OpenLLM-France/wikimedia huggingface dataset:
# The Works of the Rev. Jonathan Swift/Volume 12/From Henrietta Howard to Jonathan Swift - 4

FROM THE COUNTESS OF SUFFOLK.
YOU seem to think that you have a natural right to abuse me, because I am a woman, and a courtier. I have taken it as a woman and as a courtier ought, with great resentment, and a determined resolution of revenge. The number of letters that have been sent, and thought by many to be yours, (and thank God they were all silly ones) has been a fair field to execute it. Think of my joy to hear you suspected of folly; think of my pleasure when I entered the list for your justification! Indeed I was a little disconcerted to find Mr. Pope took the same side; for I would have had the man of wit, the dignified divine, the Irish drapier, have found no friend but the silly woman and the courtier. Could I have preserved myself alone in the list, I should not have despaired, that this monitor of princes, this Irish patriot, this excellent man at speech and pen, should have closed the scene under suspicion of having a violent passion for Mrs. Barber; and lady M— or Mrs. Haywood have writ the progress of it. Now, to my mortification I find every body inclined to think you had no hand in writing those letters; but I every day thank Providence that there is an epitaph in St. Patrick's cathedral, that will be a lasting ​monument of your imprudence. I cherish this extremely; for, say what you can to justify it, I am convinced I shall as easily argue the world into the belief of a courtier's sincerity, as you (with all your wit and eloquence) will be able to convince mankind of the prudence of that action. I expect to hear if peace shall ensue, or war continue between us. If I know but little of the art of war, yet you see I do not want courage; and that has made many an ignorant soldier fight successfully. Besides, I have a numerous body of light armed troops to bring into the field, who, when single, may be as inconsiderable as a Lilliputian, yet ten thousand of them embarrassed captain Gulliver. If you send honourable articles, they shall be signed. I insist that you own that you have been unjust to me; for I have never forgot you; for, I have made others send my compliments, because I was not able to write myself. If I cannot justify the advice I gave you, from the success of it, I gave you my reasons for it: and it was your business to have judged of my capacity, by the solidity of my arguments. If the principle was false, you ought not to have acted upon it. So you have been only the dupe of your own ill judgment, and not my falsehood. Am I to send back the crown and the plaid, well packed up, in my own character? or am I to follow my own inclination, and continue very truly and very much your humble servant,
H. SUFFOLK.
* ↑ Mrs. Haywood, a well known writer of scandal in novels.
* ↑ On the duke of Schomberg.
# The Whetstone of Witte

The first book on algebra in English.
The Whetstone of Witte, which is the second parte of Arithmetike: containyng the extrac- tion of Rootes: The Cossike practise, with the rule of Equation: and the woorkes of Surde Nombers.
¶These Bookes are to bee solde, at the Weste doore of Poules, by Jhon Byngstone.
* The Epistle Dedicatorie
* The Preface
# The Wheels of Chance: A Bicycling Idyll/Chapter 41

THE ENVOY
XLI
So the story ends, dear Reader. Mr. Hoopdriver, sprawling down there among the bracken, must sprawl without our prying, I think, or listening to what chances to his breathing. And of what came of it all, of the six years and afterwards, this is no place to tell. In truth, there is no telling it, for the years have still to run. But if you see how a mere counter-jumper, a cad on castors, and a fool to boot, may come to feel the little insufficiencies of life, and if he has to any extent won your sympathies, my end is attained, (If it is not attained, may Heaven forgive us both!) Nor will we follow this adventurous young lady of ours back to her home at Surbiton, to her new struggle against Widgery and Mrs. Milton combined. For, as she will presently hear, that devoted man has got his reward. For her, also, your sympathies are invited.
This figure passes through Basingstoke and Bagshot, Staines, Hampton, and Richmond. At last, in Putney High Street, glowing with the warmth of an August sunset and with all the 'prentice boys busy shutting up shop, and the work girls going home, and the shop folks peeping abroad, and the white 'buses full of late clerks and city folk rumbling home to their dinners, we part from him. He is back. To-morrow, the early rising, the dusting, and drudgery, begin again—but with a difference, with wonderful memories and still more wonderful desires and ambitions replacing those discrepant dreams.
He turns out of the High Street at the corner, dismounts with a sigh, and pushes his machine through the gates of the Antrobus stable yard, as the apprentice with the high collar holds them open. There are words of greeting. "South Coast," you hear; and "splendid weather—splendid." He sighs. "Yes—swapped him off for a couple of sovs. It's a juiced good machine."
The gate closes upon him with a slam, and he vanishes from our ken.
THE END
# The Sunday Eight O'Clock/Two Points of View

"THE furnace is out of business again," he said to his roommate as they came into the cold room after drill. "I'm going to leave this shack. It hasn't been above sixty this fall. Put on the light, Mac, it will at least look warm."
"Say," he said a little later, as he rummaged in the drawer of the washstand, "are there any clean towels? I don't believe we've had one since last September. That counterpane on the bed looks like a study in charcoal. I suppose I didn't take my shoes off when I lay down, but it looks as if she might give us a clean one once a year, anyway."
He walked over and kicked the radiator vigorously in an attempt to stir up a stoker, but with no effect.
"I'd like to know how a fellow's going to ​study here," he went on, "with all the noise that goes on down stairs. Did you hear 'sister' last night hitting the piano and warbling to her young man while we were trying to bone on Calc? I guess I wasn't especially polite."
"Now look at the side rail of that bed. It's as sway backed as an old horse. There's another castor smashed, too. If you simply touch a thing it goes to pieces. I'll bet her great grandmother bought these things second hand when she went to housekeeping. Do you suppose she ever dusts? I wrote your name in the layer on the window sill two weeks ago, and it's there yet. And the bath room—"
"Never mind turning out the light, Mac," he said as they started down stairs, "we'll not be gone long."
"My dear," the woman downstairs was saying to her husband, "those students are simply unendurable. Mr. McGregor came in after twelve last night and made so much ​noise that he waked everybody. I never slept the rest of the night. They were really rude to Mabel's callers, too."
"The carpet in their room was new two years ago, and it won't last until spring. They've ruined grandmother's bed. There isn't a bath towel in the house; I'm sure they take them to the gymnasium. You'll have to speak to them about that boxing in their rooms. They have knocked the plas tering loose on the parlor ceiling, and the way they were pounding each other around the other night, I thought they'd come through the floor.
"They smoke dreadfully, and you can smell tobacco all over the house. Their language isn't what we've been accustomed to. I was really ashamed when the minister called Thursday. I told him it wasn't you, and that we did our best to exercise a good moral influence over them. I wonder sometimes what sort of parents they have."
"And George," she went on, "they've sim​ply ruined our walls. We shall have to have that north room repapered before we can rent it again. I'd put them out if they weren't behind with their rent. The electric light man called today, and his bill is simply appalling. I believe they leave the light burning all the time."
And as soon as she heard the boys go down the stairs she crept up to their rooms and turned out the light.
November
# The Sunday Times/1936/Mr. Thomas Wright

Source: The Sunday Times, Sunday, April 05, 1936; pg. 23; Issue 5895 — Mr. Thomas Wright
Layout 2
Mr. Thomas Wright
Mr. Thomas Wright, the author and authority on Cowper, died at his residence at Cowper School, Olney, Bucks, on Friday of bronchial pneumonia. he had been ailing for some time, but was only confined to his bed for a day.
He was founder-secretary of the Cowper Society, the William Blake Society, and the John Payne Society.
One of the great dreams of his life, the establishment of a Cowper Museum at Olney, was realised at the Cowper Centenary in 1900, when Mr. W. H. Collingridge presented the poet's house to the town and nation. Mr. Wright leaves a widow, a son, and two daughters.
A memorial service will be held in Cowper Memorial Congregational Church on Tuesday at 10 a.m. The cremation will take place at Golders Green.
# The Sunday Eight O'Clock/Vacations

THREE young girls came hastily and noisily into the car as the train moved out of the station. They had barely escaped being left. The Christmas vacation was over, and they were going back to college. As they disposed of their various belongings, settled back in their seats, mussed up their hair a little more becomingly, and made discriminating use of their powder rags, fragments of conversation began to float through the car. I buried myself in the book I was reading, but I found it impossible not to hear something of a "peach of a vacation" mingled with grand opera and Farrar in Carmen, with New Year's Eve at the Congress Hotel, with a lovely Delta Upsilon formal at Northwestern, and with an all-night party at the South Shore Club.
"I am simply dead," one of them said, ​"and I have a peck of back work to hand in tomorrow." The babble of conversation ceased shortly, and the silence became so great that I turned to find the cause. They were asleep, their tired, pallid faces and the dark rings under their eyes showing all too well what a lovely, restful vacation they had had.
The man who said that it takes the strongest constitution to stand the average trip for the health might have added that it takes the strongest student to stand the ordinary vacation. A woman whom I once knew when asked if she employed a servant girl remarked that she had had one, but that she was just then doing her own work. She hoped as soon as she was strong enough to try one again. I have often felt that it might be a good thing to require students to pass a physical test to determine whether or not they are strong enough to indulge in the dissipations of a vacation. The line of pale, sad eyed, tired, and physically knocked-​out undergraduates who come into my office after every vacation may have had a "peach of a time", but they very seldom reveal much of the bloom on their return. A real vacation ought to be stimulating and restful, but it oftentimes leaves students exhausted, unprepared for their work, and worth nothing for days after they get back. Instead of finding themselves eager and ready for hard work, they come back to rest up.
There is no more severe test of a man's character than the way in which he spends the time that is his own and the way in which he puts in the hours or days of leisure and vacation. Most of the moral delinquents whom I know strayed away from the path of virtue and self-control when they had nothing else to do—when they were having a vacation.
January
# The Sunday Eight O'Clock/Who Pays?

"I'VE just been up at their country place visiting the Simpkinses," George remarked to me this fall. "Cadillac, motor boat, house party, fine board, no laundry bill, nothing to pay; pretty soft."
I had met Simpkins at the end of August, and he had told me what a grind the summer had been to him. "I've had to work early and late," he said. "That family of mine had a tearing good time up north with their friends, but the bills were tremendously heavy, and you know somebody always has to pay."
The Beta Tau Sigma party, the papers said, had set a new standard for social events in this community. Nothing was lacking to make it a success—cabs, evening clothes (mostly rented), favors, theatre party, seven course luncheon—it cost a ​pretty sum. I wondered who was paying; father at home getting up early and going to bed late? Sister teaching, or clerking, or nursing? Mother going without the new gown or the vacation trip of which she was very much in need? These things more often than otherwise mean sacrifice; for some one has to pay.
Parker cut a pretty wide swath last year in college. He had the latest clothes; he never missed a good show—or a bad one; if anything was going on he could be found sitting in the front row, and there were unpleasant rumors about his associates. I knew his being in college was pinching at home a good deal, but his folks were quite willing to make the sacrifice in order that he might have the advantages that they had been denied. It wouldn't have been so bad if he had paid his part by boning on his college work. Mother could perhaps have afforded to deny herself a spring bonnet if son had needed the money to buy a Phi Beta ​Kappa pin; but as it was he finished the year in debt to every one and with a scholastic average of fifty nine. Those who were paying got little for their money.
For every good time you have, for every luxury you enjoy, for every dissipation in which you indulge or graft which you take advantage of, somebody is having to pay. You may charge the account at times, but ultimately the bills come in with interest.
It is better on the whole for each man to pay his share of the bill. No one respects a boy who is always eager to sit in, but who never reaches, or reaches far enough, for the check. He's a yellow sport and an unworthy son if he doesn't play the game fairly, economize occasionally, and square his half of the account by a return of manly character and good scholarship.
October
# The Sunday Eight O'Clock/Trifling Irritations

MOST men could have a leg cut off or receive a refusal of marriage from the girl they love with fortitude and resignation; it is the trifling irritations of life that try our courage and wreck our nervous systems. We can meet death without winking an eye lash, but cold pancakes for breakfast or a lost collar button unfits us for business for the day. Our friends and our reputations are often made or lost by the way in which we meet the seemingly insignificant situations of life.
I knew a man once who lived with his wife twenty years. They stood by each other through all sorts of sorrows and disasters, but he finally applied for a divorce. She had a persistent habit of taking his soiled handkerchief out of his pocket each evening and substituting a fresh one. It ​was a violation of his rights, which could not be brooked, and which bade fair to sour his whole disposition; he tried in vain to break her of the practice, and, failing in this, sought release from the annoyance through the divorce courts. Yet they had met with heroism and fortitude the serious things of life.
It is seldom the vital or the important occurrences which try our tempers or upset us, or make home heaven or hell for us; it is the trifling thing, the unexpected annoyance or omission.
Many of these things are largely matters of personal temperament to which we yield without a struggle. We even become elated or take pride in the fact, at times, that there are certain things which we do not like or which we can not stand. Some men boast of their little foibles or irritations as if they were an asset rather than a liability.
I heard a man admit the other day that a corroded pen, or a dry inkwell, or a waste ​paper basket put thoughtfully out of reach by the janitor did more to disturb his equanimity than a dozen difficult customers would have done.
In my undergraduate day I saw an otherwise well balanced instructor,—an experienced middle aged gentleman,—thrown into a frenzy because his hat dropped twice from the hook on which he was trying to hang it. He would have met a crisis in life with composure and complete placidity.
Perhaps when we learn to estimate men's characters justly it will not be wholly from the great crises which they meet, but by the trifling irritations as well which they are able to overlook or to control.
August
# The Sunday Eight O'Clock/Virtue and Reward

A GOOD deal of the literature for children which I have read during the last twenty years promulgates the idea that virtue is entitled to and gets its immediate, adequate, and usually its pecuniary reward, and that evil doers live a dreary and unhappy life and come to a horrible end. If one is honest or unselfish or truthful or does his duty under temptation, there is always the generous employer to send one on an unexpected vacation or the long-lost uncle to return with gold watches and filled purses for trips to Europe.
The college student it seems to me must often have been brought up on this sort of reading matter, for if he does not crib in examination, even though his facts are drawn from his imagination, he is likely to feel that this virtue should be rewarded by ​his being passed; if he tells the truth about any dereliction, he thinks he is being treated unjustly if he is not entirely forgiven; if he works unselfishly in politics or on a class committee, he is aggrieved if he does not get a "rake-off" or a gold watch-fob. No undergraduate would now think of working on a college publication if he did not expect ultimately to get in on the division of the surplus. His is the virtue that calls for tangible reward.
I have not always found it so in real life. It was something of a shock to me when I was a boy to find that when I called the attention of our bank cashier to the fact that he had over-paid me, he was irritated to have been detected in an error rather than grateful for having been spared a small loss.
"I told you the truth, and now I'm fired," a student said to me not long ago. The satisfaction of having done right was not enough for him, he wanted the gold fob; ​and the fact that I knew the truth before he told it to me did not change things in his mind; he thought himself entitled to the rake-off.
In many instances, perhaps in most instances, virtue does bring its definite reward, and the evil doer is punished, but one does not have to go far to find the derelict who is riotously happy and successful, and the faithful, honest soul who gets no recognition. Anyway, why should not one do right because it is right, and be honest and truthful and clean because he has principle? One's self-respect, the strength and joy that come from living up to the ideal, are after all the best rewards of virtue, and if one expects no other he will not be disappointed.
March
# The Sunday Eight O'Clock/The Uncertain Mail

I'VE seen a good deal in the newspapers from time to time with reference to the certainty that if you drop a letter into the mail box at the corner of your street, it will be delivered to the proper person; but I don't believe it.
I feel somewhat as Mark Twain said he did regarding the notice of his death which he read in a country newspaper; I think the reports have been greatly exaggerated. I've read something to the effect that not more than one letter out of a million ultimately goes astray, and that that one has a good chance of being run to cover by some epistolary sleuth in the dead letter office; but I've watched the thing, and I'll have to be shown.
I had a few hours of unexpected leisure one day last summer, and feeling more than ordinarily kindly toward the human race I ​used it to write to a few of the undergraduates who, it seemed to me, had done something that merited attention or was worthy of praise. When I had finished there were fifteen or twenty in all. The summer dragged on, and I was made happy by receiving two acknowledgments, one from McKinley, ashy little country freshman, and a gracious pleasant one from Bullard whom most people at first sight might have thought crude. I should scarcely have expected either to reply.
Now the thing that convinces me that all this talk about the reliability of the mails is wrong is the fact that I did not hear from those other eighteen letters.
Take Burton, for example, who won the western tennis championship. I'm sure that if he had received my congratulations, he would at least have acknowledged the note. He comes from a part of the country where they are fed on courtesy and good form three times a day, and he has an aunt who ​belongs to the Daughters of the American Revolution. A man with a past like that behind him couldn't neglect to acknowledge a simple little note.
There was Stephens, who is really a nice boy and who won the high average in Engineering and was given ninety-three in Rhetoric 1 by an instructor who came from Harvard; and Carlton who was elected to senior society and has had three years of uninterrupted training at sorority open houses; and Fulton whose uncle wrote a book and who is a prize athlete over whom seven organizations went crazy when he entered, and who finally joined the only first class fraternity in college—I'm sure the notes I wrote them were lost in the mails, or I should have heard from them.
Nancy says that I'm wrong in blaming the government, and that probably all these men got the letters that I wrote and failed to answer them through ignorance or carelessness just as some fellows keep their hats ​on when they talk to a woman, or fail to call after they've been invited to dinner, but that doesn't seem reasonable to me.
October
# The Sunday Eight O'Clock/What?

WHEN I was an undergraduate in college and used to go home for the summer to work up a little physical enthusiasm on the farm, Cornelius O'Donnell, a shrewd old Irishman who lived down in the Dutch Flats and with whom we used to exchange work during harvest time, was wont regularly, after he had greeted me and inquired if I were "still down there in college," to propound the question, "Well, what are you goin' to make o' yourself?"
I am not sure that Cornelius thought that in the transformations that go on within college walls it is possible to construct a delicately wrought silk purse out of a sow's ear, but he had the feeling that any serious minded and reasonably intelligent young fellow who was willing to put in four years of good hard work could mould himself into ​any desired shape—could make out of himself, almost anything. And he was right.
I have wondered often as I have seen each year the hundreds of new men entering college, what their individual ambition is—what they want to make of themselves. I heard our President say not long ago that it is foolish for a man to waste his time in learning in college what he could pick up at the "Corners"; he should seek something worth while.
Some fellows are satisfied with small accomplishment in college—to be the best dancer on the campus, or the keenest fusser, or the most adroit pool player or the most notorious loafer, or, without scholastic excellence, to shine in some undergraduate activity. They are setting for themselves a low standard.
My old German teacher used to say that one can buy anything from the gods if one is willing to pay what it costs. It is possible, I believe, for every healthy young ​fellow to accomplish any reasonable ambition and to make himself about what he wishes. The price of such accomplishment is not infrequently high; it means high ideals, sacrifice, and hard work, and self-control, and self-discipline.
I come back to the old question. What are you going to make of yourself—you who are already some distance along the course? You have the materials and the opportunity to make almost anything you desire. You can become a rounder or a man of stable, reliable character; you can develop into a commonplace loafer who wastes his hours in, playing Kelly pool or penny ante, or you can become a real student who cultivates careful speech and broad interests and habits of self-control, and who does his daily task excellently.
It is up to you; you'll never again have so good a chance as now to make something of yourself.
September