Excerpt from De Quincey as Literary Critic Extracts - a pitiable method! Young people have time to read long books and the imagination to seize all'the great things.' In these words the great Napoleon justly condemned the practice of making 'snibrets' of literature the staple of education. But the criticism is often carried farther, and With less reason. We have all heard anthologies condemned again and again as superficial things. Everybody, it is said, ought to make his own anthology. An admirable counsel of perfection, which becomes every year less and less possible of fulfilment as year by year the printing presses of all the nations increase indefinitely the vast piles of books already existing in the world. Even so genuine a lover of literature as Sir Arthur quiller-couch has lately expressed some gratitude to those who burnt the great library at Alexandria and destroyed an immense amount of the accumulated rubbish of the ancient world. The real charge against them, he says, is not that they burnt, but only that they burnt indiscriminately. In other words, he does not blame them for making an anthology, or even for making it violently, but only for making it badly. 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.