BOOKS AND MEN BY AGNES REPPLIER [Illustration] BOSTON AND NEW YORK HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN AND COMPANY The Riverside Press, Cambridge 1899 Copyright, 1888, BY AGNES REPPLIER. _All rights reserved._ ELEVENTH IMPRESSION _The Riverside Press, Cambridge, Mass., U. S. A._ Electrotyped and Printed by H. O. Houghton & Company. CONTENTS. PAGE CHILDREN, PAST AND PRESENT 1 ON THE BENEFITS OF SUPERSTITION 33 WHAT CHILDREN READ 64 THE DECAY OF SENTIMENT 94 CURIOSITIES OF CRITICISM 125 SOME ASPECTS OF PESSIMISM 157 THE CAVALIER 191 BOOKS AND MEN. CHILDREN, PAST AND PRESENT. As a result of the modern tendency to desert the broad beaten roads of history for the bridle-paths of biography and memoir, we find a great many side lights thrown upon matters that the historian was wont to treat as altogether beneath his consideration. It is by their help that we study the minute changes of social life that little by little alter the whole aspect of a people, and it is by their help that we look straight into the ordinary every-day workings of the past, and measure the space between its existence and our own. When we read, for instance, of Lady Cathcart being kept a close prisoner by her husband for over twenty years, we look with some complacency on the roving wives of the nineteenth century. When we reflect on the dismal fate of Uriel Freudenberger, condemned by the Canton of Uri to be burnt alive in 1760, for rashly proclaiming his disbelief in the legend of William Tell’s apple, we realize the inconveniences attendant on a too early development of the critical faculty. We listen entranced while the learned pastor Dr. Johann Geiler von Keyersperg gravely enlightens his congregation as to the nature and properties of were-wolves; and we turn aside to see the half-starved boys at Westminster boiling their own batter-pudding in a stocking foot, or to hear the little John Wesley crying softly when he is whipped, not being permitted even then the luxury of a hearty bellow.