P. 118. Fielding.—'What a master of composition Fielding was! Upon my word, I think the Oedipus Tyrannus, The Alchemist, and Tom Jones, the three most perfect plots ever planned.... How charming, how wholesome, Fielding always is!'—S. T. Coleridge. Table Talk.
P. 123. Erasmus.—The translation is the work of Nathaniel Bailey, lexicographer and schoolmaster, who died in 1742. Desiderius and Erasmus are Latin and Greek for Gerhard 'the beloved', the name of the scholar's father.
P. 123. Colton.—Compare R. B. Sheridan's: 'Easy writing's curst hard reading.'
P. 124. Bacon.—Mr. A. S. Gaye, in the new Clarendon Press edition of the Essays, points out that on almost every page the reader will find quotations from the Bible and from the Greek and Latin classics, especially Tacitus, Plutarch, Cicero, Virgil, Seneca, and Ovid, besides frequent allusions to biblical, classical, and mediaeval history. 'It is also remarkable that the quotations are more often than not inaccurate, not only in words but in sense.... Bacon furnished in himself an exception to the rule which he laid down in his Essay "Of Studies"; for though "reading" made him "a full man", "writing" did not make him "an exact man".'
P. 128. Boswell.—One of Mrs. Piozzi's anecdotes of Dr. Johnson is that he asked 'Was there ever yet anything written by mere man that was wished longer by its readers excepting Don Quixote, Robinson Crusoe, and the Pilgrim's Progress?' Johnson declared that the work of Cervantes was the greatest in the world, 'speaking of it, I mean, as a book of entertainment.'
P. 132. Emerson.—Shakespeare's phrase: Taming of the Shrew, Act I, sc. i.
P. 133. Emerson.—O. W. Holmes applies the proverb to the Bible. 'What you bring away from the Bible depends to some extent on what you carry to it.'
P. 135. Calverley.—See Tupper's lines on page [12]. The allusions are, of course, to the creations of Bulwer-Lytton.
P. 138. Gibbon.—F. W. Robertson's opinion is worth recording: 'It is very surprising to find how little we retain of a book, how little we have really made our own, when we come to interrogate ourselves as to what account we can give of it, however we may seem to have mastered it by understanding it. Hundreds of books read once have passed as completely from us as if we had never read them; whereas the discipline of mind got by writing down, not copying, an abstract of a book which is worth the trouble, fixes it on the mind for years, and, besides, enables one to read other books with more attention and more profit.'
P. 140. Hamilton.—'This assumes that the book to be operated on is your own, and perhaps is rather too elaborate a counsel of perfection for most of us.'—Lord Morely.