[Howard collection]

What is man? The death of Jean. The turning-point of my life. How to make history dates stick. The memorable assassination. A scrap of curious history. Switzerland, the cradle of liberty. At the Shrine of St. Wagner. William Dean Howells. English as she is taught. A simplified alphabet. As concerns interpreting the Deity. Concerning tobacco. The bee. Taming the bicycle. Is Shakespeare dead?

A collection of essays on art, literature, criticism, and society.

Contains 28 stories: The $30,000 bequest -- A dog's tale -- Was it heaven? Or hell? -- The Californian's tale -- A helpless situation -- A telephonic conversation -- Edward Mills and George Benton: a tale -- Saint Joan of Arc -- The five boons of life -- The first writing-machines -- Italian without a master -- Italian with grammar -- A burlesque biography -- General Washington's Negro body-servant -- Wit inspirations of the "two-year-olds" -- An entertaining article -- A letter to the Secretary of the Treasury -- Amended obituaries -- A monument to Adam -- A humane word from Satan -- Introduction to "The new guide of the conversation in Portuguese and English" -- Advice to little girls -- Post-mortem poetry -- A deception -- The danger of lying in bed -- Portrait of King William III -- Does the race of man love a lord? -- Eve's diary.

From the book:It is the fate of sequels to disappoint those who have waited for them; and my David, having been left to kick his heels for more than a lustre in the British Linen Company’s office, must expect his late re-appearance to be greeted with hoots, if not with missiles. Yet, when I remember the days of our explo-rations, I am not without hope. There should be left in our native city some seed of the elect; some long-egged, hot-headed youth must repeat to-day our dreams and wanderings of so many years ago; he will relish the pleasure, which should have been ours, to follow among named streets and numbered houses the country walks of David Balfour, to identify Dean, and Silvermills, and Broughton, and Hope Park, and Pilrig, and poor old Lochend - if it still be standing, and the Figgate Whins - if there be any of them left; or to push (on a long holiday) so far afield as Gillane or the Bass. So, perhaps, his eye shall be opened to behold the series of the generations, and he shall weigh with surprise his momentous and nugatory gift of life. You are still - as when first I saw, as when I last addressed you - in the venerable city which I must always think of as my home. And I have come so far; and the sights and thoughts of my youth pursue me; and I see like a vision the youth of my father, and of his father, and the whole stream of lives flowing down there far in the north, with the sound of laughter and tears, to cast me out in the end, as by a sudden freshet, on these ultimate islands. And I admire and bow my head before the romance of destiny.

Lady Cholmondeley certainly got more than she bargained for when she asked Bernard Shaw for "a few of [his] ideas of socialism." Bernard Shaw's sister-in-law expected a brief summary, a simple user's manual on his political and ethical beliefs. Instead in 1928 she was presented with a great tome that encompasses the meaning of life and just about everything, from marriage and children's upbringing to how to run industry. What she got was one of the great, passionate and indignant expositions of how social injustice destroys human lives. - foreword by Polly Toynbee

The American Notebooks follows chronological order, tracing Hawthorne's development over a period of eighteen years. The individual entries, however, are quite random in their makeup and contain adages, animal folklore, and biblical references that captivated Hawthorne. Observations of people whom he saw in the streets of nineteenth century Salem, Boston, and North Adams, Massachusetts, are mixed with flights of fancy that occurred to Hawthorne as he labored at his writing. Quotations from early eighteenth century newspapers and church books chronicle Hawthorne's lifelong interest in New England history. In this sense, the notebooks provide not only a glimpse of Hawthorne's close observation as a writer but also a picture of New England in the early-to-mid-nineteenth century. - enotes.com.

Introduction by Hal Holbrook. Afterword by David Barrow.

The American claimant MERRY TALES The private history of a campaign that failed Luck A curious experience Mrs. McWilliams and the lightning Meisterschaft, in three acts Playing courier.

The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg My Debut as a Literary Person The 1,000,000 Bank-Note The Esquimau Maiden's Romance My First Lie, and How I Got Out of It The Belated Russian Passport Two Little Tales About Play-Acting Diplomatic Pay and Clothes Is He Living or Is He Dead? My Boyhood Dreams The Austrian Edison Keeping School Again The Death Disk We Ought Never to Do Wrong When People Are Looking A Double-Barreled Detective Story A Petition to the Queen of England

From the book:In the dusk of an October evening, a sensible looking woman of forty came out through an oaken door to a broad landing on the first floor of an old English country-house. A braid of her hair had fallen forward as if she had been stooping over book or pen; and she stood for a moment to smooth it, and to gaze contemplatively - not in the least sentimentally - through the tall, narrow window. The sun was setting, but its glories were at the other side of the house; for this window looked eastward, where the landscape of sheepwalks and pasture land was sobering at the approach of darkness. The lady, like one to whom silence and quiet were luxuries, lingered on the landing for some time. Then she turned towards another door, on which was inscribed, in white letters, Class Room No. 6. Arrested by a whispering above, she paused in the doorway, and looked up the stairs along a broad smooth handrail that swept round in an unbroken curve at each landing, forming an inclined plane from the top to the bottom of the house.

Scarcely two years after Walter Pater's death, Macmillan & Company published Gaston de Latour: An Unfinished Romance. The author of works critical to the formation of the Transition and Modernist periods set his last novel in the turbulent years following the Reformation. Selected chapters first appeared serially in Macmillan's Magazine and the Fortnightly Review, but the posthumous volume edited by Charles L. Shadwell, Pater's long-time friend, remains controversial. For a century readers have seen only a portion of what Pater wrote for Gaston de Latour. Shadwell withheld six manuscript chapters. . Pater's prominence and widening influence in late-nineteenth and early twentieth-century studies makes those missing chapters more intriguing than ever. ELT Press is pleased to publish this long-awaited new edition Gaston de Latour: The Revised Text. Edited from the holographs and based on definitive material incorporating all known fragments, The Revised Text includes the crucial suppressed chapters.

After his journey up from Dover, Shelton was still gathering his luggage at Charing Cross, when the foreign girl passed him, and, in spite of his desire to say something cheering, he could get nothing out but a shame-faced smile. Her figure vanished, wavering into the hurly-burly; one of his bags had gone astray, and so all thought of her soon faded from his mind.

Nous ne savons si le prologue que nous allons mettre sous les yeux du lecteur est bien utile, et cependant nous ne pouvons resister au desir d'en faire, non pas le premier chapitre, mais la preface de ce livre. Plus nous avancons dans la vie, plus nous avancons dans l'art, plus nous demeurons convaincu que rien n'est abrupt et isole, que la nature et la societe marchent par deductions et non par accidents, et que l'evenement, fleur joyeuse ou triste, parfumee ou fetide, souriante ou fatale, qui s'ouvre aujourd'hui sous nos yeux, avait son bouton dans le passe et ses racines parfois dans les jours anterieurs a nos jours comme elle aura son fruit dans l'avenir. Jeune, l'homme prend le temps comme il vient, amoureux de la veille, insoucieux du jour, s'inquietant peu du lendemain. La jeunesse, c'est le printemps avec ses fraiches aurores et ses beaux soirs ; si parfois un orage passe au ciel, il eclate, gronde et s'evanouit, laissant le ciel plus azure, l'atmosphere plus pure, la nature plus souriante qu'auparavant.