IN WEEKLY VOLUMES, price 3d. or in Cloh, ed. A SELECTION OF THE MOST POPULAR VOLUMES IN CASSELL'S NATIONAL LIBRARY. The following are amongst those already published, and a full list will be sent by the Publishers post free on application. Table Talk Lives of Alcibiades, Aristides, &c. :: MARTIN LUTHER. The Life and Adventures of Baron Trenck (Vols. I. & II.). Lives of Pericles, Fabius Maximus, &c. Victories of Love Sorrows of Werter Lives of Butler, Denham, Dryden, &c. Religio Medici.. The North-West Passage Wisdom of the Ancients Earlier Poems.. Lives of Addison, Savase, and Swift Lives of Timoleon, Paulus Æmilius, &c.. Confessions of an Inquiring Spirit Francis Bacon Lives of Prior, Congreve, &c. PLUTARCH, COVENTRY PATMORE, GOETHE. SAMUEL JOHNSON. SIR T. BROWNE. RICHARD HAKLUYT. SAMUEL JOHNSON. PLUTARCH. BACON. MILTON. COLERIDGE. MACAULAY. SAMUEL JOHNSON. Shakespeare's Plays:-Hamlet, The Merchant of Venice, Macbeth, Antony and Cleopatra, Measure for Measure, Much Ad about Nothing, Julius Cæsar, Midsummer Night's Dream, All's Well that Ends Well, King Henry VIII., King John, A Winter's Tale, The Tempest, As You Like It, Coriolanus, Richard II., King Henry IV. (Part I.), King Henry IV. (Part II.), Merry Wives of Windsor, King Henry V., Taming of the Shrew, King Lear, Cymbeline, Romeo and Juliet, The Two Gentlemen of Verona, Love's Labour's Lost, King Henry VI, (Part I.), King Henry VI. (Part II.), King Henry VI. (Part III.). The next Volume will be Richard III. By WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. CASSELL & COMPANY, LIMITED, Ludgate Hill, London. WHEN, at the age of sixty-eight, Johnson was writing these "Lives of the English Poets," he had caused omissions to be made from the poems of Rochester, and was asked whether he would allow the printers to give all the verse of Prior. Boswell quoted a censure by Lord Hailes of "those impure tales which will be the eternal opprobrium of their ingenious author." Johnson replied, "Sir, Lord Hailes has forgot. There is nothing in Prior that will excite to lewdness;" and when Boswell further urged, ho put his questionings aside, and added, "No, sir, Prior is a lady's book. No lady is ashamed to have it standing in her library." Johnson distinguished strongly, as every wise man does, between offence against convention, and offence against morality. In Congreve's plays he recognised the wit but condemned the morals, and in the case of Blackmore the regard for the religious purpose of Blackmore's poem on "The Creation" gave to Johnson, as to Addison, an undue sense of its literary value, 28.00 |