❦
The electrotype plates of a compilation which maintained remarkable
popularity for more than thirty years, “Gleanings for the Curious from
the Harvest Fields of Literature,” having been destroyed in the fire
which wrecked the extensive plant of the J. B. Lippincott Company in
November, 1899, the publishers requested the compiler to prepare a
companion volume on similar lines. Like its predecessor, at once grave
and sportive, the present miscellany offers, as Butler says, “a running
banquet that hath much variety, but little of a sort.” It is a handy
book for the shady nook in summer, or the cosey fireside in winter; for
the traveller in a parlor-car, or on an ocean-steamer; for the military
post, or the wardroom of a war-ship; for the waiting-room of a doctor or
a dentist; for the stray half-hour whenever or wherever it may chance.
It is not for a class of readers, but for the multitude. Even the
scholar, who will find little in its pages with which he is unfamiliar,
will have ready reference to facts and fancies which are not always
within convenient reach. Even the captains of industry, in moments of
relaxation, may find in its manifold topics something more than what
Autolycus calls “unconsidered trifles.” It makes no pretension to
systematic completeness; it is at best, fragmentary, but as we are told
in “Guesses at Truth,” a dinner of fragments is often the best dinner,
and in the absence of a uniform web, patchwork may have a charm of its
own.
Literature, as an English writer remarks, is “not a matter of paper and
ink, but a human voice speaking to human beings; a voice, or rather a
collection of voices, from generation to generation, speaking to men and
women of the present time.” To echo these voices the excursionist must
not only follow the trail over beaten tracks, but must ramble through
devious by-ways. He must be classed with those who endeavor, as Lord
Bacon puts it, “out of monuments, names, words, proverbs, traditions,
records, fragments of stories, passages of books, and the like, to save
and recover somewhat from the deluge of time.” The results of the
literary activity of this wonder-working age and the marvels and
miracles of the ever-widening field of science are, as Coleridge says,
“not in everybody’s reach, and though it is better to know them
thoroughly than to know them only here and there, yet it is a good work
to give a little to those who have neither time nor means to get more.”
For permission to select passages from copyrighted books, the grateful
acknowledgments of the compiler are due to Messrs. Harper & Brothers and
D. Appleton & Company, The Judge Company, publishers of _Leslie’s
Weekly_, Prof. R. B. Anderson of Wisconsin, and Hon. Hampton L. Carson,
of Philadelphia. Indebtedness is also acknowledged to writers and
publishers whose copyrights have expired by limitation.