The History of English Literature and Language may be recommended to the student as a guide always sure, and as satisfactory as its limits will admit, to the gathered harvest of a thousand years -- from ALFRED the Great to VICTORIA -- now existing in a language radically identical for the whole of that period, the common property of all who are born to its use, a personal endowment not to be limited by local accidents, but the rightful possession of those who "claim SHAKESPEARE's language for their mother tongue...

Dedications is an anthology of the forms used from the earliest days of book-making to the present time. My purpose in the following anthology of dedications has been to make a representative, rather than an exhaustive collection. My first idea was to take only beautiful dedications, and above all those which showed thought and originality. I next sought those which were quaint and curious, grave and gay, and then wandering through the wide field of English literature, tried to have each section of it represented...

A description and history of the development of the English Language and reflections on the influences that changed the language. - Summary by barbara2

This collection of articles came from Mark Twain's travels and experiences abroad. While many had been previously published, there also were many that had never before seen the light of day...which one reviewer said had never been Twain's intent for them, having consigned them to obscurity. With introductory essays by Brander Matthews and Albert Bigelow Paine, the book paints a clear picture of the complexity and wide variety of Samuel L. Clemens' thinking, where it originated and how it developed.

The Ordeal of Mark Twain analyzes the literary progression of Samuel L. Clemens and attributes shortcomings to Clemens' mother and wife. The Encyclopaedia Britannica says, Brooks' work "was a psychological study attempting to show that Twain had crippled himself emotionally and curtailed his genius by repressing his natural artistic bent for the sake of his Calvinist upbringing." Also, Brooks says, his literary spirit was sidelined as "...Mark Twain was inducted into the Gilded Age, launched, in defiance of that instinct which only for a few years was to allow him inner peace, upon the vast welter of a society blind like himself, like him committed to the pursuit of worldly success...

A rare textbook on Shanghai dialect by Reverend F. L. H. Pott, an American missionary and educator who lived in China for more than 50 years. - Summary by Xiaoyan Arrowsmith