Mere Literature, and Other Essays

Mere Literature and Other Essays is by Woodrow Wilson. The contents list Mere Literature, The Author Himself, On an Author’s Choice of Company, A Literary Politician, The Interpreter of English Liberty, The Truth of the Matter, A Calendar of Great Americans and The Course of American History.

The writer says that epics are better mirrors of manners than chronicles, and that dramas oftentimes let you into the secrets of statutes. Ideals, convictions, and the opinions or fancies that have been held or followed, not knowledge, are said to move the world. A section on Burke says that other hack work did not keep Burke out of pecuniary straits, and that he engaged himself as a sort of private secretary or literary attendant to William Gerard Hamilton, whom he served, apparently to the almost entire exclusion of all other employments, for some four years. The writer says that a frontier people always in the van, kept for close upon three hundred years, is, so far, the central and determining fact of the national history.