Download or read book The Best of the World's Classics, Vol. 1 of 10 written by Henry Cabot Lodge and published by Forgotten Books. This book was released on 2018-02-02 with total page 316 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Excerpt from The Best of the World's Classics, Vol. 1 of 10: Restricted to Prose; Greece, 484 B. C. 200 A. D Ever since civilized man has had a literature he has apparently sought to make selections from it and thus put his favorite passages together in a compact and convenient form. Certain it is, at least, that to the Greeks, masters in all great arts, we owe this habit. They made such col lections and named them, after their pleasant imaginative fashion, a gathering of flowers, or what we, borrowing their word, call an anthology. So to those austere souls who regard anthologies as a labor-saving contrivance for the benefit of persons who like a smattering of knowledge and are never really learned, we can at least plead in mitigation that we have high and ancient author ity for the practise. In any event no amount of scholarly deprecation has been able to turn man kind or that portion of mankind which reads books from the agreeable habit of making volumes of selections and finding in them much pleasure. 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.