Classic British and American Essays and Speeches (page two)

From the works of Francis Bacon and Daniel Defoe to those of Virginia Woolf and Martin Luther King, Jr., more than 200 of the greatest essays and speeches composed by British and American writers over the past four centuries.

• Henry Adams to Benjamin Franklin (page one)
• Margaret Fuller to H.L. Mencken (below)
• Alice Meynell to W.B. Yeats (page three)

Margaret Fuller (1810-1850)

• The Irish Character
  "When we consider all the fire which glows so untamably in Irish veins, . . . we cannot forbear, notwithstanding all the temporary ills they aid in here, to give them a welcome to our shores."

Thomas Fuller (1608-1661)

• Of Anger
  "To be angry for every toy debases the worth of thy anger."

John Galsworthy (1867-1933)

• Quality
  "I will say that for him: not a man in London made a better boot!"

Elizabeth Gaskell (1810-1865)

• The Last Generation in England
  "The town in which I once resided is situated in a district inhabited by large landed proprietors of very old family."

Emma Goldman (1869-1940)

• On the Street
  "It would be too dreadful if he should learn that Emma Goldman, the anarchist, had been found soliciting on 14th Street."

Oliver Goldsmith (1730-1774)

• A City Night Piece
  "Why was I born a man, and yet see the sufferings of wretches I cannot relieve?"


• Happiness in a Great Measure Dependent on Constitution
  "Pleasure is in us, and not in the objects offered for our amusement."


• Of Eloquence
  "A man, therefore, may be called eloquent, who transfers the passion or sentiment with which he is moved himself, into the breast of another."


• On National Prejudices
  "I should prefer the title of . . . a citizen of the world."

Robert Graves (1895-1985)

• Goodbye to All That
  "My breaking point was near now, unless something happened to stave it off."

Philip Guedalla (1889-1944)

• Some Historians
  "Historians' English is not a style; it is an industrial disease."

Louise Imogen Guiney (1861-1920)

• On a Pleasing Encounter With a Pickpocket
  "I have attained a courteous composure proof against mortal hurricanes."

Joseph Hall (1574-1656)

• The True Friend
  "When his mate is dead, he accounts himself but half alive."

Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804-1864)

• The Haunted Mind
  "In the depths of every heart, there is a tomb and a dungeon."

William Hazlitt (1778-1830)

• On Corporate Bodies
  "Corporate bodies are more corrupt and profligate than individuals, because they have more power to do mischief, and are less amenable to disgrace or punishment."


• On Familiar Style
  "Many people mistake a familiar for a vulgar style."


• On the Fear of Death
  "People walk along the streets the day after our deaths just as they did before."


• On the Feeling of Immortality in Youth
  "Life is indeed a strange gift, and its privileges are most mysterious."


• On Going a Journey
  "With change of place we change our ideas; nay, our opinions and feelings."

Arthur Helps (1813-1875)

• On the Art of Living With Others
  "It is probable that in small social circles there is more suffering from unkindness than ill-temper."

Ernest Hemingway (1899-1961)

• Camping Out
  "Any man of average office intelligence can make at least as good a pie as his wife."

William Ernest Henley (1849-1903)

• Essays and Essayists
  "Your true essayist is in a literary sense the friend of everybody."

Maurice Hewlett (1861-1923)

• The Maypole and the Column
  "Journalism loves the particular, but literature must hold fast to the general."

Oliver Wendell Holmes (1809-1894)

• Superstitions and Recollections of Childhood
  "Yes, children believe plenty of queer things."

James Huneker (1860-1921)

• Coney Island at Night
  "What signified to all those strong, bustling men and women the death of a tiny girl baby--dead and hardly clad in a wisp of blackened canvas?"

Leigh Hunt (1784-1859)

• Deaths of Little Children
  "Made as we are, there are certain pains without which it would be difficult to conceive certain great and overbalancing pleasures."


• Getting Up on Cold Mornings
  "Some people say it is a very easy thing to get up of a cold morning."


• A "Now": Descriptive of a Hot Day
  "Now doors and brick-walls are burning to the hand; and a walled lane, with dust and broken bottles in it, near a brick-field, is a thing not to be thought of."


• Spring
  "[W]e would exhort everybody to do their best for the earth, and all that is upon it, in order that it and they may be thought worth continuance."

Zora Neale Hurston (1891-1960)

• How It Feels to Be Colored Me
  "I remember the very day that I became colored."


• Reading Quiz on "How It Feels to Be Colored Me"

Thomas Henry Huxley (1825-1895)

• A Liberal Education
  "Well, what I mean by Education is learning the rules of this mighty game."

Washington Irving (1783-1859)

• Christmas
  "One of the least pleasing effects of modern refinement is the havoc it has made among the hearty old holiday customs."


• The Mutability of Literature
  "Language gradually varies, and with it fade away the writings of authors who have flourished their allotted time."

Henry James (1843-1916)

• London
  "The British capital is the particular spot in the world which communicates the greatest sense of life."

William James (1842-1910)

• The Essence of Humanism
  "There is a stage of thought that goes beyond common sense."


• The Ph.D. Octopus
  "We of the university faculties are responsible for deliberately creating this new class of American social failures, and heavy is the responsibility. . . . We dangle our three magic letters before the eyes of these predestined victims, and they swarm to us like moths to an electric light."


• On Some Mental Effects of the Earthquake
  "I felt no trace whatever of fear; it was pure delight and welcome."

Richard Jefferies (1848-1887)

• Hours of Spring
  "It is beautiful, every filament. Always beautiful! everything beautiful!"


• January in the Sussex Woods
  "[M]igration is purely natural, and acts for the general preservation. Try to put yourself in a bird's place, and you will see that migration is very natural indeed."


• A Wet Night in London
  "Human beings reduced to mere hurrying machines, worked by wind and rain, and stern necessities of life."

Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826)

• The Declaration of Independence
  "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal"

James Weldon Johnson (1871-1938)

• The Making of Harlem
  "Harlem . . . is a city within a city, the greatest Negro city in the world."


• Outcasts in Salt Lake City
  "Our cabman . . . was probably the only compassionate soul we should meet in the whole city of the Latter-Day Saints."

Samuel Johnson (1709-1784)

• Books
  "[T]he ancient sage who thought 'a great book a great evil' would now think the multitude of books a multitude of evils."


• Conversation
  "It is always necessary to be loved, not always necessary to be reverenced."


• The Decay of Friendship
  "The most fatal disease of friendship is gradual decay."


• Of Spring
  "[T]he younger part of my readers, to whom I dedicate this vernal speculation, must excuse me for calling upon them, to make use at once of the spring of the year, and the spring of life."


• On Studies
  "[M]ethod is the excellence of writing, and unconstraint the grace of conversation."


• On the Style of Jonathan Swift
  "His style was well suited to his thoughts."


• The Vanity of Authors
  "No place affords a more striking conviction of the vanity of human hopes, than a publick library."

Ben Jonson (1572-1637)

• The Difference of Wits
  "Some wits are swelling and high; others low and still; some hot and fiery; others cold and dull; one must have a bridle, the other a spur."


• On Education and Style
  "No matter how slow the style be at first, so it be laboured, and accurate; seek the best."

John F. Kennedy (1917-1963)

• Inaugural Address
  "Together let us explore the stars."

Martin Luther King, Jr. (1929-1968)

• I Have a Dream
  "Now is the time to make justice a reality for all of God's children."


• Reading Quiz on "I Have a Dream"

Charles Lamb (1775-1834)

• Blakesmoor in H-----shire, by Charles Lamb
  "It was an old deserted place, yet not so long deserted but that traces of the splendour of past inmates were everywhere apparent."


• Grace Before Meat
  "The plainest diet seems the fittest to be preceded by the grace."


• A Few Words on Christmas
  "Let us not meet to abuse the world, but to make it better by our individual example."


• New Year's Eve
  "I am content to stand still at the age to which I am arrived."


• That the Worst Puns Are the Best
  "A pun is not bound by the laws which limit nicer wit. It is a pistol let off at the ear; not a feather to tickle the intellect."

D.H. Lawrence (1885-1930)

• Give Her a Pattern
  "Modern woman isn’t really a fool. But modern man is."

Stephen Leacock (1869-1944)

• Are the Rich Happy?
  "My judgment is that the rich undergo cruel trials and bitter tragedies of which the poor know nothing."


• How to Borrow Money
  "The process is quite easy, provided you borrow enough."


• How to Live to Be 200
  "Just one word about fresh air and exercise. Don't bother with either of them."

Abraham Lincoln (1809-1865)

• The Gettysburg Address
  "This nation shall have a new birth of freedom."


• Reading Quiz on the Gettysburg Address


• Second Inaugural Address
  "With malice toward none, with charity for all . . ."

Jack London (1876-1916)

• The Story of an Eyewitness: The San Francisco Earthquake
  "Not in history has a modern imperial city been so completely destroyed."


• Reading Quiz on "The San Francisco Earthquake"


• What Life Means to Me
  "I accepted that up above me was all that was fine and noble and gracious, all that gave decency and dignity to life."

E.L. Lucas (1868-1938)

• The Perfect Holiday
  "The secret is that our holidays should rest not only our minds and bodies but our characters too."


• The Town Week
  "Tuesday, the base craven, reconciles us to the machine."

Robert Lynd (1879-1949)

• Child's Talk
  "The problem of making the bath safe for children seems, at the age of six, a matter of far more urgent public importance than the problem of making the world safe for democracy."


• On Being an Alien
  "The world can never be made one place so long as men continue to hate foreigners simply because they are foreigners."


• The Pleasures of Ignorance
  "One of the greatest joys known to man is to take such a flight into ignorance in search of knowledge."

Don Marquis (1878-1937)

• The Almost Perfect State
  "How is it that this hideous, halfbrute city is also beautiful and a fit habitation for demi-gods? How come?"

Thomas Babington Macaulay (1800-1859)

• The Coffee Houses of London
  "The coffeehouses were the chief organs through which the public opinion of the metropolis vented itself."


• On Sadler's Bombastic Declamations
  "He indulges without measure in vague, bombastic declamation, made up of those fine things which boys of fifteen admire, and which everybody, who is not destined to be a boy all his life, weeds vigorously out of his compositions after five-and-twenty."

Edward Sandford Martin (1856-1939)

• The Tyranny of Things
  "An ideal of earthly comfort . . . is to get a house so big that it is burdensome to maintain, and fill it up so full of jimcracks that it is a constant occupation to keep it in order."

Henry Mayhew (1812-1887)

• The Watercress Girl
  "She don't often beat me; but, when she do, she don't play with me."

H. L. Mencken (1880-1956)

• The Hills of Zion
  "Dayton was having a roaring time. It was better than the circus."


• Reading Quiz on "The Hills of Zion"


• The Libido for the Ugly
  "Out of the melting pot emerges a race which hates beauty."


• Literature and the Schoolma'm
  "The essence of a sound style is that it cannot be reduced to rules."


• The Lower Depths
  "The worst idiots, even among pedagogues, are the teachers of English."


• Portrait of an Ideal World
  "All the great villainies of history have been perpetrated by sober men, and chiefly by teetotalers."


• The Nature of Liberty
  "Policemen are not given night-sticks for ornament."


• The Penalty of Death
  "What they want is the peace of mind that goes with the feeling that accounts are squared."


• The Style of Woodrow
  "He knew how to arrest and enchant the boobery with words."


• Suite Américaine
  "College professors in one-building universities on the prairie, still hoping at the age of sixty to get their whimsical essays into the Atlantic Monthly."

Concluded on page three

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