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Excerpt: The Tragedie of Titus Andronicus; Actus Primus -- Scoena Prima -- Flourish. Enter the Tribunes and Senators aloft And then enter Saturninus and his Followers at one doore, and Bassianus and his Followers at the other, with Drum & Colours. Saturninus. Noble Patricians, Patrons of my right, Defend the justice of my Cause with Armes. And Countreymen, my loving Followers, Pleade my Successive Title with your Swords. I was the first borne Sonne, that was the last That wore the Imperiall Diadem of Rome: Then let my Fathers Honours live in me, Nor wrong mine Age with this indignitie. Bassianus. Romaines, Friends, Followers, Favourers of my Right: If ever Bassianus, Caesars Sonne, Were gracious in the eyes of Royall Rome, Keepe then this passage to the Capitoll: And suffer not Dishonour to approach Th? Imperiall Seate to Vertue: consecrate To Justice, Continence, and Nobility: But let Desert in pure Election shine; And Romanes, fight for Freedome in your Choice. Enter Marcus Andronicus aloft with the Crowne. Princes, that strive by Factions, and by Friends, Ambitiously for Rule and Empery: Know, that the people of Rome for whom we ...

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Table of Contents: The Tragedie of Titus Andronicus, 1 -- Actus Primus. Scoena Prima., 1 -- Actus Secunda., 13 -- Actus Tertius., 25 -- Actus Quartus., 34 -- Actus Quintus., 47...

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Preface: A preface to the first edition of Jane Eyre being unnecessary, I gave none: this second edition demands a few words both of acknowledgment and miscellaneous remark. My thanks are due in three quarters. To the Public, for the indulgent ear it has inclined to a plain tale with few pretensions. To the Press, for the fair field its honest suffrage has opened to an obscure aspirant. To my Publishers, for the aid their tact, their energy, their practical sense and frank liberality have afforded an unknown and unrecommended author....

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Excerpt: The commercial traveler, a personage unknown to antiquity, is one of the striking figures created by the manners and customs of our present epoch. May he not, in some conceivable order of things, be destined to mark for coming philosophers the great transition which welds a period of material enterprise to the period of intellectual strength? Our century will bind the realm of isolated power, abounding as it does in creative genius, to the realm of universal but leveling might; equalizing all products, spreading them broadcast among the masses, and being itself controlled by the principle of unity,--the final expression of all societies. Do we not find the dead level of barbarism succeeding the saturnalia of popular thought and the last struggles of those civilizations which accumulated the treasures of the world in one direction?...

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Introduction: Immediately after Lincoln?s re-election to the Presidency, in an off-hand speech, delivered in response to a serenade by some of his admirers on the evening of November 10, 1864, he spoke as follows: ?It has long been a grave question whether any government not too strong for the liberties of its people can be strong enough to maintain its existence in great emergencies. On this point, the present rebellion brought our republic to a severe test, and the Presidential election, occurring in regular course during the rebellion, added not a little to the strain?. The strife of the election is but human nature practically applied to the facts in the case....

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Excerpt: Chapter 1. A bright spring day was fading into evening. High overhead in the clear heavens small rosy clouds seemed hardly to move across the sky but to be sinking into its depths of blue. In a handsome house in one of the outlying streets of the government town of O---- (it was in the year 1842) two women were sitting at an open window; one was about fifty, the other an old lady of seventy....

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Excerpt: General Introduction: There are few amusements more dangerous for an author than the indulgence in ironic descriptions of his own work. If the irony is depreciatory, posterity is but too likely to say, ?Many a true word is spoken in jest;? if it is encomiastic, the same ruthless and ungrateful critic is but too likely to take it as an involuntary confession of folly and vanity. But when Fielding, in one of his serio-comic introductions to Tom Jones, described it as ?this prodigious work,? he all unintentionally (for he was the least pretentious of men) anticipated the verdict which posterity almost at once, and with ever-increasing suffrage of the best judges as time went on, was about to pass not merely upon this particular book, but upon his whole genius and his whole production as a novelist. His work in other kinds is of a very different order of excellence. It is sufficiently interesting at times in itself; and always more than sufficiently interesting as his; for which reasons, as well as for the further one that it is comparatively little known, a considerable selection from it is offered to the reader in the last tw...

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Excerpt: A Treatise on Government by Aristotle, translated by William Ellis.

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Introduction: The Menexenus has more the character of a rhetorical exercise than any other of the Platonic works. The writer seems to have wished to emulate Thucydides, and the far slighter work of Lysias. In his rivalry with the latter, to whom in the Phaedrus Plato shows a strong antipathy, he is entirely successful, but he is not equal to Thucydides. The Menexenus, though not without real Hellenic interest, falls very far short of the rugged grandeur and political insight of the great historian. The fiction of the speech having been invented by Aspasia is well sustained, and is in the manner of Plato, notwithstanding the anachronism which puts into her mouth an allusion to the peace of Antalcidas, an event occurring forty years after the date of the supposed oration. But Plato, like Shakespeare, is careless of such anachronisms, which are not supposed to strike the mind of the reader. The effect produced by these grandiloquent orations on Socrates, who does not recover after having heard one of them for three days and more, is truly Platonic....

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Preface: It may save misunderstanding if a word or so be said here of the aim and scope of this book. It is written in relation to a previous work, Anticipations,* and together with that and a small pamphlet, ?The Discovery of the Future,?** presents a general theory of social development and of social and political conduct. It is an attempt to deal with social and political questions in a new way and from a new starting-point....

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Excerpt: When we think of the enormous number of volumes that have been published on the question as to where Hannibal crossed the Alps, without our being able to decide to-day whether it was (according to Whittaker and Rivaz) by Lyon, Geneva, the Great Saint-Bernard, and the valley of Aosta....

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Excerpt: Autobiography of a Pocket-Handkerchief by James Fenimore Cooper.

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Excerpt: Typhoon by Joseph Conrad.

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Excerpt: A girl came out of lawyer Royall?s house, at the end of the one street of North Dormer, and stood on the doorstep. It was the beginning of a June afternoon. The springlike transparent sky shed a rain of silver sunshine on the roofs of the village, and on the pastures and larchwoods surrounding it. A little wind moved among the round white clouds on the shoulders of the hills, driving their shadows across the fields and down the grassy road that takes the name of street when it passes through North Dormer....

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Excerpt: He was working on the edge of the common, beyond the small brook that ran in the dip at the bottom of the garden, carrying the garden path in continuation from the plank bridge on to the common. He had cut the rough turf and bracken, leaving the grey, dryish soil bare. But he was worried because he could not get the path straight, there was a pleat between his brows. He had set up his sticks, and taken the sights between the big pine trees, but for some reason everything seemed wrong. He looked again, straining his keen blue eyes, that had a touch of the Viking in them, through the shadowy pine trees as through a doorway, at the greengrassed garden-path rising from the shadow of alders by the log bridge up to the sunlit flowers. Tall white and purple columbines, and the butt-end of the old Hampshire cottage that crouched near the earth amid flowers, blossoming in the bit of shaggy wildness round about....

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Contents England, My England ........................................................................................................................ 4 Tickets, Please .................................................................................................................................. 35 The Blind Man ................................................................................................................................. 47 Monkey Nuts .................................................................................................................................... 66 Wintry Peacock ................................................................................................................................ 79 You Touched Me............................................................................................................................... 93 Samson and Delilah........................................................................................................................110 The Primrose Path ........................................................................................................

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Excerpt: No Thoroughfare by Charles Dickens and Wilkie Collins.

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Introduction: In an issue of the London World in April, 1890, there appeared the following paragraph: ?Two small rooms connected by a tiny hall afford sufficient space to contain Mr. Rudyard Kipling, the literary hero of the present hour, ?the man who came from nowhere,? as he says himself, and who a year ago was consciously nothing in the literary world.?...

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Contents At the Golden Gate ..................................................... 5 American Politics ....................................................... 18 American Salmon ...................................................... 29 The Yellowstone ........................................................ 37 Chicago ..................................................................... 46 The American Army ................................................... 55 America?s Defenceless Coasts ................................. 60...

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Excerpt: The third section of the ?Act further to promote the efficiency of the Navy,? approved 21st of December, 1861, provides: ?That the President of the United States by and with the advice and consent of the Senate, shall have the authority to detail from the retired list of the navy for the command of squadrons and single ships such officers as he may believe that the good of the service requires to be thus placed in command; and such officers may, if upon the recommendation of the President of the United States they shall receive a vote of thanks of Congress for their services and gallantry in action against an enemy, be restored to the active list, and not otherwise.?...

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Excerpt: Mr. President and Gentlemen of the convention:-- If we could first know where we are, and whither we are tending, we could better judge what to do, and how to do it. We are now far into the fifth year since a policy was initiated with the avowed object and confident promise of putting an end to slavery agitation. Under the operation of that policy, that agitation has not only not ceased, but has constantly augmented. In my opinion, it will not cease until a crisis shall have been reached and passed. ?A house divided against itself cannot stand.? I believe this government cannot endure permanently half slave and half free. I do not expect the Union to be dissolved; I do not expect the house to fall; but I do expect it will cease to be divided. It will become all one thing....

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Contents SPEECH AT SPRINGFIELD, JUNE 17, 1858 ............................................................................................................ 4 SPEECH AT CHICAGO, JULY 10, 1858. .................................................................................................................. 12 IN REPLY TO SENATOR DOUGLAS ...................................................................................................................... 12 SPEECH AT SPRINGFIELD, JULY 17, 1858. .......................................................................................................... 30 CORRESPONDENCE BETWEEN ........................................................................................................................... 48 LINCOLN AND DOUGLAS ..................................................................................................................................... 48 FIRST JOINT DEBATE, AT OTTAWA, AUGUST 21, 1858 ..................................................................................... 50 SECOND JOINT DEBATE, AT FREEPORT, AUGUST 27, 1858 .....................................................

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Excerpt: In the eleven years that separated the Declaration of the Independence of the United States from the completion of that act in the ordination of our written Constitution, the great minds of America were bent upon the study of the principles of government that were essential to the preservation of the liberties which had been won at great cost and with heroic labors and sacrifices. Their studies were conducted in view of the imperfections that experience had developed in the government of the Confederation, and they were, therefore, practical and thorough....

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Excerpt: These papers I am anxious to put into the hands of your house, and, so far as regards the U.S., of your house exclusively; not with any view to further emolument, but as an acknowledgment of the services which you have already rendered me; namely, first, in having brought together so widely scattered a collection--a difficulty which in my own hands by too painful an experience I had found from nervous depression to be absolutely insurmountable; secondly, in having made me a participator in the pecuniary profits of the American edition, without solicitation or the shadow of any expectation on my part, without any legal claim that I could plead, or equitable warrant in established usage, solely and merely upon your own spontaneous motion. Some of these new papers, I hope, will not be without their value in the eyes of those who have taken an interest in the original series. But at all events, good or bad, they are now tendered to the appropriation of your individual house, the Messrs. Ticknor & Fields, according to the amplest extent of any power to make such a transfer that I may be found to possess by law or custom in Ameri...

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Contents MEMORIALS, AND OTHER PAPERS, VOL. I. ....................................................................................................... 4 FROM THE AUTHOR, TO THE AMERICAN EDITOR OF HIS WORKS. .......................................................... 4 EXPLANATORY NOTICES....................................................................................................................................... 5 THE ORPHAN HEIRESS......................................................................................................................................... 18 OXFORD .................................................................................................................................................................... 96 THE PAGAN ORACLES ........................................................................................................................................ 160 THE REVOLUTION OF GREECE. ....................................................................................................................... 194 MEMORIALS, AND OTHER PAPERS, VOL. II. ................................................