The work of the life of Flaubert marks a step in the history of the novel. He was a prose author of the first rank; for several years indeed no one stood higher than Flaubert in France. His strength as a prosaist reposed upon an artistic and literary conscientiousness, which was exalted almost to the dignity of genius. He became a great artist because he was unsparing in his efforts, both when he was making preparations to write and when he was engaged in writing; he collected the results of his observations, facts, and illustrations, with the painstaking of a mere savant, while striving, with the passionate eagerness of a mere adorer of form, to fashion his materials in a plastic and harmonious manner. He became a master of modern fiction because he was sufficiently self-denying to be willing to represent real psychological events alone, and to shun all effects of poetic eloquence, all pathetic or dramatic situations which appeared beautiful or interesting at the expense of the truth. His name is synonymous with artistic earnestness and literary rigor.

This book is part of the author's "Nature Books For Children" series , which is probably the best indication of its target audience and subject matter. The book is fun and charming, even for adults. Arthur Michell Ransome was an English author and journalist who had a reputation as one of the best English writers of children's books. "This is a book about the things that are jolly and wet: streams, and ponds, and ditches, and all the things that swim and wriggle in them. I wonder if you like them as much as they are liked by the Imp and the Elf? You know all about the Imp and the Elf, do you not? Those two small jolly children, who live in a little grey house in a green garden, and know the country and all the things in it, almost as well as they know each other? The Imp and the Elf love everything that is wet. They paddle in the streams, and build dams, and make waterfalls, and harbours, and sail boats, and do all the other things that every sensible person wants to do."

This book is part of the author's "Nature Books For Children" series , which is probably the best indication of its target audience and subject matter. The book is fun and charming, even for adults. Arthur Michell Ransome was an English author and journalist who had a reputation as one of the best English writers of children's books.

PUBLISHER'S NOTE: On August 27, 1914, in London, I made this note in a memorandum book: "Met Arthur Ransome at_____'s; discussed a book on the Russian's relation to the war in the light of psychological background--folklore." The book was not written but the idea that instinctively came to him pervades his every utterance on things Russian. The versatile man who commands more than respect as the biographer of Poe and Wilde; as the , was the first notable appeal from a non-Russian to the American people for fair play in a crisis understood then even less than now. The British Who's Who--that Almanach de Gotha of people who do things or choose their parents wisely--tells us that Mr. Ransome's recreations are "walking, smoking, fairy stories." It is, perhaps, his intimacy with the last named that enables him to distinguish between myth and fact and that makes his activity as an observer and recorder so valuable in a day of bewilderment and betrayal.

This book is part of the author's "Nature Books For Children" series , which is probably the best indication of its target audience and subject matter. The book is fun and charming, even for adults. Arthur Michell Ransome was an English author and journalist who had a reputation as one of the best English writers of children's books. "When we think of sowing seeds we think of Spring with the new corn green on the red ground, and when we think of Spring we think of Summer, when it is tall and wavy in the wind, and when we think of Summer we think of Autumn when the corn is golden and cut, and then, why, then we come to Winter again."