The House of Souls

pubOne.info thank you for your continued support and wish to present you this new edition. It was somewhere, I think, towards the autumn of the year 1889 that the thought occurred to me that I might perhaps try to write a little in the modern way. For, hitherto, I had been, as it were, wearing costume in literature. The rich, figured English of the earlier part of the seventeenth century had always had a peculiar attraction for me. I accustomed myself to write in it, to think in it; I kept a diary in that manner, and half-unconsciously dressed up my every day thoughts and common experiences in the habit of the Cavalier or of the Caroline Divine. Thus, when in 1884 I got a commission to translate the Heptameron, I wrote quite naturally in the language of my favourite period, and, as some critics declare, made my English version somewhat more antique and stiff than the original. And so The Anatomy of Tobacco was an exercise in the antique of a different kind; and The Chronicle of Clemendy was a volume of tales that tried their hardest to be mediæval; and the translation of the Moyen de Parvenir was still a thing in the ancient mode