We cannot even see a man with a book without worrying over the effect it may have on him, and we would turn every critic into a sort of literary legislator. We try to compel good taste and the harmless word "culture" has already acquired a grim and horrid sound. On the lightest of matters we lay the heaviest of hands. At every point our indefatigable instructors would substitute a formula for a vital process. Our fancied obligations to these little formulas are for the most part the subject of this book, which is made up of certain news paper and magazine articles, edited and rear ranged. The topics discussed are transitory, but they are bound to recur, and the writings quoted are evanescent but they are of a kind that often returns.
A 1904 work, a collection of essays, by Frank Moore Colby (1865–1925), an American educator and writer.