Essays in Little

Transcribed from the 1891 Henry and Co. edition by David Price, email ccx074@pglaf.org
by ANDREW LANG.
with portrait of the author .
london: HENRY AND CO., BOUVERIE STREET, E.C. 1891.
Printed by Hazell , Watson , & Vincy , Ld. , London and Aylesbury .
CONTENTS.
Preface Alexandre Dumas Mr. Stevenson’s works Thomas Haynes Bayly Théodore de Banville Homer and the Study of Greek The Last Fashionable Novel Thackeray Dickens Adventures of Buccaneers The Sagas Charles Kingsley Charles Lever: His books, adventures and misfortunes The poems of Sir Walter Scott John Bunyan To a Young Journalist Mr. Kipling’s stories
Of the following essays, five are new, and were written for this volume. They are the paper on Mr. R. L. Stevenson, the “Letter to a Young Journalist,” the study of Mr. Kipling, the note on Homer, and “The Last Fashionable Novel.” The article on the author of “Oh, no! we never mention Her,” appeared in the New York Sun , and was suggested by Mr. Dana, the editor of that journal. The papers on Thackeray and Dickens were published in Good Words , that on Dumas appeared in Scribner’s Magazine , that on M. Théodore de Banville in The New Quarterly Review . The other essays were originally written for a newspaper “Syndicate.” They have been re-cast, augmented, and, to a great extent, re-written.
A. L.
Alexandre Dumas is a writer, and his life is a topic, of which his devotees never weary. Indeed, one lifetime is not long enough wherein to tire of them. The long days and years of Hilpa and Shalum, in Addison—the antediluvian age, when a picnic lasted for half a century and a courtship for two hundred years, might have sufficed for an exhaustive study of Dumas. No such study have I to offer, in the brief seasons of our perishable days. I own that I have not read, and do not, in the circumstances, expect to read, all of Dumas, nor even the greater part of his thousand volumes. We only dip a cup in that sparkling spring, and drink, and go on,—we cannot hope to exhaust the fountain, nor to carry away with us the well itself. It is but a word of gratitude and delight that we can say to the heroic and indomitable master, only an ave of friendship that we can call across the bourne to the shade of the Porthos of fiction. That his works (his best works) should be even still more widely circulated than they are; that the young should read them, and learn frankness, kindness, generosity—should esteem the tender heart, and the gay, invincible wit; that the old should read them again, and find forgetfulness of trouble, and taste the anodyne of dreams, that is what we desire.