"What I read," he told me, "were not voyages and travels, but all literature, sir, all ancient writers, all manly; though but little Greek, only some of Anacreon and Hesiod.

It was due partly to the intense absorption of men's minds in religious questions that the preceding century, though an age of advancing learning, produced scarcely any literature worthy of the name.

They form a prominent feature in every new literary project, and not unfrequently literature, to use a hackneyed phrase, is made their vehiclelike the namby-pamby of an English opera for the strains of Rossini or Weber.