Excerpt from An English Prose Miscellany: Selected With an Introduction Melvilles) to interest the reader in their characters apart from what they write. It has been found necessary to arrange this book in more than three broad divisions; for it is surely desirable that the writers of sermons, and of pious ejaculations, should be separated (whatever their quality) from the novelists and satirists, from the historians and the translators. The book has therefore been divided into eight main divisions, containing, respectively, selections from the works of story tellers, novelists, moral and philosophical writers, religious and theological writers, historians, translators, diarists, character writers, and memoir and letter writers. Each division, except in one or two places where the rule has been broken for the sake of variety, has been arranged in a rough chronological order, precedence being settled by the date of the author's birth (conjectural in some cases) not by the date of the publication of the book from which the excerpt has been taken. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.