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Ballantyne Press

BALLANTYNE, HANSON AND CO.

EDINBURGH AND LONDON

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BROADWAY, LUDGATE HILL

NEW YORK: 9 LAFAYETTE PLACE

MORLEY'S UNIVERSAL LIBRARY.

1. Sheridan's Plays.
2. Plays from Molière. By
English Dramatists.

3. Marlowe's Faustus and
Goethe's Faust.

4. Chronicle of the Cid. 5. Rabelais' Gargantua and the Heroic Deeds of Pantagruel. 6. Machiavelli's Prince. 7. Bacon's Essays. 8. Defoe's Journal of the Plague Year.

9. Locke on Civil Government and Filmer's "Patriarcha."

10. Butler's Analogy of Religion. II. Dryden's Virgil.

12. Scott's Demonology and Witchcraft. 13. Herrick's Hesperides. 14. Coleridge's Table-Talk. 15. Boccaccio's Decameron. 16. Sterne's Tristram Shandy. 17. Chapman's Homer's Iliad. 18. Medieval Tales.

19. Voltaire's Candide, and Johnson's Rasselas. 20. Jonson's Plays and Poems. 21. Hobbes's Leviathan. 22. Samuel Butler's Hudibras.

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"Marvels of clear type and general neatness."-Daily Telegraph.

INTRODUCTION.

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THE man who has something to say, and says it in as many words as are necessary to the clear, full and emphatic expression of his thought, must often be unable, without help of tedious impertinences, to spread it in ink over one or two pounds' weight of paper. The weightiest intellectual contribution to the study of some living question may possibly require for its true utterance not more than a dozen or two of printed leaves. Waste words are for some idle brain. Our modern Reviews and Magazines are, in one sense, a device for the collection of short pamphlets worth diffusion into volumes that have such currency as to assure their being widely read, and kept on record. Before there were Reviews established for such periodical collection each pamphlet came alone into the world, and in the days of the first famous pamphlet in this volume, Milton's Areopagitica, burning questions of the day that would now be argued out in leading articles and in reviews, were discussed by pamphlets in which every man fought for himself his battle of opinion, to be answered in pamphlets of opponents, and to be replied to in new pamphlets, until each question of truth and error had lain long enough in the sieve to be thoroughly sifted by the to and fro of opposite opinions. Sometimes, as in the old Church controversy between Whitgift and Cartwright, strong feeling and the wide stretch of the question caused these pamphlets of attack, reply, rejoinder to the reply, &c., to extend to the form of massive folios, heavy enough to knock down an antagonist if thrown as solid paper at his head. But though there was quick fencing with these folios, and they were produced as promptly as if they had been pamphlets in bulk as they were pamphlets in essence, they were technically volumes.

Why a work produced only upon a few leaves was called a pamphlet, it is hard to say with any certainty. Some say it was so called from the French paume and feuillet, as a leaf held in the hand. Others say that it was from a woman named Pamphila, who lived about eighteen hundred years ago and wrote many epitomes; others go for the source of the word to Spanish.

The most famous pamphlet in our language, and, considering its

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