The Project Gutenberg EBook of A Christmas Garland, by Max Beerbohm

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Title: A Christmas Garland

Author: Max Beerbohm

Release Date: January 11, 2005 [EBook #14667]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK A CHRISTMAS GARLAND ***

Produced by Suzanne Shell, William Flis, and the Online Distributed
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A CHRISTMAS GARLAND

_woven by_

MAX BEERBOHM

LONDON MCMXXI

WILLIAM HEINEMANN

First printed, October, 1912.

New Impressions, October, 1912; December, 1912; December, 1912; July,
1918; September, 1918; March, 1931.

Copyright, 1912.

BY THE SAME AUTHOR

THE WORKS OF MAX BEERBOHM
MORE
YET AGAIN

A CHRISTMAS GARLAND

THE HAPPY HYPOCRITE
ZULIEKA DOBSON
SEVEN MEN
AND EVEN NOW

CARICATURES OF TWENTY-FIVE GENTLEMEN
THE POETS' CORNER
THE SECOND CHILDHOOD OF JOHN BULL
A BOOK OF CARICATURES
FIFTY CARICATURES

NOTE

_Stevenson, in one of his essays, tells us how he "played the sedulous
ape" to Hazlitt, Sir Thomas Browne, Montaigne, and other writers of
the past. And the compositors of all our higher-toned newspapers keep
the foregoing sentence set up in type always, so constantly does it
come tripping off the pens of all higher-toned reviewers. Nor ever do
I read it without a fresh thrill of respect for the young Stevenson.
I, in my own very inferior boyhood, found it hard to revel in so much
as a single page of any writer earlier than Thackeray. This disability
I did not shake off, alas, after I left school. There seemed to be
so many live authors worth reading. I gave precedence to them, and,
not being much of a reader, never had time to grapple with the old
masters. Meanwhile, I was already writing a little on my own account.
I had had some sort of aptitude for Latin prose and Latin verse. I
wondered often whether those two things, essential though they were
(and are) to the making of a decent style in English prose, sufficed
for the making of a style more than decent. I felt that I must have
other models. And thus I acquired the habit of aping, now and again,
quite sedulously, this or that live writer--sometimes, it must