Recreations of a Recluse (Volume 1) (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.1870 Excerpt: ... ABOUT INFEBRING THE MAN FBOM THE BOOK. Jl (fee oi ion -zqmtnx. One of those essays which the author of "The Caxtons" collected into a volume, a quarter of a century at least before he devoted his practised pen to the everyway riper series entitled "Caxtoniana," takes for its theme the difference between Authors and the impression conveyed of them by their works. Lord Lytton, in that essay, expresses his belief that there is much less difference between the author and his works than is currently supposed; and that it is usually in the "physical appearance" of the writer--his manners, his mien, his exterior, that he falls short of the ideal a reasonable man forms of him--rarely in his mind. The feeling of disappointment is accordingly treated as usually a sign of the weak mind of him who experiences it, --" a foolish, apprentice-sort of disposition, that judges of everything great by the criterion of a puppet-show, and expects as much out of the common way in a celebrated author as in the lord mayor's coach." That shrewd and sensible people are apt, nevertheless, to utterly miscalculate the man in the author, is an every-day truism in practical life. "Had any one formerly brought me to Erasmus," writes Montaigne, " I should hardly have believed but that all was adage and apophthegm he spoke to his man or his hostess." Whereas Erasmus, depend upon it, cast no such pearls as epigram or rhetorical nourish before any such swine as the body-man that ran his errands, or the crone that did his chares. But Montaigne's impression was one common in all ages, and to, and about, all sorts of men. Izaak Walton tells us that many and many turned out of their road purposely to see Richard Hooker, in his parsonage at Borne, whose life and learning were so muc...