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Excerpt: Before the reader is introduced to the modest country medical practitioner who is to be the chief personage of the following tale, it will be well that he should be made acquainted with some particulars as to the locality in which, and the neighbors among whom, our doctor followed his profession....

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Excerpt: The Morte Darthur was finished, as the epilogue tells us, in the ninth year of Edward IV., i.e. between March 4, 1469 and the same date in 1470. It is thus, fitly enough, the last important English book written before the introduction of printing into this country, and since no manuscript of it has come down to us it is also the first English classic for our knowledge of which we are entirely dependent on a printed text. Caxton?s story of how the book was brought to him and he was induced to print it may be read farther on in his own preface. From this we learn also that he was not only the printer of the book, but to some extent its editor also, dividing Malory?s work into twentyone books, splitting up the books into chapters, by no means skilfully, and supplying the ?Rubrish? or chapter-headings. It may be added that Caxton?s preface contains, moreover, a brief criticism which, on the points on which it touches, is still the soundest and most sympathetic that has been written....

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Excerpt: Lucien had gone to Paris; and David Sechard, with the courage and intelligence of the ox which painters give the Evangelist for accompanying symbol, set himself to make the large fortune for which he had wished that evening down by the Charente, when he sat with Eve by the weir, and she gave him her hand and her heart. He wanted to make the money quickly, and less for himself than for Eve?s sake and Lucien?s....

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Excerpt: The War of the Worlds by H. G. Wells.

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Excerpt: The Red Badge of Courage by Stephen Crane.

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Excerpt: Several of us, all more or less connected with the sea, were dining in a small river-hostelry not more than thirty miles from London, and less than twenty from that shallow and dangerous puddle to which our coasting men give the grandiose name of ?German Ocean.? And through the wide windows we had a view of the Thames; an enfilading view down the Lower Hope Reach. But the dinner was execrable, and all the feast was for the eyes....

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Excerpt: A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur?s Court by Mark Twain (Samuel L. Clemens).

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Excerpt: What Is Coming? A Forecast of Things after the War by H. G. Wells.

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Excerpt: The Champion Of His Country. When young Nevil Beauchamp was throwing off his midshipman?s jacket for a holiday in the garb of peace, we had across Channel a host of dreadful military officers flashing swords at us for some critical observations of ours upon their sovereign, threatening Africa?s fires and savagery....

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Excerpt: Story of the Door. Mr. Utterson the lawyer was a man of a rugged countenance that was never lighted by a smile; cold, scanty and embarrassed in discourse; backward in sentiment; lean, long, dusty, dreary and yet somehow lovable. At friendly meetings, and when the wine was to his taste, something eminently human beaconed from his eye; something indeed which never found its way into his talk, but which spoke not only in these silent symbols of the after-dinner face, but more often and loudly in the acts of his life. He was austere with himself; drank gin when he was alone, to mortify a taste for vintages; and though he enjoyed the theater, had not crossed the doors of one for twenty years. But he had an approved tolerance for others; sometimes wondering, almost with envy, at the high pressure of spirits involved in their misdeeds; and in any extremity inclined to help rather than to reprove. ?I incline to Cain?s heresy,? he used to say quaintly: ?I let my brother go to the devil in his own way.? In this character, it was frequently his fortune to be the last reputable acquaintance and the last good influence in the lives of d...

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Excerpt: LO I the man, whose Muse whilome did maske, As time her taught, in lowly Shepheards weeds, Am now enforst a far vnfitter taske, For trumpets sterne to chaunge mine Oaten reeds, And sing of Knights and Ladies gentle deeds; Whose prayses hauing slept in silence long, Me, all too meane, the sacred Muse areeds To blazon broad emongst her learned throng: Fierce warres and faithfull loues shall moralize my song....

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Excerpt: These papers I am anxious to put into the hands of your house, and, so far as regards the U.S., of your house exclusively; not with any view to further emolument, but as an acknowledgment of the services which you have already rendered me; namely, first, in having brought together so widely scattered a collection--a difficulty which in my own hands by too painful an experience I had found from nervous depression to be absolutely insurmountable; secondly, in having made me a participator in the pecuniary profits of the American edition, without solicitation or the shadow of any expectation on my part, without any legal claim that I could plead, or equitable warrant in established usage, solely and merely upon your own spontaneous motion. Some of these new papers, I hope, will not be without their value in the eyes of those who have taken an interest in the original series. But at all events, good or bad, they are now tendered to the appropriation of your individual house, the Messrs. Ticknor & Fields, according to the amplest extent of any power to make such a transfer that I may be found to possess by law or custom in Ameri...

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Contents MEMORIALS, AND OTHER PAPERS, VOL. I. ....................................................................................................... 4 FROM THE AUTHOR, TO THE AMERICAN EDITOR OF HIS WORKS. .......................................................... 4 EXPLANATORY NOTICES....................................................................................................................................... 5 THE ORPHAN HEIRESS......................................................................................................................................... 18 OXFORD .................................................................................................................................................................... 96 THE PAGAN ORACLES ........................................................................................................................................ 160 THE REVOLUTION OF GREECE. ....................................................................................................................... 194 MEMORIALS, AND OTHER PAPERS, VOL. II. ................................................

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Excerpt: The writer of a book which copies the manners and language of Queen Anne?s time, must not omit the Dedication to the Patron; and I ask leave to inscribe this volume to your Lordship, for the sake of the great kindness and friendship which I owe to you and yours. My volume will reach you when the Author is on his voyage to a country where your name is as well known as here. Wherever I am, I shall gratefully regard you; and shall not be the less welcomed in America because I am....

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Next to de Alexis de Tocquville's almost contemporary Democracy in America, Frances Trollope's work may be the most famous (or at least notorious) dissection of manners and morals of the United States. The work was a sensation on both sides of the Atlantic, and particularly in America, where Trollope was reviled as representing the worst of old world prejudices the new republic (though the criticism did nothing to hurt sales). Accompanied by a son and two daughters, Trollope lived in the United States from 1827 to 1831, spending most of her time in Cincinnati, where she had hoped, when joined by her husband, to open a large department store, which was also to be a place of entertainment and culture. She was, unfortunately, almost entirely ignorant of business practices, and habitually short of money, which her husband was in no position to make up. After leaving Cincinnati she traveled briefly in the eastern states, before returning to England. There is something of a happy ending; Domestic Manners was her first book, and such a success that she turned to writing, producing in her lifetime over a hundred books, which, though they ne...

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Fiction, Travel

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Excerpt: GEORGIC I What makes the cornfield smile; beneath what star Maecenas, it is meet to turn the sod Or marry elm with vine; how tend the steer; What pains for cattle-keeping, or what proof Of patient trial serves for thrifty bees;-- Such are my themes....

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Contents THE GEORGICS............................................................................3 GEORGIC I.....................................................................................3 GEORGIC II...............................................................................18 GEORGIC III.............................................................................35 GEORGIC IV...............................................................................51 THE ECLOGUES................................................................................68 ECLOGUE I..................................................................................68 ECLOGUE II................................................................................72 ECLOGUE III...............................................................................75 ECLOGUE IV...............................................................................82 ECLOGUE V.................................................................................84 ECLOGUE VI...............................................................................88 ECLOGUE VII....................

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Excerpt: Preface to Fanny?s First Play. Fanny?s First Play, being but a potboiler, needs no preface. But its lesson is not, I am sorry to say, unneeded. Mere morality, or the substitution of custom for conscience was once accounted a shameful and cynical thing: people talked of right and wrong, of honor and dishonor, of sin and grace, of salvation and damnation, not of morality and immorality. The word morality, if we met it in the Bible, would surprise us as much as the word telephone or motor car. Nowadays we do not seem to know that there is any other test of conduct except morality; and the result is that the young had better have their souls awakened by disgrace, capture by the police, and a month?s hard labor, than drift along from their cradles to their graves doing what other people do for no other reason than that other people do it, and knowing nothing of good and evil, of courage and cowardice, or indeed anything but how to keep hunger and concupiscence and fashionable dressing within the bounds of good taste except when their excesses can be concealed....

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Excerpt: I had taken Mrs. Prest into my confidence; in truth without her I should have made but little advance, for the fruitful idea in the whole business dropped from her friendly lips. It was she who invented the short cut, who severed the Gordian knot. It is not supposed to be the nature of women to rise as a general thing to the largest and most liberal view--I mean of a practical scheme; but it has struck me that they sometimes throw off a bold conception--such as a man would not have risen to-- with singular serenity....

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Excerpt: Chapter 1. The Levins had been three months in Moscow. The date had long passed on which, according to the most trustworthy calculations of people learned in such matters, Kitty should have been confined. But she was still about, and there was nothing to show that her time was any nearer than two months ago. The doctor, the monthly nurse, and Dolly and her mother, and most of all Levin, who could not think of the approaching event without terror, began to be impatient and uneasy. Kitty was the only person who felt perfectly calm and happy....

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Excerpt: Towards three o?clock in the afternoon of one October day in the year 1844, a man of sixty or thereabouts, whom anybody might have credited with more than his actual age, was walking along the Boulevard des Italians with his head bent down, as if he were tracking some one. There was a smug expression about the mouth--he looked like a merchant who has just done a good stroke of business, or a bachelor emerging from a boudoir in the best of humors with himself; and in Paris this is the highest degree of self-satisfaction ever registered by a human countenance....

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Excerpt: Bianchon, a physician to whom science owes a fine system of theoretical physiology, and who, while still young, made himself a celebrity in the medical school of Paris, that central luminary to which European doctors do homage, practiced surgery for a long time before he took up medicine. His earliest studies were guided by one of the greatest of French surgeons, the illustrious Desplein, who flashed across science like a meteor. By the consensus even of his enemies, he took with him to the tomb an incommunicable method. Like all men of genius, he had no heirs; he carried everything in him, and carried it away with him. The glory of a surgeon is like that of an actor: they live only so long as they are alive, and their talent leaves no trace when they are gone. Actors and surgeons, like great singers too, like the executants who by their performance increase the power of music tenfold, are all the heroes of a moment....

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Excerpt: The Book of Nehemiah, the Sixteenth Book of the King James Version of the Bible.

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Excerpt: The Divine Comedy, Volume Two, Purgatory [Purgatorio] by Dante Aligheri, trans Charles Eliot Norton.

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Contents PURGATORY................................................................... 6 CANTO I. Invocation to the Muses.?Dawn of Easter on the shore of Purgatory.?The Four Stars.?Cato.?The cleansing of Dante from the stains of Hell. ............................................................................................................ 6 CANTO II. Sunrise.?The Poets on the shore.?Coming of a boat, guided by an angel, bearing souls to Purgatory.? Their landing.?Casella and his song.?Cato hurries the souls to the mountain. ................................. 10 CANTO III. Ante-Purgatory.?Souls of those who have died in contumacy of the Church.? Manfred. ............. 13 CANTO IV. Ante-Purgatory.?Ascent to a shelf of the mountain.?The negligent, who postponed repentance to the last hour.?Belacqua. ..................................................................................................................................... 16 CANTO V. Ante-Purgatory.?Spirits who had delayed repentance, and met with death by violence, but died repentant.?Jacopo del Cassero.?Buonconte da Montefeltro?Via de? Tolomei. ................................

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Introduction: ?For this my son was dead, and is alive again; he was lost; and is found.? He was lost by the Norton-Harjes Ambulance Corps. He was officially dead as a result of official misinformation....

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Introduction: 1. The Occasion of the Work. -- Luther did not impose himself as reformer upon the Church. In the course of a conscientious performance of the duties of his office, to which he had been regularly and divinely called, and without any urging on his part, he attained to this position by inward necessity. In 1515 he received his appointment as the standing substitute for the sickly city pastor, Simon Heinse, from the city council of Wittenberg. Before this time he was obliged to preach only occasionally in the convent, apart from his activity as teacher in the University and convent. Through this appointment he was in duty bound, by divine and human right, to lead and direct the congregation at Wittenberg on the true way to life, and it would have been a denial of the knowledge of salvation which God had led him to acquire, by way of ardent inner struggles, if he had led the congregation on any other way than the one God had revealed to him in His Word. He could not deny before the congregation which had been intrusted to his care, what up to this time he had taught with ever increasing clearness in his lectures at the Uni...

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Excerpt: Salammbo by Gustave Flaubert.

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Introduction: Queen Elizabeth herself, and London as it was in her time, with sketches of Elizabethan England, and of its great men in the way of social dignity, are here brought home to us by Paul Hentzner and Sir Robert Naunton....

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Excerpt: Chapter 1. The Karenins, husband and wife, continued living in the same house, met every day, but were complete strangers to one another. Alexey Alexandrovitch made it a rule to see his wife every day, so that the servants might have no grounds for suppositions, but avoided dining at home. Vronsky was never at Alexey Alexandrovitch?s house, but Anna saw him away from home, and her husband was aware of it....

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Preface: Thirteen men were banded together in Paris under the Empire, all imbued with one and the same sentiment, all gifted with sufficient energy to be faithful to the same thought, with sufficient honor among themselves never to betray one another even if their interests clashed; and sufficiently wily and politic to conceal the sacred ties that united them, sufficiently strong to maintain themselves above the law, bold enough to undertake all things, and fortunate enough to succeed, nearly always, in their undertakings; having run the greatest dangers, but keeping silence if defeated; inaccessible to fear; trembling neither before princes, nor executioners, not even before innocence; accepting each other for such as they were, without social prejudices,--criminals, no doubt, but certainly remarkable through certain of the qualities that make great men, and recruiting their number only among men of mark....

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Excerpt: Taras Bulba and Other Tales by Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol.

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Contents INTRODUCTION ............................................................ 4 TARAS BULBA.............................................................. 13 ST. JOHN?S EVE ......................................................... 130 THE CLOAK ................................................................ 146 HOW THE TWO IVANS QUARRELLED .................. 176 THE MYSTERIOUS PORTRAIT ................................ 223 THE CALASH .............................................................. 270...

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Excerpt: Wilhelm Tell by Johann Christoph Freidrich von Schiller, translated by Theodore Martin.

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Excerpt: Chapter 1. It was in the early days of April; Bernard Longueville had been spending the winter in Rome. He had travelled northward with the consciousness of several social duties that appealed to him from the further side of the Alps, but he was under the charm of the Italian spring, and he made a pretext for lingering....

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Excerpt: Preface to Major Barbara: First Aid to Critics by George Bernard Shaw.

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Excerpt: The Divine Comedy, Volume One, Hell [The Inferno] by Dante Aligheri, trans Charles Eliot Norton.

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Contents INTRODUCTION .................................................................................................................7 AIDS TO THE STUDY OF THE DIVINE COMEDY .......................................................... 14 HELL .............................................................................. 16 CANTO I. Dante, astray in a wood, reaches the foot of a hill which he begins to ascend; he is hindered by three beasts; he turns back and is met by Virgil, who proposes to guide him into the eternal world. ....................................... 16 CANTO II. Dante, doubtful of his own powers, is discouraged at the outset.?Virgil cheers him by telling him that he has been sent to his aid by a blessed Spirit from Heaven.?Dante casts off fear, and the poets proceed. ................ 19 CANTO III. The gate of Hell.?Virgil lends Dante in.?The punishment of the neither good nor bad.?Aeheron, and the sinners on its bank.?Charon.?Earthquake.?Dante swoons. ................................................................. 22 CANTO IV. The further side of Acheron.?Virgil leads Dante into Limbo, the First Circle of Hell, cont...

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Excerpt: ACT I. (SCENE.--A large room looking upon a garden door in the left-hand wall, and two in the right. In the middle of the room, a round table with chairs set about it, and books, magazines and newspapers upon it. In the foreground on the left, a window, by which is a small sofa with a work-table in front of it. At the back the room opens into a conservatory rather smaller than the room. From the right-hand side of this, a door leads to the garden. Through the large panes of glass that form the outer wall of the conservatory, a gloomy fjord landscape can be discerned, half-obscured by steady rain....

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Excerpt: BOOK I. INSCRIPTIONS. One?s-self I sing, a simple separate person, Yet utter the word Democratic, the word En-Masse. Of physiology from top to toe I sing, Not physiognomy alone nor brain alone is worthy for the Muse, I say the Form complete is worthier far, The Female equally with the Male I sing. Of Life immense in passion, pulse, and power, Cheerful, for freest action form?d under the laws divine, The Modern Man I sing....

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Contents LEAVES OF GRASS.......................8 BOOK I. INSCRIPTIONS..................9 One?s-Self I Sing...................................9 As I Ponder?d in Silence.....................10 In Cabin?d Ships at Sea.......................11 To Foreign Lands................................12 To a Historian.....................................12 To Thee Old Cause..............................13 Eidolons................................................14 For Him I Sing....................................18 When I Read the Book........................18 Beginning My Studies.........................18 Beginners............................................19 To the States.......................................19 On Journeys Through the States..........19 To a Certain Cantatrice.......................20 Me Imperturbe....................................20 Savantism..............................................21 The Ship Starting................................21 I Hear America Singing......................21 What Place Is Besieged?......................22 Still Though the One I Sing................22 Shut Not Your Doors..........................

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Excerpt: It was a foggy day in London, and the fog was heavy and dark. Animate London, with smarting eyes and irritated lungs, was blinking, wheezing, and choking; inanimate London was a sooty spectre, divided in purpose between being visible and invisible, and so being wholly neither. Gaslights flared in the shops with a haggard and unblest air, as knowing themselves to be night-creatures that had no business abroad under the sun; while the sun itself when it was for a few moments dimly indicated through circling eddies of fog, showed as if it had gone out and were collapsing flat and cold....

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Excerpt: The talisman towards the end of the month of October 1829 a young man entered the Palais-Royal just as the gaming-houses opened, agreeably to the law which protects a passion by its very nature easily excisable. He mounted the staircase of one of the gambling hells distinguished by the number 36, without too much deliberation. ?Your hat, sir, if you please?? a thin, querulous voice called out. A little old man, crouching in the darkness behind a railing, suddenly rose and exhibited his features, carved after a mean design....

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Excerpt: Overruled by George Bernard Shaw.

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Excerpt: Chapter 1. Princess Shtcherbatskaya considered that it was out of the question for the wedding to take place before Lent, just five weeks off, since not half the trousseau could possibly be ready by that time. But she could not but agree with Levin that to fix it for after Lent would be putting it off too late, as an old aunt of Prince Shtcherbatsky?s was seriously ill and might die, and then the mourning would delay the wedding still longer. And therefore, deciding to divide the trousseau into two parts--a larger and smaller trousseau--the princess consented to have the wedding before Lent. She determined that she would get the smaller part of the trousseau all ready now, and the larger part should be made later, and she was much vexed with Levin because he was incapable of giving her a serious answer to the question whether he agreed to this arrangement or not. The arrangement was the more suitable as, immediately after the wedding, the young people were to go to the country, where the more important part of the trousseau would not be wanted....

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Excerpt: This little play is really a religious tract in dramatic form. If our silly censorship would permit its performance, it might possibly help to set right-side-up the perverted conscience and re-invigorate the starved self-respect of our considerable class of loose-lived playgoers whose point of honor is to deride all official and conventional sermons....

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Excerpt: Renewal of Life by Transmission. The most notable distinction between living and inanimate things is that the former maintain themselves by renewal. A stone when struck resists. If its resistance is greater than the force of the blow struck, it remains outwardly unchanged. Otherwise, it is shattered into smaller bits. Never does the stone attempt to react in such a way that it may maintain itself against the blow, much less so as to render the blow a contributing factor to its own continued action....

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Contents Chapter One: Education as a Necessity of Life .............................................................................. 5 Chapter Two: Education as a Social Function .............................................................................. 14 Chapter Three: Education as Direction ........................................................................................ 28 Chapter Four: Education as Growth ............................................................................................. 46 Chapter Five: Preparation, Unfolding, and Formal Discipline................................................... 58 Chapter Six: Education as Conservative and Progressive ........................................................... 74 Chapter Seven: The Democratic Conception in Education ......................................................... 85 Chapter Eight: Aims in Education .............................................................................................. 105 Chapter Nine: Natural Development and Social Efficiency as Aims.........................................116 Chapter Ten: Interest and Discipline ......

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Excerpt: War and Peace: Book Thirteen by Leo Tolstoy.

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Introduction: Francois Marie Arouet, who called himself Voltaire, was the son of Francois Arouet of Poitou, who lived in Paris, had given up his office of notary two years before the birth of this his third son, and obtained some years afterwards a treasurer?s office in the Chambre des Comptes. Voltaire was born in the year 1694. He lived until within ten or eleven years of the outbreak of the Great French Revolution, and was a chief leader in the movement of thought that preceded the Revolution. Though he lived to his eighty-fourth year, Voltaire was born with a weak body....

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Contents LETTER I.?ON THE QUAKERS .............................................................................................................................. 6 LETTER II.?ON THE QUAKERS .......................................................................................................................... 10 LETTER III.?ON THE QUAKERS ......................................................................................................................... 12 LETTER IV.?ON THE QUAKERS......................................................................................................................... 16 LETTER V.?ON THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND .................................................................................................. 20 LETTER VI.?ON THE PRESBYTERIANS............................................................................................................ 23 LETTER VII.?ON THE SOCINIANS, OR ARIANS, OR ANTITRINITARIANS ............................................. 24 LETTER VIII.?ON THE PARLIAMENT ............................................................................................................... ...