Words and Their Uses, Past and Present: A Study of the English Language (Classic Reprint)
(Excerpt from Words and Their Uses, Past and Present: A St...)
Excerpt from Words and Their Uses, Past and Present: A Study of the English Language
IN preparing a new edition of this book, I have sought help and taken hints from every criticism of it that I have seen; and I heard of none that I did not try to find if it was not at hand. Whoever at tempts to correct the faults of others in any respect may expect severe treatment at the hands of the very men whom he would serve; and if his efforts are directed to their use of language, he may reasonably look forward to walking, sitting, and sleeping upon pen points for a while. Wherefore I have been very pleasantly surprised that of the much that has been written about this book, so little, comparatively, was disparaging. In only one quarter have I found reason to complain of unfairness, or even of a captions spirit, while the general tone of my critics, public and pri vate, has been that of thankfulness for a real service. But I have tried not to allow myself to be led by the favorable judgment of my critics into the belief that I could disregard the strictures of my censors.
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National Hymns: How They are Written and how They are Not Written : a Lyric and National Study for the Times : with a Letter to the Saturday Review
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The New Gospel of Peace, Vol. 2: According to St. Benjamin (Classic Reprint)
(Excerpt from The New Gospel of Peace, Vol. 2: According t...)
Excerpt from The New Gospel of Peace, Vol. 2: According to St. Benjamin
20. And they sent letters to their friends and their kins men which dwelt in the land of Hesh, saying to them, Come unto this. Land and live, for there is gelt here. And they came.
About the Publisher
Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com
This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.
Richard Grant White was a literary and musical critic. He was also a Shakespearean scholar, journalist, social critic, and lawyer.
Background
Richard Grant White was born in New York, eldest of the five children of Richard Mansfield and Ann Eliza (Tousey) White, and seventh in descent from John White, a follower of Thomas Hooker and one of the founders of Cambridge, Massachussets, Hartford, Connecticut, and Hadley, Massachussets. His father was a prosperous South Street merchant, a prominent Episcopalian of the Low Church party, and an official of the Allaire Iron Works. The boy grew up in Brooklyn.
Education
He attended the Grammar School of Columbia College, then conducted by Charles Anthon, and was admitted to the junior class in the University of the City of New York when but sixteen years old. As a student he was notoriously averse to writing. Music was a passion with him, but his desire to become a professional musician was thwarted by his parents. Upon his graduation in 1839 he began the study of medicine, turned to the law.
Career
He was called to the bar in 1845. The next year he helped Cornelius Mathews to edit a short-lived humorous paper, Yankee Doodle, and made other sparetime ventures into journalism. When his father's fortune collapsed, leaving White to support two unmarried sisters, he turned to writing for a livelihood. As musical critic of James Watson Webb's Morning Courier and New-York Enquirer, then edited by Henry Jarvis Raymond, he immediately attained distinction in his new profession. White remained on the Courier staff until 1859, writing musical, art, and literary criticism, and numerous political articles and editorials. During the Civil War he was secretary of the Metropolitan Sanitary Fair and, after a brief connection with the World, was appointed chief clerk of the marine revenue bureau of the New York Custom House (1861 - 78). Throughout his career he wrote voluminously for periodicals, especially for Putnam's Magazine, the Galaxy, and the Atlantic Monthly. To the London Spectator he contributed useful articles during the Civil War. Among his separate publications were: Handbook of Christian Art (1853); Shakespeare's Scholar (1854); The New Gospel of Peace (4 vols. , 1863 - 66), a mordant, widely circulated satire on "Copperheads"; The Adventures of Sir Lyon Bouse, Bart. , in America during the Civil War (1867); Words and Their Uses (1870), witty, influential, and often unsound; Every-day English (1880), a sequel; England Without and Within (1881); The Fate of Mansfield Humphreys (1884), a belated, unsuccessful, but amusing attempt at a novel; and Studies in Shakespeare (1886). He was an acute, learned, and sometimes brilliant student of Shakespeare, one of the first to detect the spuriousness of J. P. Collier's forgeries, and with a little more leisure and a happier geographical situation might have been one of Shakespeare's great editors. His edition, in twelve volumes, of The Works of William Shakespeare (1857 - 66) was published just as the Cambridge Edition (1863 - 66) of W. G. Clark, John Glover, and W. A. Wright began a new epoch in the history of the text, and its merits have been consequently obscured. White's text was republished as the Riverside Shakespeare and was the basis of a revised edition, in eighteen volumes, by W. P. Trent, B. W. Wells, and J. B. Henneman, that was issued in 1912. He died at his home in New York after a long illness, in his sixty-fourth year.
White was six feet two inches tall, erect, athletic, and handsome, and until the last years of his life enjoyed robust health. His senses were remarkably acute and his enjoyment of beauty intense. He revered the memory of his forebears, especially of his grandfather, Calvin White, a gentleman of stout Tory principles, on whom, to some extent, he patterned his own character.
Francis James Child, James Russell Lowell, and Charles Eliot Norton were his friends, but he shunned the commonplace literary and journalistic society of New York. The usual representation of him as a disagreeable, humorless snob, coxcomb, and Anglomaniac was a caricature of a high-minded gentleman and an accomplished man of letters. Uncomplainingly he lived his entire life in a city that he detested, earning his living by toilsome, uncongenial occupations. He traveled hardly at all in America, visited England - the land of his admiration - only once, and then when he was past his fifty-fifth birthday, and never saw the continent of Europe.
Interests
Music, Shakespeare, and the art of violin construction were his three great solaces.
Connections
On October 16, 1850, he married Alexina Black Mease, who with two sons, Richard Mansfield and Stanford, survived him.