Excerpt from Text-Book of Prose From Burke, Webster and Bacon: With Notes, and Sketches of the Authors Lives, for Use in Schools and Classes
For instance, two pages will be given to Macaulay, or to a writer of still lower grade, where one is given to Jeremy Taylor or Addison or Burke. So, again, some fifth-rate or sixth-rate author, whose name is hardly known out of Boston, comes in for a larger space than is accorded to Daniel Webster. Or, once more, Edgar A. Poe"s vapid inanities done into verse, where all is mere jugglery of words, or an exercise in verbal legerdemain, are made quite as much of as the choice workmanship of our best American poets, Bryant, Longfellow, and Whittier. This is an application of the levelling principle so unjust and so inexpedient, that we may well marvel how it should be tolerated in any walks of liberal learning and culture.
No thoughtful person, I take it, will have any difficulty in gathering that this volume is made up, like its predecessor, with a special view to the oldest and ripest pupils in our high-schools and seminaries and academies. These pupils, it may well be supposed, are old enough and ripe enough to unfold at least the beginnings of literary and intellectual taste, so as to be at home and find delight in tasteful and elegant authorship, where the graces may do something towards making the ways of learning ways of pleasantness to them.
Of the three authors here drawn upon, two are, by general suffrage, the very greatest in the prose literature of the English-speaking world, while the third is, I believe, generally and justly held to be, by all odds, the first in the prose literature of our own country. In the case of Burke and Webster, the works from which I had to select are somewhat voluminous, and it is quite likely that my selections are not in all cases the most judicious that might have been made.
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