- Alain René Le Sage
In a little garden summer-house behind a Paris street, Le Sage sat at his desk, dipped through Spanish books, and wrote with a light heart of the people that he knew, disguised in foreign clothes, and moving in places he had never seen. - Samuel Richardson
Richardson was an author of a kind quite new to English letters—neither a great gentleman like Sidney, nor a roisterer like Greene, nor a fanatic preacher like Bunyan, nor a journalist like Defoe; just a quiet, conscientious, little business man, who, after a duteous apprenticeship, had married his master's daughter like a proper Whittington, and, when she died, had married again, with admirable judgment in each case. - Jean-Jacques Rousseau
Rousseau was the son of a watchmaker, in a day when superiority of intellect in a man of low birth won him either neglect or the most insufferable patronage. His mother died in bearing him, and his father, although he made a second marriage, never mentioned her without tears. He seems to have been a very simple-hearted man, and found such pleasure in romances that he would sit up all night reading them to his little son, going ashamedly to bed in the morning when the swallows began to call in the eaves. - Honoré De Balzac
Balzac, the working machine, was simply enormous energy so coaxed and trained as to produce an enormous output. The raw material of his rich humanity passed through violent processes. It had but small chance of any very delicate finish. Balzac thought in books and in cycles of books, never in pages, paragraphs, or sentences. - William Godwin
William Godwin, the author of An Enquiry concerning Political Justice and of several novels, among them one now most undeservedly half forgotten, called Caleb Williams. It is seldom possible to point to any one book as the sign-post of a literary cross-roads, but there can be no doubt that in Caleb Williams we see the beginnings of self-conscious construction in story-telling. - Prosper Mérimée
There is a lean athletic air about the tales of Prosper Mérimée. Their author is like a man who throws balls at the cocoa-nuts in the fair—to bring them down, and not for the pleasure of throwing. His writing was something quite outside himself, undertaken for the satisfaction of feeling himself able to do it. - Miguel De Cervantes Saavedra
Cervantes, like Shakespeare, used all the resources of his time, and did not disdain to profit by other men's experiments. Don Quixote owed a triple debt to the common-sensible humorous rogue novel invented seventy years before, as well as to the more serious tales of knights and pastoral life that made his existence possible. Thieves and shepherds and paragons of chivalry assisted at his birth. The thieves in particular were responsible for the design, or lack of design, in the construction of the book. The rogue novels were made by stringing a series of disconnected 'merry quips' along the autobiography or biography of a disreputable hero. - Richard Steele and Joseph Addison
A wise remark will usher in an Eastern tale, and, not even in the papers of Steele or Addison are the subjects of characters, like the little beau, who would have been a 'mere indigent gallant,' magicked so deliciously to life. Finally, he did with 'The Man in Black' what Addison and Steele could so well have done with Sir Roger. Fielding and Smollett had written before him, and he saw that he could follow their art without resigning any of the graces of the essayist. - Jean de Meung
Jean de Meung, joyous of heart, belongs absolutely to the mediæval revival of learning. He was less of a poet than a scholar, more pleased with a display of knowledge than of beauty, and yet so far undamped by his learning as to be always ready to put plainly out such observations upon life as keep a reader smiling to-day at their [23]shrewdness and applicability. - Gustave Flaubert
Flaubert's prose is due, like his unhappiness, to his inhuman trueness of feeling. He realised that flexible as language is, there are almost insuperable difficulties in the way of any one who wishes to put an idea accurately into words. - Method of baiting guillotine trap
Guillotine traps should be baited with small pieces of Vienna sausage (Wienerwurst) or bacon. The trigger wire should be bent inward to bring the bait into proper position to permit the fall to strike the rat in the neck, as shown in the illustration. - The Houppelande
- The Knave of Diamonds
- Othello
- Queen Elizabeth in Full Dress
- The Austrian Peasant-Bride in Black
- The Cape with Buttoned Sleeve
- The Horned Head-dress
- Marie Antoinette
- Maximilian
- Miss Constance Collier as Viola
- Miss Ellen Terry as Mistress Page
- Miss Gertrude Elliot as Desdemona
- Julian L'Estrange as Hermes
- Lady Blessington
- Lewis Waller as Henry V
- Madame de Pompadour
- In the Nineteenth Century
- In the Thirteenth Century
- In the Time of Henry VII
- In the Twelfth Century
- Isolde
- In Ancient Greece
- In China of Old
- In Corfu To-day
- In the Eighteenth Century
- Elizabeth of Woodville
- Elizabeth of York
- George Alexander as Guy Domville
- Head-dress of Jewelled Velvet and Lawn
- Henry III.'s Queen
- An Elaborate Head-dress in the Reign of Henry V
- An Italian Gentleman
- An Italian Lady
- An Old Indian Festival Dress
- Beerbohm Tree as Malvolio
- Dagged Costume in the Twelfth Century
- Albanian Peasants
- An Egyptian Dancer
- An Egyptian Peasant Woman
- An Eighteenth-Century Pierrot
- A Roman Lady
- A Shoulder-Jacket
- A Simple Buttoned Gown
- A South Sea Islander
- A Spaniard in the Sixteenth Century
- A Westphalian Peasant
- A Greek Peasant in Mediæval Days
- A Hungarian Peasant in the Seventeenth Century
- A Peignoir