Miscellanies of Edward Fitzgerald Author:Edward FitzGerald Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: Preface to Polonius Few books are duller than books of Aphorisms and Apophthegms. A Jest-book is, proverbially, no joke; a Wit- book, perhaps, worse; but dull... more »est of all, probably, is the Moral-book, which this little volume pretends to be. So with men: the Jester, the Wit, and the Moralist, each wearisome in proportion as each deals exclusively in his one commodity. " Too much of one thing," says Fuller, " is good for nothing." Bacon's Apophthegms seem to me the best collection of many men's sayings; the greatest variety of wisdom, good sense, wit, humour, and even simple naivete (as one must call it for want of a native word), all told in a style whose dignity and antiquity (together with perhaps our secret consciousness of the gravity and even tragic greatness of the narrator) add a particular humour to the lighter stories. Johnson said Selden's Table-talk was worth all the French " Ana " together. Here also we find wit, humour, fancy, and good sense alternating, something as one has heard in some scholarly English gentleman's after-dinner talk—the best English common sense in the best common English. It outlives, I believe, all Selden's books; and is probably much better, collected even imperfectly by another, than if he had put it together himself. What would become of Johnson if Boswell had not done as much for his talk ? If the Doctor himself, or some of his more serious admirers, had recorded it! And (leaving alone Epictetus, a Kempis, and other Moral aphorists) most of the collections of this nature I have seen are made up mainly from Johnson and the Essayists of the last century, his predecessors and imitators ; when English thought and language had lost so much of their vigour, freshness, freedom, and picturesque- ness—so much, in short, of their native...« less