Anyone who reads my Twitter bios knows that Chambers’s Cyclopaedia is a mainstay for me. And why not? The entries are generally fantastically written, occasionally rising to a high pitch of eloquence, and the articles also point readers to the various editions of each author’s work.

I have to thank @frequencymark for recommending this book to me. Overall I have found the entries generally informative (albeit not eloquent like Chambers) but the coverage is at times spotty–there are authors in the 1946 edition who don’t appear in this edition! One step forward, another step back if you ask me in terms of comprehensiveness; granted “European literature” is a very wide field to cover.

You don’t read Hippolyte Taine for the rightness of his opinions. You read Taine to read a powerful, at times gorgeously picturesque, at times almost mystical French prose stylist who even Proust and Anatole France were impressed by.

One of these days I’m going to read and review all of these. I really need to read that one Gogol comedy that I keep seeing mentioned everywhere.

I haven’t forgotten about this (highly entertaining) creep. I hope to continue reviewing him–and am exciting for when he goes west and arrives in Paris for the first time. Paris is the stage (if anywhere) for the intrepid Jacques Casanova!

I didn’t say these were the nicest books in my collection. Only the one’s I really wanted handy.

I do believe Johnson’s Dictionary and Burton’s Anatomy are two of the greatest bedside, randomly-flip-to-a-page books of all time.

Truth be told, I haven’t dipped into this one as much as I should. But for nice extracts of old authors, this is probably a nice reading experience.