The Living Age Volume 264 (Paperback)

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1910 Excerpt: ...to say what they are all about--what are they not about? Yet the book is irresistible, and not to be laid aside; and, what is the strongest test of all, it is so contagious in style and manner that after reading it one has a fatal tendency to try to imitate it; it produces a kind of mental intoxication, in which one feels capable de tout--of observing and loving and interpreting human nature in the same large and easy way. Thackeray must have had the special gift of writing exactly as fast as he thought. If a man thinks faster than he writes, the result is abruptness of transition, a disconnected allusiveness, a sense of flying leaps and uneven progress. If he thinks slower than he writes, there is a sense of costive reluctance--be wades, as Tennyson said, in a sea of glue. But with Thackeray the word is the thought; it has the sense of fluent talk without self-consciousness or strain. It would be difficult to find a more complete contrast than that presented by Leslie Stephen to Thackeray. The "Hours in a Library" contain an immense amount of admirable literary appreciation, stated with a temperate justice and a reasonable candor which is above pral.se. These criticisms read like legal judgments passed upon writers by a man with a wide knowledge of the subject and distinct preferences of his own, before whom the cause of the writer has been pleaded by an advocate, ou the one hand, of indiscriminate admiration and headlong eulogy, aud on the other band by an advocate of confessed hostility and wholehearted contempt. The two extremes seem to be always in the mind of the presiding judge, and he delivers his decision with logical clearness and an extreme sense of responsibility. Hardly ever do his own personal preferences betray him into bias or hast...