THE MAN who is content to please while others insist on being admired is so rare in literature that he is certain never to be forgotten. No one has ever thought of calling the author of “The Curiosities of Literature” a great writer, but who that ever knew him would wish him to be great at the expense of ceasing to be what he is? He has not the delicate wit of Addison, the humor of Lamb, or the brilliancy of De Quincey, but there are times when he can make the reader forget that there is, or that there need be, better writing than his. Like Robert Chambers, he is unobtrusively friendly; and at the same time he is wholly free from the vice of the critical style, which avoids stating facts except by involution and indirection. He writes as if he had an open book before him and were modestly answering a friend’s question of what had most interested him in it. This, indeed, is what he does do, except that the open book is the literature of the world, in which he so immersed himself that it was the only world he lived in.

  He was born at Enfield, England, May, 1766, from a family of Jewish origin. His father, who removed from Venice to England, wished him to become a merchant, but his distaste for trade was so great that one of his first literary attempts was a poem denouncing it. His father finally consented to allow him to follow his own inclinations, and he passed his subsequent life almost wholly in libraries. His son, the celebrated Earl of Beaconsfield, says that in the country he scarcely ever left his room “but to saunter in abstraction upon a terrace, muse over a chapter, or coin a sentence.” He died January 19th, 1848. Among his works are “The Recreations of Authors,” “The Calamities of Authors,” “The Quarrels of Authors,” and “The Amenities of Literature,” all approximating the quality of “The Curiosities of Literature,” but none of them equaling it. It was a masterpiece of its kind which even its own author could produce but once. Many of its essays are models worthy of imitation by all who, when they have something to say, are willing to give up admiration and be wholly forgotten by their hearers for the sake of saying it and having it remembered rather than wondered at.