Part Two - Reader book author
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 07 September 2011
Summary
Reader book author
One of the amusements of idleness is reading without the fatigue of close attention; and the world therefore swarms with writers whose wish is not to be studied, but to be read.
(Samuel Johnson, Idler 30, 1758)I hate books: they only teach people to talk about what they don’t understand.
(Jean Jacques Rousseau, Emilius and Sophia, 1762)’Till authors hear at length, one gen’ral cry,
Tickle and entertain us, or we die.
The loud demand from year to year the same,
Beggars invention and makes fancy lame.
(William Cowper, “Retirement,” 1782)
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- The Appearance of Print in Eighteenth-Century Fiction , pp. 103 - 104Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2011