Book Description

Excerpt from Early Papers and Some Memories In great and small there is a like instinct of self-preservation. Let me have leave, then, to be such a gosling as to obey instinct, when I seek to reunite the past and present of a life of work that has, by accident and course of time, been cut in two. Those earlier books and papers which it is proposed now to reissue in volumes uniform with English Writers were first published while I was putting off the work to which I then hoped, if time lasted, to give the riper part of life. It seemed right to defer formal use of a small measure of knowledge that could only be approached through years of study and experience, at least until the age at which man knows himself a fool. "At thirty man suspects himself a fool," or did so in the days of Dr. Edward Young; - "knows it at forty, and reforms his plan." The writer of these Memories did, in fact, soon after the age of forty, form anew his plan of work. Since then, during the thirty years that men count as a generation, he has tried to spend his life on the one service for which, if for anything, it might be made a little fit. While so doing he has suffered lapse of time to separate his present from his past, for want of care over the work done when he lived among the grandfathers and fathers of the present generation, and found them kind. 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.