Marginal Notes (Classic Reprint)

Excerpt from Marginal Notes<br><br>Macaulay's library contained many books, of no great intrinsic value in themselves, which are readable, from the first page to the last, for the sake of his manuscript notes inscribed in immense profusion down their margins. He was contented, when the humour took him, to amuse his solitary hours with such productions as Percival Stockdale's memoirs, and the six volumes of Miss Anna Seward's Letters. His running commentary on those trivial and pretentious authors was as the breaking of a butterfly beneath the impact of a cheerful steam - hammer. "Ingenious," (so Miss Seward wrote to a correspondent,) "is your parallel between the elder and the modern Erasmus." "The modern Erasmus," said Macaulay, "is Darwin. That anybody should have thought of making a parallel between him and the elder Erasmus is odd indeed. They had nothing but the name in common. One might as well make a parallel between Csar and Sir Csar Hawkins."<br><br>About the Publisher<br><br>Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com<br><br>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.