United States or French Polynesia ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Let me suggest another; let me suggest that what both Mr. James and Mr. Besant had in view was neither more nor less than the art of narrative. But Mr. Besant is anxious to speak solely of "the modern English novel," the stay and bread-winner of Mr. Mudie; and in the author of the most pleasing novel on that roll, ALL SORTS AND CONDITIONS OF MEN, the desire is natural enough.
Mr. Mudie may make himself easy. England will still boast a humourist; and the late Mr. Walking the other day in Cheapside I saw some turtles in Mr. Sweeting's window, and was tempted to stay and look at them.
"The Romance of Scripture" was to be seen frequently in booksellers' advertisements, and Mr. Mudie told how he always had two thousand copies of it on his shelves. So our friend did something in the world; but what he did do was unfortunately not applauded by his friends. Harcourt very plainly told him that a man who scribbled never did any good at the bar.
Is it not notorious that all who are lucky enough to supply wants grow rapidly and enormously rich; and is not Truth a now recognised want in ten thousand homes wherever, indeed, persons are to be found wealthy enough to pay Mr. Mudie a guinea and so far literate as to be able to read?
Two days later a cab deposited at the lodge Miss May, and her dress-basket, and her travelling-bag, and her holdall, together with certain loose periodicals and a volume or two bearing the yellow label of Mudie.
After her first book, England quietly ignored her, they could not afford to be so startled; as Sir Leicester Dedlock said, "It was really really "; she did very well for the circulating libraries; and because Mr. Mudie insists on his three volumes or none at all, she was forced to extend her rich webs to thinness.
His library consisted only of some fifty volumes, for he had never felt himself able to purchase books; Mudie, and the shelves of his club, generally supplied him with all he needed.
"Read 'em myself over and over again, and find 'em give points in the way of amusement to the piffle Mudie sends out. Not that I pretend to be a judge of literature. Only know when I'm not bored, you know. You to play, Lord Henry." But the senior officer of the Staff, Lady Hannah's partner, had vanished.
There are some new books" he pointed to a side-table where the obvious contents of a Mudie box, with some magazines, were laid out "and if you want old ones, that door" he waved towards one at the far end of the room "will take you into the library. My great-grandfather's collection not mine! And then one has ridiculous scruples about burning them! However, you'll find a few nice ones.
Let it not be said that their manner is so different from mine that no jury would convict; for when I read extracts from Clifford, Swinburne, Maudsley, Matthew Arnold, James Thomson, Lord Amberley, Huxley, and other heretics whose works are circulated by Mudie, Lord Coleridge remarked "I confess, as I heard them, I had, and have a difficulty in distinguishing them from the alleged libels.
Word Of The Day