It is said that the frozen Norwegians, on the first sight of roses, dared not touch what they conceived were trees budding with fire: and the natives of Virginia, the first time they seized on a quantity of gunpowder, which belonged to the English colony, sowed it for grain, expecting to reap a plentiful crop […]

The congenial histories of literature and of art are accompanied by the same periodical revolutions; and none is more interesting than that one which occurs in the decline and corruption of arts, when a single mind returning to right principles, amidst the degenerated race who had forsaken them, seems to create a new epoch, and […]

A new edition of Bayle in France is an event in literary history which could not have been easily predicted. Every work which creates an epoch in literature is one of the great monuments of the human mind; and Bayle may be considered as the father of literary curiosity, and of modern literature. Much has […]

To know Bayle as a man, we must not study him in the folio Life of Des Maizeaux, whose laborious pencil, without colour and without expression, loses, in its indistinctness, the individualising strokes of the portrait. Look for Bayle in his “Letters,” those true chronicles of a literary man, when they record his own pursuits. […]

Fuseli, in the introduction to the second part of his Lectures, has touched on the character of Cicero, respecting his knowledge and feeling of Art, in a manner which excites our curiosity. “Though Cicero seems to have had as little native taste for painting and sculpture, and even less than he had taste for poetry, […]

When men, writes the philosophical compiler of “L’Esprit des Usages et des Coutumes,” salute each other in an amicable manner, it signifies little whether they move a particular part of the body, or practise a particular ceremony. In these actions there must exist different customs. Every nation imagines it employs the most reasonable ones; but […]

Felton, the assassin of the Duke of Buckingham, by the growing republican party was hailed as a Brutus, rising, in the style of a patriotic bard, Refulgent from the stroke.–AKENSIDE. Gibbon has thrown a shade of suspicion even over Brutus’s “god-like stroke,” as Pope has exalted it. In Felton, a man acting from mixed and […]

I shall preserve a literary curiosity, which perhaps is the only one of its kind. It is an original memorandum of Dr. Johnson’s, of hints for the Life of Pope, written down, as they were suggested to his mind, in the course of his researches. The lines in Italics Johnson had scratched with red ink, […]

If the golden gate of preferment is not usually opened to men of real merit, persons of no worth have entered it in a most extraordinary manner. Chevreau informs us that the Sultan Osman having observed a gardener planting a cabbage with some peculiar dexterity, the manner so attracted his imperial eye that he raised […]

Francis the First was accustomed to say, that when the nobles of his kingdom came to court, they were received by the world as so many little kings; that the day after they were only beheld as so many princes; but on the third day they were merely considered as so many gentlemen, and were […]

Dr. Cayet is an old French controversial writer, but is better known in French literature as an historian. His Chronologie Novenaire is full of anecdotes unknown to other writers. He collected them from his own observations, for he was under-preceptor to Henry IV. The dreadful massacre of St. Bartholomew took place in the reign of […]

“It is curious to trace the first rude attempts of the drama in various nations; to observe at that moment how crude is the imagination, and to trace the caprices it indulges; and that the resemblance in these attempts holds in the earliest essays of Greece, of France, of Spain, of England, and, what appears […]

The Duke of Buckingham, in his bold and familiar manner, appears to have been equally a favourite with James I. and Charles I. He behaved with singular indiscretion both at the courts of France and Spain. Various anecdotes might be collected from the memoir writers of those countries, to convince us that our court was […]

It is curious to observe the various substitutes for paper before its discovery. Ere the invention of recording events by writing, trees were planted, rude altars were erected, or heaps of stone, to serve as memorials of past events. Hercules probably could not write when he fixed his famous pillars. The most ancient mode of […]

The following circumstances probably gave rise to the tyranny of the feudal power, and are the facts on which the fictions of romance are raised. Castles were erected to repulse the vagrant attacks of the Normans; and in France, from the year 768 to 987, these places disturbed the public repose. The petty despots who […]

In the Memoirs of the French Academy, a little essay on this subject is sufficiently curious; the following contains the facts:– FIREWORKS were not known to antiquity.–It is certainly a modern invention. If ever the ancients employed fires at their festivals, it was only for religious purposes. Fire, in primaeval ages, was a symbol of […]

The following are the express words contained in the regulation of the popes to prohibit the use of the Bible. “As it is manifest, by experience, that if the use of the holy writers is permitted in the vulgar tongue more evil than profit will arise, because of the temerity of man; it is for […]

Crown, in his “City Politiques,” 1688, a comedy written to satirise the Whigs of those days, was accused of having copied his character too closely after life, and his enemies turned his comedy into a libel. He has defended himself in his preface from this imputation. It was particularly laid to his charge, that in […]

As a literary curiosity, can we deny a niche to that “obliquity of distorted wit,” of Barton Holyday, who has composed a strange comedy, in five acts, performed at Christ Church, Oxford, 1630, not for the entertainment, as an anecdote records, of James the First? The title of the comedy of this unclassical classic, for […]

Desmarets, the friend of Richelieu, was a very extraordinary character, and produced many effusions of genius in early life, till he became a mystical fanatic. It was said of him that “he was the greatest madman among poets, and the best poet among madmen.” His comedy of “The Visionaries” is one of the most extraordinary […]