G.E. Lessing, widely regarded by students of theater as the world's first dramaturg, was also one of the first proponents of the German bourgeois tragedy. Miss Sara Sampson, in which a young woman runs off with a ne'er-do-well who is still entangled with his former mistress, was a reaction against the Voltarian verse drama popular in the eighteenth century.

Isabella Bird travels abroad in Canada and the United States in the 1850s. As an Englishwoman and a lone female, she travels as far as Chicago, Prince Edward Island, and Cincinatti. Her observations on the trials and tribulations of the journeys are astute, if formed by her place and time in history. Adventures with pickpockets, omnibuses, cholera, and rat invested hotels deter her not. (Sibella Denton)

The classic of the Way and of High Virtue is the Tao Teh Ching. Its author is generally held as a contemporary of Confucius, Lao Tzu, or Laozi. The exact date of the book’s origin is disputed. The book is divided into two parts, the Upper Part and the Lower Part. The Upper Part consists of chapters 1-37, and each chapter begins with the word “Tao,” or the Way. The Lower Part consists of chapters 38-81, and each chapter begins with the words “Shang Teh,” or High Virtue. This 1919 edition names the Lower Part as the Wu Wei, or translated variously as “not doing,” “non-ado,” or “non-assertion...

Flutist Aaron Sisson is caught up in the aftermath of WWI. A lost soul, he attempts to find himself in the comfort of bar-room talk and alcohol and a woman. Moving on, he spends time with a mining executive's relatives. But he finds the family a stuffy middle-class lot, bored with each other and themselves. He leaves his wife and children and strikes out for the open road. During a playing engagement at an opera performance, he reunites with the mining executive's family. Talk is of love and war, none of it very satisfying to anyone...

"There is no mistake about it, Alvina was a lost girl. She was cut off from everything she belonged to." In this most under-valued of his novels, Lawrence once again presents us with a young woman hemmed in by her middle-class upbringing and (like Ursula Brangwen in The Rainbow) longing for escape. Alvina Houghton's plight, however, is given a rather comic and even picaresque treatment. Losing first her mother, a perpetual invalid, and later her cross-dressing father, a woefully ineffectual small-scale entrepreneur, Alvina feels doomed to merge with the tribe of eternal spinsters who surround her in the dreary mining community of Woodhouse...

Maturin Murray Ballou was the author of dozens of books, chiefly centered around his extensive sea travel. He was deputy navy-agent in the Boston Custom House and circumnavigated in 1882, collecting material for several travel accounts and various nautical romances, amongst which The Sea-Witch can be counted.

This work tells the history of smoking in England from the social point of view. Thus it does not deal with the history of tobacco growing or tobacco related manufacture, but is rather the story of how smoking has fitted in with the fashions and customs throughout the ages, and the changes in the attitude of society towards smoking.

MANUAL OF SURGERY, OXFORD MEDICAL PUBLICATIONSBY ALEXIS THOMSON, F.R.C.S.Ed.PREFACE TO SIXTH EDITION Much has happened since this Manual was last revised, and many surgical lessons have been learned in the hard school of war. Some may yet have to be unlearned, and others have but little bearing on the problems presented to the civilian surgeon. Save in its broadest principles, the surgery of warfare is a thing apart from the general surgery of civil life, and the exhaustive literature now available on every aspect of it makes it unnecessary that it should receive detailed consideration in a manual for students...

Zanoni, a timeless Rosicrucian brother, cannot fall in love without losing his power of immortality; but he does fall in love with Viola Pisani, a promising young opera singer from Naples, the daughter of Pisani, a misunderstood Italian violinist. An English gentleman named Glyndon loves Viola as well, but is indecisive about proposing marriage, and then renounces his love in order to pursue occult study. The story develops in the days of the French Revolution in 1789. Zanoni has lived since the Chaldean civilization...