The Book of Virtues: A Treasury of Great Moral Stories, edited, with commentary by William J. Bennett (Simon & Schuster, 873 pp., $27.50)
SOME ten years ago I noticed a copy of Baroness Orczy’s Scarlet Pimpernel in a second-hand bookshop. As I picked it up and leafed through it. I remembered just how much I had enjoyed it at the age of ten. What I had enjoyed was not just the adventure but adventure infused with morality. I bought it and read it again expecting to find it nonsense. It is not nonsense. In fact it is all the better today since its genre is so rare. Slowly the names started coming back: not just Baroness Orczy but Rider Haggard, Anthony Hope, Rafael Sabatini, G. A. Henty, Harrison Ainsworth, Conan Doyle, C. S. Forester, John Buchan, P. C. Wren, Percy Westerman, and a dozen others. What had happened to all those books? I suppose I must have thrown them away. Some I never owned but borrowed from libraries or other boys— “You can have my Henty, if you lend me your Buchan.”
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