EPISODES OF FICTION OR Choice Stories from the Great Novelists WITH BIOGRAPHICAL INTRODUCTIONS NUMEROUS ORIGINAL ILLUSTRATIONS BY EMINENT ARTISTS .....AND COGE LIBRARY FROM THE BEQUEST OF 1919 Entered, according to Act of Congress, in the year Eighteen hundred and sixtynine, by VIRTUE AND YORSTON, in the Clerk's Office of the District Court of the United States for the Southern District of New York. the compiler's object has been to furnish the reader with material for an hour or two of pleasant reading, and the artist with suitable subjects for the exercise of his pencil. The exigencies of space have compelled him to omit several authors from whose works he would gladly have quoted, and to restrict his prefatory notices to the merest enumeration of "dates" and "titles." The reader desirous of further information is referred to Mr Dunlop's "History of Fiction," Mr Jeaffreson's "Novels and Novelists," Miss Kavanagh's "English Women of Letters," Professor Masson's "British Novelists," Thackeray's "Lectures on the English Humorists," and the admirable memoirs which Sir Walter Scott contributed to "the Novelist's Library." As far as possible, the editor has sought in each Selection an episode of the story from which it is taken, that it might, to some extent, be com plete in itself. Where this is not the case, a few words of explanation have generally been introduced. EDINBURGH, 1869. |