Author Description

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1883 edition. Excerpt:...her husband wrote under her picture: "La Raison, si souvent tranchante, atrabiliaire, Toujours dans ses ecrits plait autant que 'He eclaire, L' indulgence, 1' amour, allument son flambeau, C'est la Sagesse en fin, non 1' Ennui peint en beau." All her good work belongs to the eighteenth century; all her inspiration came from the day when society still had animal spirits to fortify it against boredom; when people laughed merrily because they were amused, not satirically to show themselves cleverer than the rest. But with the deeper tendencies of her age she was not in sympathy, and she had neither courage nor power to deal adequately with its serious problems. In her last novel, "The Wanderer," which appeared in 1814, she was led by the influence of the new time to attempt more profound things than she had ventured upon before, and the result was a grotesque sensationalism, even more "deplorable " than the flatness of "Camilla." Madame D'Arblay died on the 6th of January, 1840, at the age of eighty-eight, having outlived her son three years and her husband two-and-twenty. Her father had died in 1814, and from 1818 to 1832 she was occupied in writing his Memoirs from the papers he left behind him. SAMUEL WILBERFORCE. By SIR. G. W. DASENT. In July, 1873, Samuel Wilberforce, Bishop of Winchester, met his death by a fall from a stumbling horse on that " cruel sloping meadow," or, as Lord Granville, the bishop's companion, called it, "on a smooth stretch of turf," near Abinger, in Surrey. That fall called forth an echo of wailing all over England. It was felt that one who, take him for all in all, was the formost prelate in the English Church, had been called away in the twinkling of an...