English Eccentrics and Eccentricities is a historical collection of sketches and anecdotes about unusually odd figures in English life. John Timbs presents their sayings and doings with warmth, showing how eccentricity can coexist with good sense and good heart. It is worth listening to for its curious portraits of human character and the light it throws on bygone manners.
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Cover of the original edition (Project Gutenberg, public domain).
Text source: gutenberg.org · The work is in the public domain.
Opening of the book
ENGLISH ECCENTRICS.
PRINTED BY SPOTTISWOODE AND CO., NEW-STREET SQUARE LONDON
The Earl of Bridgewater and his dogs.
The Earl of Bridgewater and his dogs.
Title page for English Eccentrics and Eccentricities
PREFACE.
GENTLE READER, a few words before we introduce you to our
EŕŕŧƿǵǡƗŕǪ. They may be odd company: yet how often do we find eccentricity in the minds of persons of good understanding. Their sayings and doings, it is true, may not rank as high among the delicacies of intellectual epicures as the Strasburg pies among the dishes described in the Almanach des Gourmands; but they possess attractions in proportion to the degree in which "man favours wonders." Swift has remarked, that "a little grain of the romance is no ill ingredient to preserve and exalt the dignity of human nature, without which it is apt to degenerate into everything that is sordid, vicious, and low." Into the latter extremes Eccentricity is occasionally apt to run, somewhat like certain fermenting liquors which cannot be checked in their acidifying courses.
Into such headlong excesses our Eccentrics rarely stray; and one of our objects in sketching their ways, is to show that with oddity of character may co-exist much goodness of heart; and your strange fellow, though, according to the lexicographer, he be outlandish, odd, queer, and eccentric, may possess claims to our notice which the man who is ever studying the fitness of things would not so readily present.
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