Xenograffiti Read Online Free

assigning the Langs Gypsy blood, despite its probable untruthfulness); he could still parody the Latin original of magician Cornelius Agrippa with a phrase of his own: “ Hoc opus diligenter perlexi, et dico ut in amplissimo verbi sensu Bosh vel Rot vel Bolly sit ” (“This book has surveyed [its field] accurately, and I say in the fullest sense of the word that it’s bosh, rot, and bolly”). In later years he tried to remain open-minded on the subject, and succeeded to the extent that his opinions then are difficult to judge from today’s perspective; even the introduction to his major work on the subject, The Book of Dreams and Ghosts , is curiously noncommittal.
    Lang entered Balliol College at Oxford in 1864. His talents as a writer were just beginning to shine forth, and one of his schoolmates noted that he could “knock off” an essay on any subject whatever in half an hour’s time. By the time he went to Merton College, Oxford, in 1868, he was writing poetry, and his first book appeared during his stay there in 1872. He left Oxford in 1875, partly because of an impending marriage to Leonora Alleyne (school rules at the time forbade extension of a fellowship to married students), but primarily because of an expanding and rapidly developing career as an essayist and reviewer, a following to which he devoted thirty-seven years.
    Lang was a scholar, poet, essayist, romantic novelist, and anthologist of the fairy tale; his first collection of poems was followed by more than sixty other books scattered throughout a dozen areas of knowledge. As a literary historian, he is best known for three studies of Homer which refuted the then-popular theory of collective authorship for the Odyssey and Iliad . He authored a history of Joan of Arc, and solved an historical puzzle with his novel, Pickle the Spy . His poetry, although published early in his career and never truly popular, had, nevertheless, a profound effect on its time, and certainly influenced British poetry of the first decades of the twentieth century. He knew well both Robert Louis Stevenson and H. Rider Haggard, and collaborated with the latter on The World’s Desire , a fantasy sequel to the adventures of Odysseus. His own love for the romantic novel caused him to write a triad of fantasies set in the imaginary lands of Pantouflia and Fairnilee.
    He is chiefly known today, and was best known in his own lifetime, for a series of twelve anthologies of fairy tales. His theme, as exemplified in the first of the series, The Blue Fairy Book (1889), was to present the best myths and tales of all times and civilizations in popular and readable form, packaged to attract children, and translated or rewritten to suit the language of his time. Called the “Rainbow” series for the distinctive color featured in each title, the books were an enormous commercial success, and remain in print to this day from Dover Publications.
    The Book of Dreams and Ghosts first appeared in 1897, and was the first serious attempt to relate and retell the best-attested stories of psychical phenomena and ghosts with any kind of critical sense. Lang researched sources reaching back to classical times, and covering all civilizations, to discover what he believed to be the most authentic encounters of humanity with the unknown. Although he took no public stand on the material’s veracity, he himself claimed to have seen three specters in his lifetime, one in 1869 of a deceased professor, another of a dark girl in 1894, and a third, the death omen of a cat, shortly before he died in 1912. His attitude is best summarized in his own words: “I do firmly believe that there are human faculties as yet unexplained, as yet inconsistent with popular scientific ‘materialism.’ I do believe, with all students of human nature, in hallucinations of one, or of several, or even of all the senses. But as to whether such hallucinations, among the sane, are ever caused by psychical influences from the