The Glory of English Prose. Stephen Coleridge

      Published by Good Press, 2019

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      EAN 4064066180270

Table of Contents

       PREFACE

       LETTERS TO MY GRANDSON

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PREFACE

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      If you have read, gentle reader, the earlier series of Letters to my Grandson on the World about Him, you are to understand that in the interval between those letters and these, Antony has grown to be a boy in the sixth form of his public school.

      It has not been any longer necessary therefore to study an extreme simplicity of diction in these letters.

      My desire has been to lead him into the most glorious company in the world, in the hope that, having early made friends with the noblest of human aristocracy, he will never afterwards admit to his affection and intimacy anything mean or vulgar.

      Many young people who, like Antony, are not at all averse from the study of English writers, stand aghast at the vastness of the what seems so gigantic an enterprise.

      In these letters I have acted as pilot for a first voyage through what is to a boy an uncharted sea, after which I hope and believe he will have learned happily to steer for himself among the islands of the blest.

      S.C.

      THE FORD, CHOBHAM.

LETTERS TO MY GRANDSON

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      My Dear Antony,

      The letters which I wrote "On the world about you" having shown you that throughout all the universe, from the blazing orbs in infinite space to the tiny muscles of an insect's wing, perfect design is everywhere manifest, I hope and trust that you will never believe that so magnificent a process and order can be without a Mind of which it is the visible expression.

      The chief object of those letters was to endorse your natural feeling of reverence for the Great First Cause of all things, with the testimony of your reason; and to save you from ever allowing knowledge of how the sap rises in its stalk to lessen your wonder at and admiration of the loveliness of a flower.

      I am now going to write to you about the literature of England and show you, if I can, the immense gulf that divides distinguished writing and speech from vulgar writing and speech.

      There is nothing so vulgar as an ignorant use of your own language. Every Englishman