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.