The Plain Speaker - 1826 Author:William Hazlitt Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: ESSAY X. ON OLD ENGLISH WRITERS AND SPEAKERS. When I see a whole row of standard French authors piled up on a Paris book-stall, to the height of twenty or... more » thirty volumes, shewing their mealy coats to the sun, pink, blue, and yellow, they seem to me a wall built up to keep out the intrusion of foreign letters. There is scarcely such a thing as an English book to be met with, unless, perhaps, a dusty edition of Clarissa Harlowe lurks in an obscure corner, or a volume of the Sentimental Journey perks its well-known title in your face. But there is a huge column of Voltaire's works complete in sixty volumes, another (not so frequent) ofRousseau's in fifty, Racine in ten volumes, Moliere in about the same number, La Fontaine, Marmontel, Gil Bias, for ever; Madame Sevigne's Letters, Pascal, Montesquieu, Cre- billon, Marivaux, with Montaigne, Rabelais, and the grand Corneille more rare; and eighteen full-sized volumes of La Harpe's criticism, towering vain-gloriously in the midst of them, furnishing the streets of Paris with a graduated scale of merit for all the rest, and teaching the very garcons perruquiers how to measure the length of each act of each play by a stop-watch, and to ascertain whether the angles at the four corners of each classic volume are right ones. How climb over this lofty pile of taste and elegance to wander down into the bogs and wastes of English or of any other literature, " to this obscure and wild?" Must they " on that fair mountain leave to feed, to batten on this moor ?" Or why should they ? Have they not literature enough of their own, and to spare, without coming to us? Is not the public mind crammed, choaked with French books, pictures, statues, plays, operas, newspapers, parties, and an incessant farrago of words, so that it has not i moment left...« less