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Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: 47 RICHARDSON'S NOVELS The literary artifice, so often patronised by Lord Macaulay of describing a character by a series of paradoxes, is of course, in one sense, a mere artifice. It is easy enough to make a dark grey black and a light grey white, and to bring the two into unnatural proximity. But it rests also upon the principle which is more of a platitude than a paradox, that our chief faults often lie close to our chief merits. The greatest man is perhaps one who is so equably developed that he has the strongest faculties in the most perfect equilibrium, and is apt to be somewhat uninteresting to the rest of mankind. The man of lower eminence has some one or more faculties developed out of all proportion to the rest, with the natural result of occasionally overbalancing him. Extraordinary memories with weak logical faculties, wonderful imaginative sensibility with a complete absence of self-control, and other defective conformations of mind, supply the raw materials for a luminary of the second order, and imply a predisposition to certain faults, which are natural complements to the conspicuous merits. Such reflections naturally occur in speaking of one of our greatest literary reputations, whose popularity is almost in an inverse ratio to his celebrity. Every one knows the names of Sir Charles Grandison and Clarissa Harlowe. They are amongst the established types which serve topoint a paragraph; but the volumes in which they are described remain for the most part in undisturbed repose, sleeping peacefully amongst Charles Lamb's biblia a-biblia, books which are no books, or, as he explains, those books ' which no gentleman's library should be without.' They never enjoy the honours of cheap reprints; the modern reader shudders at a novel in eight volumes, and declines...
| ISBN-13 | 9781459082571 |
|---|---|
| ISBN-10 | 1459082575 |
| Weight | 0.72 Pounds |
| Dimensions | 9.00 x 6.00 x 0.49 In |
| List Price | $19.94 |
| Format | Paperback |
|---|---|
| Pages | 216 pages |
| Publisher | |
| Published On | 2009-08-01 |
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