In this wide-ranging and slyly erudite essay, Andrew Lang dissects the art of literary forgery with more amusement than outrage, revealing a long tradition of hoaxes that blur the line between scholarship and charade. From Onomacritus to Ireland, Lang draws out the comic futility of chasing authenticity in a world where erudition and credulity so often walk hand in hand.

A toast is drunk to the memory of the departed. The men sit about the fireplace smoking or weaving baskets; the women apart, knitting or spinning by the light of the fire and one candle. The children play with their gifts of apples and nuts. As the hour grows later, and mysterious noises begin to be heard about the house, and a curtain sways in a draught, the thoughts of the company already centred upon the dead find expression in words, and each has a tale to tell of an adventure with some friend or enemy who has died.

Drawing on Highland lore and Druidic remnants, W. H. Davenport Adams’s account of Scottish Halloween customs reveals a twilight world where apples predict love, fire wards off famine, and the veil between past and present grows disconcertingly thin. It is not merely a catalogue of superstition, but a meditation on how cultural memory clings to ritual long after belief has faded.

Reginald Wynford’s exhaustive portrait of English country-house life blends social anthropology with nostalgic prose, tracing the rituals, economies, and hierarchies that animate the great rural estates. From the breakfast table to the billiard room, the manor emerges not only as a seat of leisure but as the quietly beating heart of English class identity.

In her sweeping moral survey of European womanhood, Lydia Maria Child marshals history as both evidence and indictment, tracing the entrenchment of patriarchal custom across class, church, and crown. What emerges is less a chronology than a cumulative argument — one in which progress is never assumed, and civilization often masks its own brutality.

With the precision of a naturalist and the curiosity of a proto-archaeologist, Jeffries Wyman documents the ancient shell-heaps of coastal New England, revealing layered histories of diet, habitation, and human presence long before European contact. The work is as much an anatomical catalog as it is a quiet challenge to the prevailing myths of a blank American past.

In lush, almost mournful detail, Richard Davey reconstructs the ancestral landscape of Lady Jane Grey, where Tudor architecture, dynastic intrigue, and the melancholic ruin of Bradgate Park converge into a portrait of England at its most tragic and picturesque. Beneath the ivy and heraldry lies a meditation on inheritance, fate, and the haunted weight of noble blood.

A fevered tapestry of imperial Rome at its most lavishly unhinged, The Extravagances of the Emperor Elagabalus reads like Suetonius rewritten by Huysmans, exalting in perfumed orgies, edible gold, and theatrical cruelty, all filtered through a strangely sympathetic lens. In J. Stuart Hay’s hands, the boy-emperor becomes both monstrous and magnetic: a vision of youth, decadence, and doomed grandeur that is as unsettling as it is seductively absurd.

A shape-shifting virtuoso of invention and deceit, the so-called German Princess dazzled Restoration England with her improbable lineage, theatrical grifts, and inexhaustible appetite for reinvention. What emerges is less a criminal biography than a carnivalesque satire of gender, class, and credulity, where performance itself becomes the most profitable profession.

Combining clinical detachment with a flair for high tragedy, MacLaurin reexamines Anne Boleyn’s fall not as a political convenience or religious melodrama, but as a case study in hysteria, sexual pathology, and royal syphilis. The result is part forensic reconstruction, part moral autopsy, where Tudor history is scalpelled open to reveal something closer to Greek theater than constitutional crisis.

What begins as a record of courtroom defense becomes, in Mary Stuart’s own words, a final act of sovereign self-fashioning—at once wounded, regal, and devastatingly lucid. These addresses, drawn from the last days of her long captivity, reveal not only the makings of a martyr but the rhetorical precision of a woman who understood the stage upon which she was condemned to die.

With florid admiration and a touch of disbelief, Terhune paints Ninon de l’Enclos as both libertine and philosopher—an ageless enchantress who outlived her lovers, defied convention, and seduced an entire intellectual century. In his telling, she is less a woman than a paradox: virtuous in wit, notorious in reputation, and ever the sovereign of her own myth.

In prose as brisk and unnerving as the institution it exposes, Nellie Bly’s undercover account of life inside Blackwell’s Island asylum remains a landmark of journalistic bravery and feminist indictment. What emerges is not merely a portrait of cruelty, but a razor-sharp study of how poverty, language, and nonconformity were mistaken, often willfully, for madness.

In a breathless catalogue of geological might and national pride, Bombaugh’s “Our Wonderlands” stages a rhetorical duel between the natural marvels of Europe and the sublimities of the American West, where scale, spectacle, and patriotic conviction collide. What results is less a travel essay than a florid act of terrestrial boasting—part gazetteer, part hymn, and unmistakably a product of its imperial century.

An eccentric omnibus of sacred marvels and architectural oddities, Platts’s chapter leaps from Scottish battlements to Spanish palaces, Swiss hermitages, and Chinese fortifications with the gleeful conviction that wonder alone is evidence enough. Less concerned with chronology than spectacle, it captures the 19th-century impulse to collect the world’s grandeur like postcards.

Told in prose equal parts gossip sheet and tragic oratorio, Orr’s portrait of Marie Antoinette and Count Fersen is less a historical account than a romantic fever dream, where doomed grandeur, political inertia, and forbidden devotion converge in a Versailles already teetering toward ruin.

In this richly layered account, Breen traces the psychoactive journeys of 17th-century English merchants and natural philosophers as they encounter cannabis in South Asia, not as a colonial commodity, but as a marvel both alluring and epistemologically unruly. Through Bowrey’s hallucinatory experiments and Hooke’s stilted lectures, we glimpse an early modern world where science, intoxication, and empire all struggled to contain the “occult” logic of the plant.

In this densely embroidered chronicle of midwinter rites, Charles Hardwick traces the roots of Yuletide and New Year custom, from wassail bowls and yule logs to pantomimes and prophetic mists, revealing a layered tapestry where Christian celebration interweaves with pagan fire-worship and Victorian social aspiration.

Clement A. Miles moves fluently between wassail bowls and boar-shaped loaves, herring salads and sacrificial cats, assembling a vivid ethnography of European Christmases where feasting and folk play linger as half-forgotten rites. At once meticulous and mythopoeic, he invites us to taste the sacred in the sugared, and to see in roast pigs and honeyed wafers the ghost of gods once fed.

Alice Morse Earle paints an intricate panorama of early American subsistence, where the woods teemed with deer and turkeys, the seas with cod and lobsters, and the air with the thunder of wildfowl wings. Her chapter on “Food From Forest and Sea” is less a quaint pastoral than a vivid account of ecological abundance, frontier ingenuity, and the uneasy edge between reverence and exploitation.