BY THOMAS WALKER, M.A. WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY HENRY MORLEY LL.D., PROFESSOR OF ENGLISH LITERATURE AT LONDON GEORGE ROUTLEDGE AND SONS BROADWAY, LUDGATE HILL GLASGOW AND NEW YORK 1887 MORLEY'S UNIVERSAL LIBRARY. 1. Sheridan's Plays. 4. Chronicle of the Cid. 9. Locke on Civil Government and Filmer's Patriarcha." 10. Butler's Analogy of Religion. II. Dryden's Virgil. 12. Scott's Demonology and Witchcraft. 13. Herrick's Hesperides. 14. Coleridge's Table-Talk. 15. Boccaccio's Decameron. 16. Sterne's Tristram Shandy. 17. Chapman's Homer's Iliad. 18. Mediaval Tales. 19. Voltaire's Candide, and Johnson's Rasseias. 20. Jonson's Plays and Poems. 21. Hobbes's Leviathan. 22. Samuel Butler's Hudibras. 23. Ideal Commonwealths. 48. Cobbett's Advice to Young Men. 24. Cavendish's Life of Wolsey. 25 & 26. Don Quixote. 27. Burlesque Plays and Poems. 28. Dante's Divine Comedy. LONGFELLOw's Translation. "Marvels of clear type and general neatness. '- Daily Telegraph. INTRODUCTION. COLERIDGE'S" Friend" in 1812 and Walker's "Original" in 1835 are the two chief attempts made in our century to produce in quick succession a series of papers chiefly from one hand, and published in an independent series after the manner of the periodical essayists who set the fashion in Queen Anne's time. "The Friend" extended to twenty-seven numbers, "The Original" to twenty-nine. The two works are as unlike as their authors. Thomas Walker would have made but a poor poet; and Coleridge but a poor police magistrate. "The Friend" has heights and depths of thought which may be caviare to the general. "The Original" is not the work of a rare genius, is not the gift to us of one of the immortals, yet it is a book that none who have once met with it would willingly let die. Its graceful writing, always direct and clear, drawing its grace from the simplicity of truth, satisfies the cultivated reader; its wisdom and its playfulness in illustration of the various forms of our life, social and individual, yield matter various enough to make the collection pleasant to all sorts and conditions of men. Thomas Walker in his "Original" frankly delivered himself, and brought the way of life as it was seen by a refined and social gentleman, well educated, shrewd, and without one low thought, so plainly within view of his reader that neither young nor old, rich nor poor, learned nor unlearned, could read through his book without having been in some degree amused and taught through his experience. 744633 |