Essays from Five Centuries

Of the cannibals / Michel Eyquem de Montaigne -- A preface to the reader / Roger Ascham -- Of boldness ; Of travel ; Of dispatch / Francis Bacon -- A devilish usurer / Sir Thomas Overbury -- A child ; A good old man / John Earle -- A letter to a friend upon occasion of the death of his intimate friend / Sir Thomas Browne -- Of education / John Milton -- Of modesty / Jeremy Taylor -- The dangers of an honest man in much company / Abraham Cowley -- Preface : fables, ancient and modern / John Dryden -- An academy for women / Daniel Defoe -- A modest proposal / Jonathan Swift -- Love of glory / Sir Richard Steele -- A superstitious household / Joseph Addison -- Rules for reducing a great empire to a small one / Benjamin Franklin. Preface to Shakespeare / Samuel Johnson -- Beau Tibbs / Oliver Goldsmith -- Forth into the field / Joseph Dennie -- The old benchers of the Inner Temple / Charles Lamb -- On the fear of death / William Hazlitt -- Popular superstitions / Washington Irving -- The affliction of childhood / Thomas De Quincey -- Biography / Thomas Carlyle -- Southey's edition of the Pilgrim's progress / Thomas Babington Macaulay -- What is a university? / John Henry Newman -- Self-reliance / Ralph Waldo Emerson -- On old age / Oliver Wendell Holmes -- Ogres / William Makepeace Thackeray -- Solitude / Henry David Thoreau -- At sea / James Russell Lowell -- The two boyhoods / John Ruskin -- Milton / Matthew Arnold -- Tolstoy / William Dean Howells -- Conclusion / Walter Pater. Roman Calleva / William Henry Hudson -- An excursion / Henry James -- Pan's pipes / Robert Louis Stevenson -- A visit to Whittier / Edmund Gosse -- Prue / Alice Meynell -- Initiation / Joseph Conrad -- Leisure while you wait / Samuel McChord Crothers -- The virtuous Victorian / Agnes Repplier -- Montaigne / Maurice Hewlette -- Decadent wit / Paul Elmer More -- About censorship / John Galsworthy -- A little conversation in Herefordshire / Hilaire Belloc -- "A clergymen" / Max Beerbohm -- The free man's worship / Bertrand Russell -- On Mr. McCabe and a divine frivolity / Gilbert Keith Chesterton -- The genealogy of etiquette / Henry Louis Mencken -- Tradition / Stuart Pratt Sherman -- The critics / Philip Guedalla -- On unanswering letters / Christopher Morley.