Adventures Among Books

Transcribed from the 1912 Longmans, Green and Co. edition by David Price, email ccx074@coventry.ac.uk
Contents:
Preface Adventures Among Books Recollections of Robert Louis Stevenson Rab’s Friend Oliver Wendell Holmes Mr. Morris’s Poems Mrs. Radcliffe’s Novels A Scottish Romanticist of 1830 The Confessions of Saint Augustine Smollett Nathaniel Hawthorne The Paradise of Poets Paris and Helen Enchanted Cigarettes Stories and Story-telling The Supernatural in Fiction An Old Scottish Psychical Researcher The Boy
Of the Essays in this volume “Adventures among Books,” and “Rab’s Friend,” appeared in Scribner’s Magazine ; and “Recollections of Robert Louis Stevenson” (to the best of the author’s memory) in The North American Review . The Essay on “Smollett” was in the Anglo-Saxon , which has ceased to appear; and the shorter papers, such as “The Confessions of Saint Augustine,” in a periodical styled Wit and Wisdom . For “The Poems of William Morris” the author has to thank the Editor of Longman’s Magazine ; for “The Boy,” and “Mrs. Radcliffe’s Novels,” the Proprietors of The Cornhill Magazine ; for “Enchanted Cigarettes,” and possibly for “The Supernatural in Fiction,” the Proprietors of The Idler . The portrait, after Sir William Richmond, R.A., was done about the time when most of the Essays were written—and that was not yesterday.
In an age of reminiscences, is there room for the confessions of a veteran, who remembers a great deal about books and very little about people? I have often wondered that a Biographia Literaria has so seldom been attempted—a biography or autobiography of a man in his relations with other minds. Coleridge, to be sure, gave this name to a work of his, but he wandered from his apparent purpose into a world of alien disquisitions. The following pages are frankly bookish, and to the bookish only do they appeal. The habit of reading has been praised as a virtue, and has been denounced as a vice. In no case, if we except the perpetual study of newspapers (which cannot fairly be called reading), is the vice, or the virtue, common. It is more innocent than opium-eating, though, like opium-eating, it unlocks to us artificial paradises. I try to say what I have found in books, what distractions from the world, what teaching (not much), and what consolations.