Paulding's Works (Volume 4) (Paperback)

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: BOOK SECOND. CHAPTER I. Which the courteous reader is advised to skip ovor, unlaM peradventure he loves truth better than fiction. The farther we advance in our history, the more do we perceive the advantages of extempore writing. It is wonderful, with what a charming rapidity the thoughts flow, and the pen moves, when thus disembarrassed of all care for the past, all solicitude for the future. Incidents are invented or borrowed at pleasure, and put together with a degree of ease that is perfectly inconceivable by a plodding author, who thinks before he speaks, and stultifies himself with long cogitations as to probability, congruity, and all that sort of thing, which we despise, as appertaining to our ancient and irreconcilable enemy, common sense. It may in truth be affirmed of this new and happy mode of writing, that it very often happens, that it causes less trouble to the author than to the reader, the latter of whom not unfrequently, most especially if he is one of those unreasonable persons who suppose that nature and probability are necessary parts of an historical novel, will be sorely puzzled to find out the motive of an action, or the means by which it was brought about. Vol. i?F But whatever may be the profit of the reader, certain it is, that of the author is amazingly enhanced by the increased velocity attained by this new mode of writing. Certain plodding writers, such as Fielding, Smollet, and others, whom it is unnecessary to name, wrote not above three or four works of this sort in the whole course of their lives; and what was the consequence ? They lived from hand to mouth, as it were, for want of a knowledge of the art of writing extempore; and were obliged to put up with an immortality of fame, which they could never enjoy. Instead of making a ...