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Maurice Francis Egan. Confessions of a Book-Lover
Confessions of a Book-Lover
Table of Contents
CHAPTER I
My Boyhood Reading
Early Recollections
The Bible
Essays and Essayists
CHAPTER II
Poets and Poetry
France—Of Maurice de Guérin
Dante
English and American Verse
CHAPTER III
Certain Novelists
CHAPTER IV
Letters, Biographies, and Memoirs
CHAPTER V
Books at Random
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Maurice Francis Egan
Published by Good Press, 2019
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My father generally arrived at home late in the afternoon, when he read the evening paper. After a very high tea, he stretched himself on a long horsehair-covered sofa, and bade me read to him, generally from the novels of George Eliot, or from certain romances running through the New York Ledger by Sylvanus Cobb, Jr. These were generally stories of the times of the Irish Kings, in which gallowglasses and lovely and aristocratic Celtic maidens disported themselves. My mother, after her conversion, disapproved of the New York Ledger. In fact, there were families in Philadelphia whose heads regarded it with real horror! In our house, there was a large stack of this interesting periodical, which, with many volumes of Godey's Lady's Book, were packed in the attic.
It happened that a young man, in whom my father had a great interest, was threatened with tuberculosis. An awful rumour was set abroad that he was about to die. He sent over a messenger asking my father for the back numbers of the New York Ledger containing a long serial story by Mrs. Anna Cora Mowatt. As I remember, it was a story of the French Revolution, and the last number that I was allowed to read ended with a description of a dance in an old château, when the Marquise, who was floating through the minuet, suddenly discovered blood on the white-kid glove of her right hand! I was never permitted to discover where the blood came from; I should like to find out now if I could find the novel. I remember that my mother was terribly shocked when my father sent the numbers of the New York Ledger to the apparently dying man. "It's a horrible thing," my mother said, "to think of any Christian person reading the New York Ledger at the point of death." The young man, however, did not die; and I rather think my father attributed his recovery to the exhilarating effect of one of his favourite stories.
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