Occupation: Writer Birth: October 23, 1845 Death: January 28, 1933
Let us also once more rejoice in, and thank God for, the fact that we know nothing about Homer, and practically nothing about Shakespeare..
The Odyssey is, indeed, one of the greatest of all stories, it is the original romance of the West; but the Iliad, though a magnificent poem, is not ….
To pass to the deluge, and beyond it, and to come to close quarters with our proper division, the origin of Romance itself is a very debatable subjec….
Alcoholic drinks, rightly used, are good for body and soul alike, but as a restorative of both there is nothing like brandy..
Miss Austen had shown the infinite possibilities of ordinary and present things for the novelist..
When [wines] were good they pleased my sense, cheered my spirits, improved my moral and intellectual powers, besides enabling me to confer the same b….
We shall not busy ourselves with what men ought to have admired, what they ought to have written, what they ought to have thought, but with what they….
So, then, there abide these three, Aristotle, Longinus, and Coleridge..
The hardest thing to attain... is the appreciation of difference without insisting on superiority..
The Book of History is the Bible of Irony..
It is the unbroken testimony of all history that alcoholic liquors have been used by the strongest, wisest, handsomest, and in every way best races o….
But even gold is not everything: and only a fanatic, and a rather foolish fanatic, would say that this style of fiction summed up and exhausted all t….
But dinner is dinner, a meal at which not so much to eat - it becomes difficult to eat much at it as you grow older - as to drink, to talk, to flirt,….
One of the best known, and one of the least intelligible, facts of literary history is the lateness, in Western European Literature at any rate, of p….
When people cannot write good literature it is perhaps natural that they should lay down rules how good literature should be written..
The transition state of manners and language cannot be too often insisted upon: for this affected the process at both ends, giving the artist in fict….
The Italian prose tale had begun to exercise that influence as early as Chaucer's time: but circumstances and atmosphere were as yet unfavourable for….
But at the time when he wrote, Englishmen, with the rarest exceptions, wrote only in French or Latin; and when they began to write in English, a man ….
Majorities are generally wrong, if only in their reasons for being right..
But the eighteenth century, on the whole, loathed melancholy..
Oratory is, after all, the prose literature of the savage..