Hours in a Library

by Leslie Stephen

Overview

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Product Details

ISBN-13:	9783368801489
Publisher:	Outlook Verlag
Publication date:	02/17/2023
Pages:	406
Product dimensions:	5.83(w) x 8.27(h) x 0.90(d)

Read an Excerpt

III. WILLIAM LAW. The name of William Law will recall to most readers a passage in Gibbon's autobiography. The cynical historian is thought to have shown little insight into the loftier motives of the early Christians. Yet he spoke with affectionate tenderness of the man who, amongst all his contemporaries, might stand for a primitive Christian come to revisit a strangely altered world. "In our family," says Gibbon, "he left the reputation of a worthy and pious man who believed all that he professed, and practised all that he enjoined." Gibbon's respect for the purity and tenderness of Law's character is mixed with admiration for his intellectual vigour. As a controversialist, according to Gibbon, he showed himself at least the equal of the Whig champion, Hoadly; and in his practical writings, his fervid emotion is seconded by a power of drawing satirical portraits "not unworthy of the pen of La Bruyere."Were it not for his mysticism, he " might be ranked with the most agreeable and ingenious writers of the times; " and even " a philosopher must allow that he exposes with equal sincerity and truth the strange contradiction which exists between the faith and practice of the Christian world." Gibbon's autobiography is a very delightful specimen of one of the most generally delightful of all forms of literature. Nobody ever laid bare his own character with more felicity; and there is something curiously dramatic in the contrast between the two men thus brought into momentary contact. Gibbon is as perfect an incarnation of the worldly thinkers of the eighteenth century, with their placid contempt for all the higher spiritual influences, as Law of some counteracting forces which weregradually stirring beneath the surface of society. If we would trace to its head the great rea...

Table of Contents

1. De Foe's novels; 2. Richardson's novels; 3. Pope as a moralist; 4. Mr Elwin's edition of Pope; 5. Some words about Sir Walter Scott; 6. Nathaniel Hawthorne; 7. Balzac's novels; 8. De Quincey.