Explore "The Reward of Letters" by Hilaire Belloc on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
It has often been remarked that while all countries in the world possess some sort of literature, as Iceland her Sagas, England her daily papers, France her prose writers and dramatists, and even Prussia her railway guides, one nation and one alone, the Empire of Monomotopa, is utterly innocent of this embellishment or frill.
No traveller records the existence of any Monomotopan quill-driver; no modern visitor to that delightful island has come across a _littérateur_ whether in the worse or in the best hotels; and such reading as the inhabitants enjoy is entirely confined to works imported by large steamers from the neighbouring Antarctic Continent.