Miscellanies Vol 1 Of 2 Classic Reprint

Excerpt from Miscellanies, Vol. 1 of 2 'Truth is stranger than fiction.' A trite remark. We all say it, again and again: but how few of us believe it! How few of us, when we read the history of heroical times and heroical men, take the story simply as it stands. On the contrary, we try to explain it away; to prove it all not to have been so very wonderful: to impute accident, circumstance, mean and commonplace motives; to lower every story down to the level of our own littleness, or what we (unjustly to ourselves, and to the God who is near us all) choose to consider our level; to rationalize away all the wonders, till we make them at last impossible, and give up caring to believe them; and prove to our own melancholy satisfaction that Alexander conquered the world with a pin, in his sleep, by accident. And yet in this mood, as in most, there is a sort of left-handed truth involved. These heroes are not so far removed from us, after all. 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.