In Course of Publication. 



THE TEIPLE ANECDOTES, 



BY 



RALPH & CEAHDOS TEMPLE, 



WITH ILLUSTRATIONS BY EMINENT ARTISTS, 



ENGRAVED BY THE BROTHERS DALZIEL, 



' ' Keep unshak'd 

 That temple, tby fair mind." 



Shakfpt 



Mankind, it has been observed, love anecdotes. The conversation, 

 whether of lettered men or of men of the world, is made up of them ; the 

 books which most delight are the books which abound in them. In long 

 narratives of history and biography the portions best remembered are 

 always those which illustrate some point of character, develop in action 

 some new truth, or record some discovery or invention in a brief passage. 

 These are strictly Anecdotes ; and thus by a sort of winnowing process 

 the minds and memories of readers, where the labour is not already 

 performed for thsm, may be said to reduce all narratives to anecdotal form. 



Forty years ago " The Percy Anecdotes " delighted our fathers ; form- 

 ing one of the earliest and most successful attempts to supply good 

 popular literature, at a price which till then had been rarely associated 

 with any but publications of an exceptionable character. 



Headers have not only multiplied enormously since 1820, but every 

 reader is now critical to an extent which the writers of that day little 

 foresaw. Forty years, indeed, yield but a faint idea of the world's progress 

 since that time. Another England has been added to our numbers, and 

 the moral and material prosperity of all is considerably higher. But it is, 

 perhaps, only by taking a few of the more striking points of comparison 

 that an adequate idea of this progress can be attained. 



We require to be reminded that in 1820 the streets even of the metro- 

 polis were unlighted with gas, and practically unguarded by night ; that 

 our gigantic railway system, on which more than a thousand millions 

 sterling have been sunk, had not then turned its first sod, or built its 

 earliest arch; that photography was unknown, and electric telegraphs 

 unimagined ; that only fifty millions of letters then passed in one year 

 through our post-offices, which now conveys at least five hundred millions 

 in the same space of time ; and that no daily paper was then published in 

 England at a lower price than eightpence, while even an almanack of any 

 kind could not be purchased for less than a shilling ; and innumerable 

 appliances and arts, less striking to the imagination than some we have 

 mentioned, though now no less important in their effects upon human 

 welfare, were still unknown. 



THE TEMPLE ANECDOTES will be a shrine in which Happy Thoughts, 

 Good Words, and Noble Deeds, shall have a place. The aim of its 

 Editors will be not only to be worthy of these later and better times, but 

 also i some measure to reflect them. Though not always Biographical, 



