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Essays of Elia, and Eliana. with a Memoir by Barry Cornwall
Essays of Elia and Eliana with a Memoir by Barry Cornwall Author:Charles Lamb, Bryan Waller Procter General Books publication date: 2009 Original publication date: 1879 Original Publisher: G. Bell Notes: This is a black and white OCR reprint of the original. It has no illustrations and there may be typos or missing text. When you buy the General Books edition of this book you get free trial access to Million-Books.com where you can select ... more »from more than a million books for free. Excerpt: DETACHED THOUGHTS ON HOOKS AND READING. To mind the inside of a book is to entertain one's self with the forced product of another man's brain. Now I think a man of quality and breeding may he much amused with the natural sprouts of his own. -- Lord Fopj'ington, in " Tkt Relapse." ingenious acquaintance of my own was so much struck with this bright sally of his Lordship, that he has left off reading 85'gl altogether, to the great improvement of his originality. At the hazard of losing some credit on this head, I must confess that I dedicate no inconsiderable portion of my time to other people's thoughts. I dream away my life in others' speculations. I love to lose myself in other men's minds. When I am not walking, I am reading; I cannot sit and think. Books think for me. I have no repugnances. Shaftesbury is not too genteel for me, nor Jonathan Wild too low. I can read anything which I call a book. There are things in that sTiape which I cannot allow for such. In this catalogue of books which are no books -- biblia a-biblia -- reckon Court Calendars, Directories, Pocket Books [the Literary excepted], Draught Boards, bound and lettered on the back, n. c Scientific Treatises, Almanacs, Statutes at Large : the works of Hume, Gibbon, Robertson, Beattie, Soame Jenyns, and generally, all those volumes which " no gentleman's library should be without:" the Histories of Flavius Josephus (that learned Jew), and Paley's Moral Philosophy. With these exceptions, I can read almost anything. I bless my stars for a taste so catholic, so unexcluding. I confess that it moves my s...« less