levant, among some goods which were brought home by their Turkey fleet; others said it was brought from Candia; others from Cyprus. It mattered not from whence it came; but all agreed it was come into Holland again....

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Excerpt: Preface By Way Of Criticism. These studies are collected from the monthly press. One appeared in the New Quarterly, one in MacMillan?s, and the rest in the Cornhill Magazine. To the Cornhill I owe a double debt of thanks; first, that I was received there in the very best society, and under the eye of the very best of editors; and second, that the proprietors have allowed me to republish so considerable an amount of copy....

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Contents PREFACE BY WAY OF CRITICISM. ........................................................................................... 4 CHAPTER I ? VICTOR HUGO?S ROMANCES ........................................................................ 15 CHAPTER II ? SOME ASPECTS OF ROBERT BURNS.......................................................... 34 CHAPTER III ? WALT WHITMAN............................................................................................. 63 CHAPTER IV ? HENRY DAVID THOREAU: HIS CHARACTER AND OPINIONS........... 84 CHAPTER V ? YOSHIDA-TORAJIRO..................................................................................... 107 CHAPTER VI ? FRANCOIS VILLON, STUDENT, POET, AND HOUSEBREAKER.........117 CHAPTER VII ? CHARLES OF ORLEANS ............................................................................ 141 CHAPTER VIII ? SAMUEL PEPYS .......................................................................................... 170 CHAPTER IX ? JOHN KNOX AND HIS RELATIONS TO WOMEN .................................. 190...

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Excerpt: Chapter 1. The Foreigner At Home. ?This is no my ain house; I ken by the biggin? o?t.? Two recent books* one by Mr. Grant White on England, one on France by the diabolically clever Mr. Hillebrand, may well have set people thinking on the divisions of races and nations. Such thoughts should arise with particular congruity and force to inhabitants of that United Kingdom, peopled from so many different stocks, babbling so many different dialects, and offering in its extent such singular contrasts, from the busiest over-population to the unkindliest desert, from the Black Country to the Moor of Rannoch. It is not only when we cross the seas that we go abroad; there are foreign parts of England; and the race that has conquered so wide an empire has not yet managed to assimilate the islands whence she sprang. Ireland, Wales, and the Scottish mountains still cling, in part, to their old Gaelic speech. It was but the other day that English triumphed in Cornwall, and they still show in Mousehole, on St. Michael?s Bay, the house of the last Cornish-speaking woman. English itself, which will now frank the traveller through the most of...

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Contents CHAPTER I: THE FOREIGNER AT HOME ..................................................................................... 5 CHAPTER II: SOME COLLEGE MEMORIES................................................................................ 14 CHAPTER III: OLD MORTALITY .................................................................................................. 20 CHAPTER IV: A COLLEGE MAGAZINE ...................................................................................... 28 CHAPTER V: AN OLD SCOTCH GARDENER ............................................................................. 36 CHAPTER VI: PASTORAL .............................................................................................................. 41 CHAPTER VII: THE MANSE .......................................................................................................... 48 CHAPTER VIII: MEMOIRS OF AN ISLET .................................................................................... 53 CHAPTER IX: THOMAS STEVENSON ? CIVIL ENGINEER...................................................... 58 CHAPTER X: TALK AND TALKERS ....................

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Excerpt: Welcome to the fifth volume of Best of Four. We hope you enjoy reading it as much as we have enjoyed bringing it to you. The purpose of Best of Four is to bring the best writing produced in English 004 each fall semester to the widest audience possible. Our students have important stories to tell and powerful voices to be heard. The students who read these essays will learn that they too have permission to state what is important to them in a public voice....

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Contents How to Use This Magazine .............................................................................................................. 3 High School to College Andrew Makhoul ........................................................................................ 4 Ignoring Problems Creates More! Ashley Morris................................................................................ 5 Hang in There Brad Hart ................................................................................................................. 6 Nate Brandi Saveri ........................................................................................................................... 7 The Best Birthday Is the Sixteenth Brent Heimbach ......................................................................... 9 Sharing the Bread of Angels Christa Sist ......................................................................................... 10 Tragedy in the Night Danielle Gehman .......................................................................................... 11 My Grandfather David Smith ..............................................

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Introduction: Benjamin Franklin was born in Milk Street, Boston, on January 6, 1706. His father, Josiah Franklin, was a tallow chandler who married twice, and of his seventeen children Benjamin was the youngest son. His schooling ended at ten, and at twelve he was bound apprentice to his brother James, a printer, who published the ?New England Courant.? To this journal he became a contributor, and later was for a time its nominal editor....

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Excerpt: He sat, in defiance of municipal orders, astride the gun Zam Zammah on her brick platform opposite the old Ajaib-Gher -the Wonder House, as the natives call the Lahore Museum. Who hold Zam-Zammah, that ?fire-breathing dragon?, hold the Punjab, for the great green-bronze piece is always first of the conqueror?s loot....

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Excerpt: There is nothing more disenchanting to man than to be shown the springs and mechanism of any art. All our arts and occupations lie wholly on the surface; it is on the surface that we perceive their beauty, fitness, and significance; and to pry below is to be appalled by their emptiness and shocked by the coarseness of the strings and pulleys....

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Excerpt: So oft as I with state of present time, The image of the antique world compare, When as mans age was in his freshest prime, And the first blossome of faire vertue bare, Such oddes I finde twixt those, and these which are, As that, through long continuance of his course, Me seemes the world is runne quite out of square, From the first point of his appointed sourse, And being once amisse growes daily wourse and wourse....

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Excerpt: Chapter 1. Miriam, Hilda, Kenyon, Donatello Four individuals, in whose fortunes we should be glad to interest the reader, happened to be standing in one of the saloons of the sculpture-gallery in the Capitol at Rome. It was that room (the first, after ascending the staircase) in the centre of which reclines the noble and most pathetic figure of the Dying Gladiator, just sinking into his death-swoon. Around the walls stand the Antinous, the Amazon, the Lycian Apollo, the Juno; all famous productions of antique sculpture, and still shining in the undiminished majesty and beauty of their ideal life, although the marble that embodies them is yellow with time, and perhaps corroded by the damp earth in which they lay buried for centuries. Here, likewise, is seen a symbol (as apt at this moment as it was two thousand years ago) of the Human Soul, with its choice of Innocence or Evil close at hand, in the pretty figure of a child, clasping a dove to her bosom, but assaulted by a snake....

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Excerpt: One of the few drawing-rooms where, under the Restoration, the Archbishop of Besancon was sometimes to be seen, was that of the Baronne de Watteville, to whom he was particularly attached on account of her religious sentiments. A word as to this lady, the most important lady of Besancon....

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Excerpt: Across the Plains by Robert Louis Stevenson.

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Contents CHAPTER I - ACROSS THE PLAIN........................3 CHAPTER II - THE OLD PACIFIC CAPITAL........38 CHAPTER III - FONTAINEBLEAU VILLAGE COMMUNITIES OF PAINTERS...............................52 CHAPTER IV - EPILOGUE TO ?AN INLAND VOYAGE?................................................................. 68 CHAPTER V - RANDOM MEMORIES.................79 CHAPTER VI - RANDOM MEMORIES................89 CHAPTER VII - THE LANTERN-BEARERS........97 CHAPTER VIII - A CHAPTER ON DREAMS......107 CHAPTER IX - BEGGARS...................................118 CHAPTER X - LETTER TO A YOUNG GENTLEMAN WHO PROPOSES TO EMBRACE THE CAREER OF ART............................................127 CHAPTER XII - A CHRISTMAS SERMON.........140...

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Excerpt: Chapter 1. ?Won?t you stay a little longer?? the hostess asked while she held the girl?s hand and smiled. ?It?s too early for every one to go--it?s too absurd.? Mrs. Churchley inclined her head to one side and looked gracious; she flourished about her face, in a vaguely protecting sheltering way, an enormous fan of red feathers. Everything in her composition, for Adela Chart, was enormous. She had big eyes, big teeth, big shoulders, big hands, big rings and bracelets, big jewels of every sort and many of them. The train of her crimson dress was longer than any other; her house was huge; her drawing-room, especially now that the company had left it, looked vast, and it offered to the girl?s eyes a collection of the largest sofas and chairs, pictures, mirrors, clocks, that she had ever beheld. Was Mrs. Churchley?s fortune also large, to account for so many immensities? Of this Adela could know nothing, but it struck her, while she smiled sweetly back at their entertainer, that she had better try to find out. Mrs. Churchley had at least a high-hung carriage drawn by the tallest horses, and in the Row she was to be seen perched...

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Excerpt: Chapter 1. On a brilliant day in May, in the year 1868, a gentle man was reclining at his ease on the great circular divan which at that period occupied the centre of the Salon Carre, in the Museum of the Louvre. This commodious ottoman has since been removed, to the extreme regret of all weak-kneed lovers of the fine arts, but the gentleman in question had taken serene possession of its softest spot, and, with his head thrown back and his legs outstretched, was staring at Murillo?s beautiful moon-borne Madonna in profound enjoyment of his posture. He had removed his hat, and flung down beside him a little red guide-book and an opera-glass....

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Excerpt: Chapter 1. An old lady, in a high drawing-room, had had her chair moved close to the fire, where she sat knitting and warming her knees. She was dressed in deep mourning; her face had a faded nobleness, tempered, however, by the somewhat illiberal compression assumed by her lips in obedience to something that was passing in her mind. She was far from the lamp, but though her eyes were fixed upon her active needles she was not looking at them. What she really saw was quite another train of affairs....

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Excerpt: Chapter 1. Miriam, Hilda, Kenyon, Donatello Four individuals, in whose fortunes we should be glad to interest the reader, happened to be standing in one of the saloons of the sculpture-gallery in the Capitol at Rome. It was that room (the first, after ascending the staircase) in the centre of which reclines the noble and most pathetic figure of the Dying Gladiator, just sinking into his death-swoon. Around the walls stand the Antinous, the Amazon, the Lycian Apollo, the Juno; all famous productions of antique sculpture, and still shining in the undiminished majesty and beauty of their ideal life, although the marble that embodies them is yellow with time, and perhaps corroded by the damp earth in which they lay buried for centuries. Here, likewise, is seen a symbol (as apt at this moment as it was two thousand years ago) of the Human Soul, with its choice of Innocence or Evil close at hand, in the pretty figure of a child, clasping a dove to her bosom, but assaulted by a snake....

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Excerpt: She walks in beauty She walks in beauty, like the night Of cloudless climes and starry skies; And all that?s best of dark and bright Meet in her aspect and her eyes: Thus mellowed to that tender light Which heaven to gaudy day denies....

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Contents SHE WALKS IN BEAUTY.........................................3 ON THIS DAY I COMPLETE MY THIRTY-SIXTH YEAR ....................................................................3 TO CAROLINE ........................................................5 FAREWELL TO THE MUSE ...................................6 ?And wilt thou weep when I am low?? .......................7 OSSIAN?S ADDRESS TO THE SUN IN ?CARTHON? .........................................................8 ?DEAR DOCTOR, I HAVE READ YOUR PLAY? ...9 ?So we?ll go no more a roving? .................................11 ?And thou art dead, as young and fair? ...................12 THE DESTRUCTION OF SENNACHERIB ..........14 DARKNESS ..............................................................15 WHEN WE TWO PARTED ....................................17 TRANSLATION FROM ANACREON ...................18 TO CAROLINE .......................................................19 EPISTLE TO AUGUSTA ........................................20 ODE TO NAPOLEON BUONAPARTE ................23 AND THOU ART DEAD, AS YOUNG AND FAIR ......................................................................

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Excerpt: It falles me here to write of Chastity, That fairest vertue, farre aboue the rest; For which what needs me fetch from Faery Forreine ensamples, it to haue exprest? Sith it is shrined in my Soueraines brest, And form?d so liuely in each perfect part That to all Ladies, which haue it profest, Need but behold the pourtraict of her hart, If pourtrayd it might be by any liuing art....

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Excerpt: Essays of Michel De Montaigne, translated by Charles Cotton, Ed. William Carew Hazilitt.

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Contents CHAPTER I OF PROFIT AND HONESTY................................................................................... 4 CHAPTER II OF REPENTANCE ................................................................................................. 21 CHAPTER III OF THREE COMMERCES ................................................................................. 36 CHAPTER IV OF DIVERSION .................................................................................................... 50 CHAPTER V ................................................................................................................................... 61 CHAPTER VI OF COACHES ..................................................................................................... 129 CHAPTER VII OF THE INCONVENIENCE OF GREATNESS ............................................ 150 CHAPTER VIII OF THE ART OF CONFERENCE ................................................................. 156 CHAPTER IX OF VANITY.......................................................................................................... 181 CHAPTER X OF MANAGING THE WILL ...................

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Excerpt: ACT I. SCENE I. Rome. A street. [Enter FLAVIUS, MARULLUS, and certain Commoners.] FLAVIUS: Hence! home, you idle creatures get you home: Is this a holiday? what! know you not, Being mechanical, you ought not walk Upon a laboring day without the sign Of your profession? Speak, what trade art thou? First Commoner: Why, sir, a carpenter. MARULLUS: Where is thy leather apron and thy rule? What dost thou with thy best apparel on? You, sir, what trade are you? Second Commoner: Truly, sir, in respect of a fine workman, I am but, as you would say, a cobbler....

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Excerpt: Landfall and departure mark the rhythmical swing of a seaman?s life and of a ship?s career. From land to land is the most concise definition of a ship?s earthly fate. A ?Departure? is not what a vain people of landsmen may think. The term ?Landfall? is more easily understood; you fall in with the land, and it is a matter of a quick eye and of a clear atmosphere....

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Contents: I. Landfalls and Departures IV. Emblems of Hope VII. The Fine Art X. Cobwebs and Gossamer XIII. The Weight of the Burden XVI. Overdue and Missing XX. The Grip of the Land XXII. The Character of the Foe XXV. Rules of East and West...

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Excerpt: Right well I wote most mighty Soueraine, That all this famous antique history, Of some th?aboundance of an idle braine Will iudged be, and painted forgery, Rather then matter of iust memory, Sith none, that breatheth liuing aire, does know, Where is that happy land of Faery, Which I so much do vaunt, yet no where show, But vouch antiquities, which no body can know....

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Excerpt: ACT I. SCENE I. The king of Navarre?s park. [Enter FERDINAND king of Navarre, BIRON, LONGAVILLE and DUMAIN.] FERDINAND: Let fame, that all hunt after in their lives, Live register?d upon our brazen tombs And then grace us in the disgrace of death; When, spite of cormorant devouring Time, The endeavor of this present breath may buy That honor which shall bate his scythe?s keen edge And make us heirs of all eternity. Therefore, brave conquerors,--for so you are, That war against your own affections And the huge army of the world?s desires,-- Our late edict shall strongly stand in force: Navarre shall be the wonder of the world; Our court shall be a little Academe, Still and contemplative in living art. You three, Biron, Dumain, and Longaville....

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Excerpt: From my boyish days I had always felt a great perplexity on one point in Macbeth. It was this: the knocking at the gate, which succeeds to the murder of Duncan, produced to my feelings an effect for which I never could account. The effect was, that it reflected back upon the murder a peculiar awfulness and a depth of solemnity; yet, however obstinately I endeavored with my understanding to comprehend this, for many years I never could see why it should produce such an effect....

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Contents On the Knocking at the Gate, in Macbeth....................................................4 On Murder, Considered as One of the Fine Arts .........................................9 LECTURE..................................................................................................... 11 Second Paper on Murder, Considered as One of the Fine Arts ...................37 Joan of Arc .....................................................................................................51 In Reference to M. Michelet?s History of France.........................................51 THE ENGLISH MAIL-COACH; ...............................................................85 GOING DOWN WITH VICTORY...........................................................104 THE VISION OF SUDDEN DEATH........................................................ 112 Dream-Fugue...............................................................................................129 On the above Theme of Sudden Death .......................................................129 Dinner, Real and Reputed ......................................................................

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Excerpt: Reprinted Pieces by Charles Dickens.

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Contents THE LONG VOYAGE ...................................................................................................................... 5 THE BEGGING-LETTER WRITER ........................................................................................... 14 A CHILD?S DREAM OF A STAR................................................................................................. 21 OUR ENGLISH WATERING-PLACE ......................................................................................... 24 OUR FRENCH WATERING-PLACE........................................................................................... 33 BILL-STICKING ............................................................................................................................ 46 LYING AWAKE.............................................................................................................................. 62 THE GHOST OF ART.................................................................................................................... 69 OUT OF TOWN .........................................................................................

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Excerpt: The incident recorded in this sketch took place towards the end of the month of November, 1809, the moment when Napoleon?s fugitive empire attained the apogee of its splendor. The trumpet-blasts of Wagram were still sounding an echo in the heart of the Austrian monarchy. Peace was being signed between France and the Coalition. Kings and princes came to perform their orbits, like stars, round Napoleon, who gave himself the pleasure of dragging all Europe in his train--a magnificent experiment in the power he afterwards displayed at Dresden. Never, as contemporaries tell us, did Paris see entertainments more superb than those which preceded and followed the sovereign?s marriage with an Austrian archduchess. Never, in the most splendid days of the Monarchy, had so many crowned heads thronged the shores of the Seine, never had the French aristocracy been so rich or so splendid. The diamonds lavishly scattered over the women?s dresses, and the gold and silver embroidery on the uniforms contrasted so strongly with the penury of the Republic, that the wealth of the globe seemed to be rolling through the drawing-rooms of Paris. Int...

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Introduction: In several of the dialogues of Plato, doubts have arisen among his interpreters as to which of the various subjects discussed in them is the main thesis. The speakers have the freedom of conversation; no severe rules of art restrict them, and sometimes we are inclined to think, with one of the dramatis personae in the Theaetetus, that the digressions have the greater interest....

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Excerpt: The opening of the eyes of Mrs Chick Miss Tox, all unconscious of any such rare appearances in connection with Mr. Dombey?s house, as scaffoldings and ladders, and men with their heads tied up in pocket-handkerchiefs, glaring in at the windows like flying genii or strange birds,--having breakfasted one morning at about this eventful period of time, on her customary viands; to wit, one French roll rasped, one egg new laid (or warranted to be), and one little pot of tea, wherein was infused one little silver scoopful of that herb on behalf of Miss Tox, and one little silver scoopful on behalf of the teapot--a flight of fancy in which good housekeepers delight; went upstairs to set forth the bird waltz on the harpsichord, to water and arrange the plants, to dust the nick-nacks, and, according to her daily custom, to make her little drawing-room the garland of Princess?s Place....

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Excerpt: A chapter of which the last page only is of any importance comedy is a game played to throw reflections upon social life, and it deals with human nature in the drawing-room of civilized men and women, where we have no dust of the struggling outer world, no mire, no violent crashes, to make the correctness of the representation convincing. Credulity is not wooed through the impressionable senses; nor have we recourse to the small circular glow of the watchmaker?s eye to raise in bright relief minutest grains of evidence for the routing of incredulity....

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Excerpt: We, who can recall the consulship of Plancus, and quite respectable, old-fogyfied times, re member amongst other amusements which we had as children the pictures at which we were permitted to look. There was Boydell?s Shakespeare, black and ghastly gallery of murky Opies, glum Northcotes, straddling Fuselis! there were Lear, Oberon, Hamlet, with starting muscles, rolling eyeballs, and long pointing quivering fingers; there was little Prince Arthur (Northcote) crying, in white satin, and bidding good Hubert not put out his eyes; there was Hubert crying; there was little Rutland being run through the poor little body by bloody Clifford; there was Cardinal Beaufort (Reynolds) gnashing his teeth, and grinning and howling demoniacally on his death-bed (a picture frightful to the present day); there was Lady Hamilton (Romney) waving a torch, and dancing before a black background,--a melancholy museum indeed. Smirke?s delightful ?Seven Ages? only fitfully relieved its general gloom. We did not like to inspect it unless the elders were present, and plenty of lights and company were in the room....

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Excerpt: ACT I. SCENE I. An apartment in the DUKE?S palace. [Enter DUKE VINCENTIO, ESCALUS, Lords and Attendants.] DUKE VINCENTIO: Escalus. ESCALUS: My lord. DUKE VINCENTIO: Of government the properties to unfold, Would seem in me to affect speech and discourse; Since I am put to know that your own science Exceeds, in that, the lists of all advice My strength can give you: then no more remains, But that to your sufficiency as your Worth is able, And let them work. The nature of our people, Our city?s institutions, and the terms For common justice, you?re as pregnant in As art and practice hath enriched any That we remember....

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Excerpt: The Poetics of Aristotle translated by S. H. Butcher.

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Analysis of Contents I ?Imitation? the common principle of the Arts of Poetry. II The Objects of Imitation. III The Manner of Imitation. IV The Origin and Development of Poetry. V Definition of the Ludicrous, and a brief sketch of the rise of Comedy. VI Definition of Tragedy. VII The Plot must be a Whole. VIII The Plot must be a Unity. IX (Plot continued.) Dramatic Unity. X (Plot continued.) Definitions of Simple and Complex Plots. XI (Plot continued.) Reversal of the Situation, Recognition, and Tragic or disastrous Incident defined and explained. XII The ?quantitative parts? of Tragedy defined. XIII (Plot continued.) What constitutes Tragic Action. XIV (Plot continued.) The tragic emotions of pity and fear should spring out of the Plot itself. XV The element of Character in Tragedy....

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Preface: It is the fashion to call every story controversial that deals with times when controversy or a war of religion was raging; but it should be remembered that there are some which only attempt to portray human feelings as affected by the events that such warfare occasioned. ?Old Mortality? and ?Woodstock? are not controversial tales, and the ?Chaplet of Pearls? is so quite as little. It only aims at drawing certain scenes and certain characters as the convulsions of the sixteenth century may have affected them, and is, in fact, like all historical romance, the shaping of the conceptions that the imagination must necessarily form when dwelling upon the records of history. That faculty which might be called the passive fancy, and might almost be described in Portia?s song....