BRIEF DIVERSIONS PAPERS FROM LILLIPUT I FOR ONE FIGURES IN MODERN LITERATURE THE ENGLISH COMIC CHARACTERS A Gallery of Comic Figures "I will confess a truth to thee, reader. I love a Fool." NEW YORK DODD, MEAD AND COMPANY Undergraduate PN Made and Printed in Great Britain Undergraduate TR to Stor 4-83 TH PREFACE HERE are so many anthologies and selections and books of extracts already in existence that the editor of a new one is almost compelled to be on the defensive. He must give a good reason why he has chosen to cast yet another burden on the groaning book-stalls. Many anthologies and volumes of extracts come into existence because they are largely composed of unfamiliar work, such as little-known Elizabethan songs or minor eighteenth-century verse and so forth, and such compilations, usually the result of years of quiet research and unflagging zeal, need no excuse. But I cannot plead that the work represented here is unfamiliar; on the contrary, the plays and novels and essays from which these passages have been chosen are, with one or two possible exceptions, among the oldest friends of any lover of books. Practically every passage will be familiar to every well-read person, and not for a moment do I flatter myself that I am giving the reader anything new. What I have done is simply to isolate these passages, classifying them in a fashion that must not be taken too seriously, and to put them within one cover, so that the reader has here a gallery of comic figures from our literature that he is able, as it were, to |