Download or read book Personal Reminiscences (Classic Reprint) written by Cornelia Knight and published by . This book was released on 2015-08-09 with total page 374 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Excerpt from Personal Reminiscences If there be, as many would have us believe, an instinctive curiosity in the Republican mind in regard to royal and noble personages, their habits and course of life, this curiosity has been gratified of late by the publication of the "Greville Memoirs," with the choicest portions of which the readers of this series of little volumes are doubtless familiar. These famous "Memoirs" have not increased the respect of any reader towards royalty; on the contrary, they have lessened it amazingly, both here and in England. The divinity that doth hedge a king is vanished. Divine right is now seen to be a monstrous earthly wrong, and the High Mightinesses who claimed it, humbugs, if not worse. There is a hasty and unreasoning hatred of kingcraft and its belongings, of which the village Fourth of July oration, spouted in thundering tones by a blatant demagogue, is a good example; and there is a well considered and reasonable dislike of kingcraft and its abuses which is shared by thoughtful minds the world over. We flatter ourselves, perhaps, that it is only of late years that men have learned to measure kings by the common standards of humanity, but we are wrong. Many of the old English poets have done so in their stately tragedies and lyrics. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.