WHO WROTE IT! AN INDEX TO THE AUTHORSHIP OF THE MORE NOTED WORKS IN ANCIENT AND MODERN LITERATURE BY WILLIAM A. WHEELER EDITED BY CHARLES G. WHEELER As it is the commendation of a good huntsman to find game in a wide wood so it is no imputation if he hath not caught all PLATO BOSTON LEE AND SHEPARD PUBLISHERS NEW YORK CHARLES T. DILLINGHAM 1887 WOR 19 FEB 30 Preface. This little volume is not a universal index to literature. It lays no claim to being exhaustive in any department. Its design is simply to furnish a handy-book for ascertaining or verifying the authorship of famous poems, plays, essays, novels, romances, philosophical and literary treatises, and the like, so far as they bear a specific and distinctive title. An elegy like Adonais, a scientific treatise like Cosmos, a book of travels like Eothen, come fairly within the grasp of the work; while a History of England (as Froude's), a Dictionary of the English Language (as Fohnson's), a volume of Essays (as Bacon's) or Sermons (as Tillotson's), and other the like books, have titles altogether too general and indiscrete to bring them properly within its scope. Of course an undertaking of this sort - wholly novel as it is believed to be must inevitably and from its very nature yield imperfect results. The compiler, in doubtful cases, must exercise his own judgment; yet however cautiously he may do so, he will sometimes err, both in what he admits and what he excludes. The very copiousness of the materials with which he has to deal will prove a distraction and a snare. He will find himself, as Taine says of the critic of English novels, in danger of being "swamped, as it were, in this abundance: he must select in order to grasp the whole, and confine himself to a few in order to 1 |