Author: John Bell HennemanPublisher:
ISBN: 9781330692981
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 286
Book Description
Excerpt from Shakespearean and Other Papers This Preface is at once a labor of love and the saddest literary task I ever undertook. The writer of the papers here collected was one of my dearest friends, one of the most pure and loyal characters I ever knew, one of the most devoted scholars and sincere lovers of literature with whom it was ever my privilege to work. At the time of his unobtrusively tragical and heroic death our friendship had lasted for twenty-six years, and for fifteen of them had been peculiarly close. We were collegemates and then fellow-teachers in Tennessee; then he took the chair I had filled at Sewanee and carried on The Sewanee Review, to which he had been a sturdy prop from its inception. After that we were closely associated in editing Shakespeare and Thackeray, so that I think I may fairly say that it would be difficult for one man to know another better than I knew John Henneman. It would be more difficult to make me believe that a finer spirit than his ever animated a human body. Peace to his ashes! It is obvious that I cannot write of his essays in the capacity of an impartial critic. I write of them only as one of the friends that suggested the preparation of this volume. When he came back from Germany and went to Hampden-Sidney to teach, I found that his interest was quite as much engaged by the history of the South as it was by English philology and literature, the studies he had chiefly pursued abroad. Shortly afterwards I wrote a biography of the South Carolina novelist, William Gilmore Simms, which brought down on my head a storm of unexpected denunciation. One of my stoutest defenders was John Henneman, despite the fact that he was more conservative on many matters than I had been, and although he privately found fault with me for expressions, in which, doubtless, I had not been overtactful. 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.
