Essays

Essays contains 170 classic books of essays, from Plutarch and Cicero, to Montaigne and Emerson.

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Table of Contents

General and Collections

• Cambridge Essays on Education edited by Arthur Christopher Benson
• Character Writing of the Seventeenth Century edted by Henry Morley
• An English Garner: Critical Essays and Literary Fragments
• Famous Reviews selected and edited by R. Brimley Johnson
• Prefaces and Prologues to Famous Books (from Harvard Classics)
• Prefaces to Fiction

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Multi-National

Lafcadio Hearn (1850-1904) (born in Greece to Irish and Greek parents, educated in England, lived most of his life in Japan)

• Books and Habits
• The Romance of the Milky Way

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American

Ambrose Bierce (1842-1914)

• Write It Right

Claude Bragdon (1866-1946)

• Beautiful Necessity: Seven Essays on Theosophy and Architecture

John Jay Chapman

• Emerson and Other Essays

Winston Churchill (not related to Sir Winston Churchill) (1871-1947)

• An Essay on the American Contribution and the Democratic Idea

Clarence Day, Jr. (1874-1935)

• This Simian World

W.E.B. Du Bois (1868-1963)

• The Conservation of Races (short)
• The Souls of Black Folk

Frederick Douglass (1818-1895)

• Reconstruction (article)

Havelock Ellis

• Essays in War-Time: Further Studies in the Task of Social Hygiene

Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882)

• Essays, First Series
• Essays, Second Series
• Representative Men

Edward Everett Hale (1822-1909)

• How to Do It

Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (1809-1894)

• The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table
• Medical Essays
• A Mortal Antipathy
• Over the Teacups
• The Poet at the Breakfast Table
• The Professor at the Breakfast Table

Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.

• Pages from an Old Volume of Life: a Collection of Essays

William Dean Howells (1837-1920)

• Confessions of a Summer Colonist (essay)
• Literary Boston(essay)
• Literature and Life:
• American Literary Centers (essay)
• The Man of Letters as a Man of Business (essay)
• Notes of a Vanished Summer (essay)
• A Psychological Counter-Current in Recent Fiction (essay)
• Short Stories and Essays
• Worries of a Winter Walk
• Summer Isles of Eden
• Wild Flowers of the Asphalt
• A Circus in the Suburbs
• A She Hamlet
• The Midnight Platoon
• The Beach at Rockaway
• Sawdust in the Arena
• At a Dime Museum
• American Literature in Exile
• The Horse Show
• The Problem of the Summer
• Aesthetic New York Fifty-odd Years Ago
• From New York into New England
• The Art of the Adsmith
• The Psychology of Plagiarism
• Puritanism in American Fiction
• The What and How in Art
• Politics in American Authors
• Storage
• "Floating down the River on the O-hi-o"
• Some Anomalies of the Short Story (essay)
• Spanish Prisoners of War (essay)
• The Standard Household-Effect Company (essay)
• Suburban Sketches
• Venetian Life

Charles Ives

• Essays Before a Sonata

Jack London (1876-1916)

• Revolution and Other Essays

James Russell Lowell (1819-1891)

• Among My Books
• First Series
• Second Series

John Muir (1838-1914)

• The Grand Canyon of the Colorado
• The Mountains of California
• Steep Trails: California-Utah-Nevada-Washington-Oregon-The Grand Canyon
• Stickeen
• Travels in Alaska
• Yosemite

Upton Sinclair (1878-1968)

• The Profits of Religion: an Essay in Economic Interpretation

Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862)

• Excursions (1863)
• On the Duty of Civil Disobedience (essay)
• A Plea for Captain John Brown (essay)
• Walden
• Walking (essay)
• A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers
• Wild Apples (essay)

Timothy Titcomb

• Lessons in Life

Mark Twain

• Fenimore Cooper's Literary Offences (essay)
• How to Tell a Story and Others (stories and essays)
• How to Tell a Story
• The Wounded Soldier
• The Golden Arm
• Mental Telegraphy Again
• The Invalid's Story
• In Defence of Harriet Shelley (essay)
• What Is Man? And Other Essays
• What Is Man?
• The Death of Jean
• The Turning-Point of My Life
• How to Make History Dates Stick
• The Memorable Assassination
• A Scrap of Curious History
• Switzerland, the Cradle of Liberty
• At the Shrine of St. Wagner
• William Dean Howells
• English as She is Taught
• A Simplified Alphabet
• As Concerns Interpreting the Deity
• Concerning Tobacco
• Taming the Bicycle
• Is Shakespeare Dead?
 

Charles Dudley Warner (1829-1900)

• Complete Essays (three complete books, plus other essays)
• As We Were Saying
• Rose and Chrysanthemum
• The Red Bonnet
• The Loss in Civilization
• Social Screaming
• Does Refinement Kill Individuality?
• The Directorie Gown
• The Mystery of the Sex
• The Clothes of Fiction
• The Broad A
• Chewing Gum
• Women in Congress
• Shall Women Propose?
• Frocks and the Stage
• Altruism
• Social Clearing-House
• Dinner-Table Talk
• Naturalization
• Art of Governing
• Love of Display
• Value of the Commonplace
• The Burden of Christmas
• The Responsibility of Writers
• The Cap and Gown
• A Tendency of the Age
• A Locoed Novelist
• As We Go
• Our President
• The Newspaper-Made Man
• Interesting Girls
• Give the Men a Chance
• The Advent of Candor
• The American Man
• The Electric Way
• Can a Husband Open His Wife's Letters?
• A Leisure Class
• Weather and Character
• Born with an "Ego"
• Juventus Mundi
• A Beautiful Olf Age
• The Attraction of the Repulsive
• Giving as a Luxury
• Climate and Happiness
• The New Feminine Reserve
• Repose in Activity
• Women -- Ideal and Real
• The Art of Idleness
• Is There Any Conversation?
• The Tall Girl
• The Deadly Diary
• The Whistling Girl
• Born Old and Rich
• The "Old Soldier"
• The Island of Bimini
• June
• Nine Short Essays
• A Night in the Garden of the Tuileries
• Turthfulness
• The Pursuit of Happiness
• Literature and the Stage
• The Live-Saving and Life Prolonging Art
• "H.H." in Southern California
• Simplicity
• The English Volunteers During the Late Invasion
• Nathan Hale
• Fashions in Literature
• The American Newspaper
• Certain Diversities of American Life
• The Pilgrim, and the American of Today -- [1892]
• Some Causes of the Prevailing Discontent
• The Education of the Negro
• The Indeterminate Sentence
• Literary Copyright
• The Relationship of Literature to Life
• Biographical Scketch by Thomas R. Lounsbury
• The Relation of Literature to Life
• "Equality"
• Modern Fiction
• Thoughts Suggested by Mr. Froude's "Progress"
• England
• The Novel and the Common School
• The People For Whom Shakespeare Wrote

Woodrow Wilson

• On Being Human (short) by Woodrow Wilson

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British (English, Irish, Scottish, and Welsh)

Joseph Addison (1672-1719) and Richard Steele

• Essays and Tales
• Public Credit
• Household Superstitions
• Opera Lions
• Women and Wives
• The Italian Opera
• Lampoons
• True and False Humour
• Sa Ga Yean Qua Rash Tow's Impressions of London
• The Vision of Marraton
• Six Papers on Wit
• Friendship
• Chevy-Chase (Two Papers)
• A Dream of the Painters
• Spare Time (Two Papers)
• Censure
• The English Language
• The Vision of Mirza
• Genius
• Theodosius and Constantia
• Good Nature
• A Grinning Match
• Trust in God
• The Spectator, volumes 1, 2, and 3
• The Tatler, volume 1

Roger Ascham (1515-1568)

• The Scholemaster

Sir Francis Bacon (1561-1626)

• The Advancement of Learning
• Essays
• Of Truth
• Of Death
• Of Unity in Religion
• Of Revenge
• Of Adversity
• Of Simulation and Dissimulation
• Of Parents and Children
• Of Marriage and Single Life
• Of Envy
• Of Love
• Of Great Place
• Of Boldness
• Of Goodness and Goodness of Nature
• Of Nobility
• Of Seditions and Troubles
• Of Atheism
• Of Superstition
• Of Travel
• Of Empire
• Of Counsel
• Of Delays
• Of Cunning
• Of Wisdom for a Man's Self
• Of Innovations
• Of Dispatch
• Of Seeming Wise
• Of Friendship
• Of Expense
• Of the True Greatness of Kingdoms and Estates
• Of Regiment of Health
• Of Suspicion
• Of Discourse
• Of Plantations
• Of Riches
• Of Prophecies
• Of Ambition
• Of Mosques and Triumphs
• Of Nature in Men
• Of Custom and Education
• Of Fortune
• Of Usury
• Of Youth and Age
• Of Beauty
• Of Deformity
• Of Building
• Of Gardens
• Of Negotiating
• Of Followers and Friends
• Of Suitors
• Of Studies
• Of Faction
• Of Ceremonies and Respects
• Of Praise
• Of Vain-glory
• Of Honor and Reputation
• Of Judicature
• Of Anger
• Of Vicissitude of Things
• Of Fame
• The New Atlantis
• Valerius Terminus: of the Interpretation of Nature

Thomas Barker

•  Barker's Delight: or, The Art of Angling (2nd ed., 1659)

George Berkeley (1685-1753)

• An Essay Towards a New Theory of Vision

Arnold Bennett (1867-1931)

• Books and Persons, being comments on a past epoch 1908-1911

Edward Bennett

•  A treatise divided into three parts, touching the inconveniences, that  the Importation of Tobacco out of Spain, hath brought into this land.

Sir Walter Besant (1836-1901)

• As We Are and As We May Be, 1903

Sir Richard Blackmore

• Essay Upon Wit

Sir Thomas Browne (1605-1682)

• Religio Medici, Hydrotaphia, and The Letter to a Friend

John Bunyan (1628-1688)

• Miscellaneous Pieces (articles)
• Of the Trinity and a Christian
• Of the Law and a Christian
• Bunyan's Last Sermon
• Bunyan's Dying Sayings

Robert Burton (1576-1640)

• Anatomy of Melancholy (first published in 1621)

Samuel Butler (1835-1902)

• Essays on Life
• The Humour of Homer and Other Essays

George Calvert

• Essays Aesthetical, 1875

Thomas Carlyle (1795-1881)

• On the Choice of Books
• Past and Present

Samuel Cobb

• Discourse on Criticism and Poetry, 1707

Thomas Cockaine

• A Short Treatise of Hunting

John Gilbert Cooper and John Armtrong

• Essays on Taste, 1757 and 1770

Daniel Defoe (1661-1731)

• A Vindication of the Press, 1718

Thomas De Quincey (1785-1859)

• Biographical Essays
• Confessions of an English Opium Eater
• The English Coach and Joan of Arc
• Memorials and Other Papers, volume 1
• Miscellaneous Essays
• Narrative and Miscellaneous Papers, volume 1
• Notebook of an English Opium Eater
• Theological Essays and other Papers, volume 1

John Galsworthy (1867-1933), winner of Nobel Prize in Literature in 1932

• Censorship and Art (1911)
• Concerning Letters (1910)
• The Inn of Tranquility and Other Essays (1912)
• Quality and Other Essays (1912)

William Godwin (husband of Mary Wollstonecraft, father of Mary Shelley) (1756-1836)

• Thoughts on Man
• Four Early Pamphlets

Sir Thomas Hoby

• The Book of the Courtier by Count Baldessar Castilio, translated to English by Sir Thomas Hoby

Thomas H. Huxley

• Discourses: Biological and Geological Essays, 1894

Samuel Johnson

• The Vanity of Human Wishes (1749) and Two Rambler Papers (1750

Charles Kingsley (1819-1875)

• Literary and General Lectures and Essays
• Scientific Lectures and Essays

Charles Lamb (1775-1834)

• Works, volume 4

Andrew Lang

• Adventures Among Books
• Books and Bookmen
• Custom and Myth
• Essays in Little
• How to Fail in Literature (essay) by Andrew Lang
• Introduction to the Compleat Angler
• The Library
• The Making of Religion by Andew Lang
• The Man in the Iron Mask
• Myth, Ritual, and Religion
• Old Friends
• Oxford
• The Puzzle of Dickens' Last Plot (essay) all by Andrew Lang
• Shakespeare, Bacon, and the Great Unknown by Andrew Lang

George Meredith (1828-1909)

• Miscellaneous Prose

Alice Meynell (1847-1922)

• The Colour of Life
• Hearts of Controversy
• The Rhythm of Life
• Cere's Runaway
• Essays
• The Spirit of Place

John Stuart Mill

• Essays on Some Unsettled Questions of Political Economy by John Stuart Mill, 1844

John Milton (1608-1674)

• Areopagitica
• Of Education

Walter Pater (1839-1894)

• Appreciations, with an Essay on Style
• Essays from the Guardian
• Greek Studies
• Miscellaneous Studies
• Plato and Platonism
• The Renaissance

James Payn

• Some Private Views

Alexander Pope (1688-1744)

• Essay on Criticism
• Essay on Man

Mark Rutherford

• Pages from a Journal with Other Papers

Thomas Scott

•  Certaine reasons and arguments of policie, why the king of England should enter into warre with the Spaniard. 1624

Percy Bysshe Shelley (husband of Mary Shelley)

• A Defense of Poetry and Other Essays

Robert Louis Stevenson

• Essays

Jonathan Swift (1667-1745)

• A Modest Proposal
• The Battle of the Books and Other Short Pieces
• The Battle of the Books
• A Meditation upon a Broomstick
• Predictions for the Year 1708
• The Accomplishment of the First Mr. Bickerstaff's Predictions
• Baucis and Philemon
• The Logicians Refuted
• The Puppet Show
• Cadenus and Vanessa
• Stella's Birthdays
• To Stella
• The First He Wrote Oct. 17, 1727
• The Second Prayer Ws Written Nov. 6, 1727
• The Beasts' Confession (1732)
• Abolishing Christianity
• Hints Toward an Essay on Converation

Thoughts on Various Subjects

Isaak Walton ( ? - 1683)

• The Compleat Angler (1653)
• Waltoniana: previously unpublished verse and prose by Isaak Walton (1878)

Oscar Wilde (1854-1900)

• Reviews

Mary Wollstonecraft (wife of William Godwin, mother of Mary Shelley) (1759-1797)

• Maria, of the Wrongs of Woman
• A Vindication of the Rights of Women

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The Netherlands

Desiderius Erasmus (c. 1469-1536)

• The Praise of Folly, translated by John Wilson, 1668
• Selections from Erasmus edited by P.S. Allen

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French

Michel de Montaigne (1533-1592)

• Essays, translated to English by Charles Cotton, edited by William Carew Hazlitt
• Volume 1
• Volume 2
• Volume 3
• Volume 4
• Volume 5
• Volume 6
• Volume 7
• Volume 8
• Volume 9
• Volume 10

Francois Duc de la Rochefoucauld (1613-1680)

• Reflections, translated by J.W. Willis Bund
• Reflexions, in French, 1664

Jean Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778)

• Confessions, in English
• Emile, in English

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German

Friedrich Schiller (1759-1805)

• Aesthetic and Philosophical Essays

Arthur Schopenhauer

• Essays
• Essays
• The Art of Controversy
• The Art of Literature
• Counsels and Maxims
• On Human Nature
• Religion
• Studies in Pessimism
• The Wisdom of Life

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Greek

Aristotle

• The Poetics, translated to English by S.H. Butcher

Democritus

• The Anatomy of Melancholy

Plutarch

• Essays and Miscellaneous Writings, in English, includes:
• Philosophical Essays
• That it is not possible to live pleasurably accoridng to the doctrine of Epicurus
• That a philosopher ought chiefly to converse with great men
• Sentiments concerning nature, with which philosophers were delighted
• Abstract of a disourse showing that the stoics speak greater improabilities than the poets
• Symposiacs
• Common conceptions against the stoics
• Contradictions of the stoics
• The eating of flesh
• Concerning fate
• Against Colotes, the disciple and favorite of Epicurus
• Platonic questions
• Literary Essays
• The life and poetry of Homer
• The banquet of the seven wise men
• How a young man ought to hear poems
• Abstract of a comparison between Aristophanes and Menander
• The malice of Herodotus

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Italian

Niccolo Machiavelli (1469-1527)

• Discourses on the first 10 books of Livy
• The Prince

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Latin

Cicero

• De Amicitia and Scipio's Dream, in English
• Essays on Friendship and Old Age, translated to English by E. S. Shuckburgh
• Cato Maior de Senectute, in Latin

Horace

• In Latin and English
• De Arte Poetica (The Art of Poetry)

Titus Lucretius Carus

• Of the Nature of Things, translated to English by William Emery Leonard

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Russian

Peter Kropotkin

• Mutual Aid

Nicholas Nekrassov (1821-1877)

• Who Can be Happy and Free in Russia? translated by Juliet Soskice, 1917

Leo Tolstoy

• Science and Art
• Thoughts Evoked by the Census of Moscow (from What to Do?), translated to English by Isabel Hapgood