Wit, Wisdom and Folly

Excerpt from Wit, Wisdom and Folly: Pen and Pencil Flashes They necessarily are, regardless of expense, offer the ordinary reader precisely what he wants short stories of a more or less sensational char acter, enlivened almost at every page by pictures which make the text exceedingly attractive. The publishers, alive to the change that has taken place of late years, were not slow in understand ing that, in order to 'bait' the subscriber and 'land him,' it was imperative to draw his eye and his mind in an equal degree, and they supplied him with the only nourishment which could satisfy his sluggish mental appetite. And the food presented to him is, in consequence, often 'gruel and treacle,' fit for babes, and just as often 'pickles and spice,' fit for rowdies. The writer of these pages, taking up a magazine from a railway bookstall not long ago, was not a little astonished to count twelve ghost and spirit stories out of the fourteen which made up the number. Magazine tales are by no means always of this description, it is true. Many are tales of adventures and war; many are tales of love; some are good studies of life, well-thought-out and elegantly written, and some are idyllic or romantic tales of fiction, delightfully told; but a great number - too many are blood-curdling, 'dagger-and-poison' stories, written with the view of depicting base instincts and unfolding hideous crimes - the only object being, apparently, to arouse no nobler sensation than morbid curiosity. 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.