Blessing or Curse? (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. 1885. Excerpt: ... CHAPTER XIII. ' A N ' off' day, to-day," St. George says one- -morning, as he enters Ivy Cottage, " and nothing to be done. What on earth are you reading, Lionel? Why, good gracious, it is Carlyle's French Revolution '" "Yes, I hate novels, they are all about the same thing, Love, and if it is love of a happy sort, one says, 'how untrue to life, ' and if it be unhappy, why read about imaginary sorrows, when there are enough real ones in the world?" "You are rather hard on novels, I think; it is, after all, from them that we principally learn our picturesque views of life, and also from works of fiction many unobservant people get more insight into character than they would in years of experience." "What I dislike about the novels of to-day is, that the authors, and above all, authoresses, will always try and describe people they know nothing about. For instance, the other day I was reading a book by Lady somebody (I forget the woman's name), all about a poor navvy, who kept a sick wife, eight children, and an old mother-in-law, on fifteen shillings a week. 'So well did he manage, ' says the authoress, 'that each Saturday he was able to put by five shillings for a dark day, and every Sunday his family had the orthodox British dinner of beef and plum pudding ' Did you ever hear anything so wildly improbable; eleven people living on ten shillings a week, and having a Sunday dinner into the bargain?" St. George laughs, and Lionel being started on one of his favourite hobbies, the literary want of logic, continues: "If only such people as the writer of ' Navvy Sims' would confine themselves to their own class in life, they might produce something readable; but here again comes the same difficulty, they, in their turn, with few exceptions, are described by ...