Is a Great Read for us Diehard Eddie Fans.
(try to get the edition by Saunders that puts back all the best bits cut out of the official "cleaned up" version which has been in print for two hundred years...)



The design of my first work, the Essay on the Study of Literature , was suggested by a refinement of vanity, the desire of justifying and praising the object of a favorite pursuit. In France, to which my ideas were confined, the learning and language of Greece and Rome were neglected by a philosophic age.

A writer can seldom be content with the doubtful recompense of solitary approbation, but a youth ignorant of the world, and of himself, must desire to weigh his talents in some scales less partial than his own. My conduct was natural, my motive laudable, my choice of Dr. Maty judicious and fortunate.
His reputation was justly founded on the eighteen volumes of the Journal Britannique , which he had supported almost alone with perseverance and success.

...It is not surprising that a work, of which the style and sentiments were so totally foreign, should have been more successful abroad than at home.

In England it was received with cold indiffernce, little read, and speedily forgotten. A small impression was slowly dispersed; the bookseller murmured; and the author (had his feelings been more exquisite) might have wept over the blunders and baldness of the English translation.

I have expatiated on the loss of my literary maidenhead, a memorable era in the life of a student when he ventures to reveal the measure of his mind. His hopes and fears are multiplied by the idea of self-importance, and he believes for a while that the eyes of mankind are fixed on his person and performance. Whatever may be my present reputation, it no longer rests on the merit of this first essay; and at the end of twenty-eight years I may appreciate my juvenile work with the impartiality, and almost with the indifference, of a stranger.