Excerpt from Letters, Speeches and Tracts on Irish Affairs Indeed, and a loss for which no conversance with con temporary prose literature can make up, any more than conversance with contemporary poetry could make up to us for unacquaintance with Shakespeare and Milton. In both cases the unacquaintance shuts us out from great sources of English life, thought, and language, and from the capital records of its history and develop ment, and leaves us in consequence very imperfect and fragmentary Englishmen. )it can hardly be said that this inattention to our prose classics is due to their being contained in collections made up of many volumes, collections dear and inaccessible. Their remaining buried in such collections, - a fate so unlike that which has been Rousseau's in France, or Lessing's in Germany, - is rather the result of our inattention than its cause. While they are so buried, however, they are in truth almost inaccessible to the general public, and all occa sions for rescuing and exhibiting representative speci mens of them should be welcomed and used) 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.