[Footnote 3: "The present inquiry originates in an affair of literary conscience. Many years ago I set off with the popular notions of the character of James the First; but in the course of study, and with a more enlarged comprehension of the age, I was frequently struck by the contrast between his real and his apparent character. * * * * It would be a cowardly silence to shrink from encountering all that popular prejudice and party feeling may oppose; this would be incompatible with that constant search after truth, which at least may be expected from the retired student."--_Preface to the Inquiry._] [Footnote 4: "Essay on the Literary Character," Vol. II. chap. XXV.] * * * * * CURIOSITIES OF LITERATURE. BY I. DISRAELI. * * * * * TO FRANCIS DOUCE, ESQ. THESE VOLUMES OF SOME LITERARY RESEARCHES ARE INSCRIBED; AS A SLIGHT MEMORIAL OF FRIENDSHIP AND A GRATEFUL ACKNOWLEDGMENT TO A LOVER OF LITERATURE. * * * * * PREFACE. Of a work which long has been placed on that shelf which Voltaire has discriminated as _la Bibliothèque du Monde_, it is never mistimed for the author to offer the many, who are familiar with its pages, a settled conception of its design. The "Curiosities of Literature," commenced fifty years since, have been composed at various periods, and necessarily partake of those successive characters which mark the eras of the intellectual habits of the writer. In my youth, the taste for modern literary history was only of recent date. The first elegant scholar who opened a richer vein in the mine of MODERN LITERATURE was JOSEPH WARTON;--he had a fragmentary mind, and he was a rambler in discursive criticism. Dr. JOHNSON was a famished man for anecdotical literature, and sorely complained of the penury of our literary history. THOMAS WARTON must have found, in the taste of his brother and the energy of Johnson, his happiest prototypes; but he had too frequently to wrestle with barren antiquarianism, and was lost to us at the gates of that paradise which had hardly opened on him. These were the true founders of that more elegant literature in which France had preceded us. These works created a more pleasing species of erudition:--the age of taste and genius had come; but the age of philosophical thinking was yet but in its dawn. Among my earliest literary friends, two distinguished themselves by their anecdotical literature: JAMES PETIT ANDREWS, by his "Anecdotes, Ancient and Modern," and WILLIAM SEWARD, by his "Anecdotes of Distinguished Persons." These volumes were favourably received, and to such a degree, that a wit of that day, and who is still a wit as well as a poet, considered that we were far gone in our "Anecdotage."