book I

see; But yet no end of those therein or me; Here we begin new life; while thousands quite Are lost, and theirs, in everlasting night.

Go thou forth, my book, though late Yet be timely fortunate. It may chance good luck may send Thee a kinsman or a friend That may harbour thee, when I With my fates neglected lie. If thou know'st not where to dwell, See, the fire's by. Farewell.

R. HERRICK. _Hesperides._

IMMORTALITY IN BOOKS

Since honour from the honourer proceeds, How well do they deserve, that memorize And leave in books for all posterities The names of worthies and their virtuous deeds; When all their glory else, like water-weeds Without their element, presèntly dies, And all their greatness quite forgotten lies, And when and how they flourished no man heeds! How poor remembrances are statues, tombs, And other monuments that men erect To princes, which remain in closèd rooms, Where but a few behold them, in respect Of books, that to the universal eye Show how they lived; the other where they lie!

S. DANIEL.

ENDURING MONUMENTS

We see then how far the monuments of wit and learning are more durable than the monuments of power or of the hands. For have not the verses of Homer continued twenty-five hundred years, or more, without the loss of a syllable or letter; during which time infinite palaces, temples, castles, cities, have been decayed and demolished? It is not possible to have the true pictures or statues of Cyrus, Alexander, Caesar, no, nor of the kings or great personages of much later years; for the originals cannot last, and the copies cannot but leese of the life and truth. But the images of men's wits and knowledges remain in books, exempted from the wrong of time and capable of perpetual renovation. Neither are they fitly to be called images, because they generate still, and cast their seeds in the minds of others, provoking and causing infinite actions and opinions in succeeding ages. So that if the invention of the ship was thought so noble, which carrieth riches and commodities from place to place, and consociateth the most remote regions in participation of their fruits, how much more are letters to be magnified, which as ships pass through the vast seas of time, and make ages so distant to participate of the wisdom, illuminations, and inventions, the one of the other?--F. BACON, LORD VERULAM. _Of the Advancement of Learning._

THE STRANGE QUALITY OF BOOKS

Books have that strange quality, that being of the frailest and tenderest matter, they outlast brass, iron and marble; and though their habitations and walls, by uncivil hands, be many times overthrown; and they themselves, by foreign force, be turned prisoners, yet do they often, as their authors, keep their giver's names; seeming rather to change places and masters than to suffer a full ruin and total wreck. So, many of the books of Constantinople changed Greece for France and Italy; and in our time, that famous Library in the Palatinate changed Heidelberg for the Vatican. And this I think no small duty, nor meaner gift and retribution, which I render back again to my benefactor's honest fame, being a greater matter than riches; riches being momentany and evanishing, scarce possessed by the third heir; fame immortal, and almost everlasting; by fame riches is often acquired, seldom fame by riches; except when it is their good hap to fall in the possession of some generous-minded man. And though a philosopher said of famous men, disdainfully, that they died two deaths, one in their bodies, another, long after, in their names, he must confess, that where other men live but one life, famous men live two.--W. DRUMMOND. _Bibliotheca Edinburgena Lectori._

BOOKS ARE NOT DEAD THINGS

I deny not but that it is of greatest concernment in the Church and Commonwealth to have a vigilant eye how books demean themselves, as well as men; and thereafter to confine, imprison, and do sharpest justice on them as malefactors. For books are not absolutely dead things, but do contain a potency of life in them to be as active as that soul was whose progeny they are; nay, they do preserve, as in a vial, the purest efficacy and extraction of that living intellect that bred them. I know they are as lively and as vigorously productive as those fabulous dragon's teeth; and, being sown up and down, may chance to spring up armed men. And yet, on the other hand, unless wariness be used, as good almost kill a man as kill a good book. Who kills a man kills a reasonable creature, God's image; but he who destroys a good book, kills reason itself; kills the image of God, as it were, in the eye. Many a man lives a burden to the earth; but a good book is the precious life-blood of a master-spirit, embalmed and treasured up on purpose to a life beyond life. 'Tis true no age can restore a life, whereof, perhaps, there is no great loss; and revolutions of ages do not oft recover the loss of a rejected truth, for the want of which whole nations fare the worse. We should be wary, therefore, what persecution we raise against the living labours of public men, how we spill that seasoned life of man preserved and stored up in books; since we see a kind of homicide may be thus committed, sometimes a martyrdom, and if it extend to the whole impression, a kind of massacre, whereof the execution ends not in the slaying of an elemental life, but strikes at that ethereal and fifth essence--the breath of reason itself; slays an immortality rather than a life.--J. MILTON. _Areopagitica._

SHAKESPEARE IN HEAVEN

BOSWELL. 'There is a strange unwillingness to part with life, independent of serious fears as to futurity. A reverend friend of ours (naming him) tells me, that he feels an uneasiness at the thoughts of leaving his house, his study, his books.'

JOHNSON. 'This is foolish in ---- [Percy?]. A man need not be uneasy on these grounds; for, as he will retain his consciousness, he may say with the philosopher, _Omnia mea mecum porto_.'

BOSWELL. 'True, Sir: we may carry our books in our heads; but still there is something painful in the thought of leaving for ever what has given us pleasure. I remember, many years ago, when my imagination was warm, and I happened to be in a melancholy mood, it distressed me to think of going into a state of being in which Shakespeare's poetry did not exist. A lady whom I then much admired, a very amiable woman, humoured my fancy, and relieved me by saying, "The first thing you will meet in the other world will be an elegant copy of Shakespeare's works presented to you."'

Dr. Johnson smiled benignantly at this, and did not appear to disapprove of the notion.--J. BOSWELL. _Life of Johnson._

THE LIBRARIES OF HEAVEN

I cannot think the glorious world of mind, Embalmed in books, which I can only see In patches, though I read my moments blind, Is to be lost to me.

I have a thought that, as we live elsewhere, So will these dear creations of the brain; That what I lose unread, I'll find, and there Take up my joy again.

O then the bliss of blisses, to be freed From all the wants by which the world is driven; With liberty and endless time to read The libraries of Heaven!

R. LEIGHTON.

THE ONLY THINGS THAT LAST FOR EVER

Actions pass away and are forgotten, or are only discernible in their effects; conquerors, statesmen, and kings live but by their names stamped on the page of history. Hume says rightly that more people think about Virgil and Homer (and that continually) than ever trouble their heads about Caesar or Alexander. In fact, poets are a longer-lived race than heroes: they breathe more of the air of immortality. They survive more entire in their thoughts and acts. We have all that Virgil or Homer did, as much as if we had lived at the same time with them: we can hold their works in our hands, or lay them on our pillows, or put them to our lips. Scarcely a trace of what the others did is left upon the earth, so as to be visible to common eyes. The one, the dead authors, are living men, still breathing and moving in their writings. The others, the conquerors of the world, are but the ashes in an urn. The sympathy (so to speak) between thought and thought is more intimate and vital than that between thought and action. Thought is linked to thought as flame kindles into flame: the tribute of admiration to the manes of departed heroism is like burning incense in a marble monument. Words, ideas, feelings, with the progress of time harden into substances: things, bodies, actions, moulder away, or melt into a sound, into thin air!--Yet though the schoolmen in the Middle Ages disputed more about the texts of Aristotle than the battle of Arbela, perhaps Alexander's Generals in his lifetime admired his pupil as much and liked him better. For not only a man's actions are effaced and vanish with him; his virtues and generous qualities die with him also: his intellect only is immortal and bequeathed unimpaired to posterity. Words are the only things that last for ever.--W. HAZLITT. _Table Talk._

THE AUTHORS' METAMORPHOSIS

How pleasant it is to reflect, that all these lovers of books have themselves become books! What better metamorphosis could Pythagoras have desired! How Ovid and Horace exulted in anticipating theirs! And how the world have justified their exultation! They had a right to triumph over brass and marble. It is the only visible change which changes no further; which generates and yet is not destroyed. Consider: mines themselves are exhausted; cities perish; kingdoms are swept away, and man weeps with indignation to think that his own body is not immortal.

Muoiono le città, muoiono i regni, E l'uom d'esser mortal par che si sdegni.

Yet this little body of thought, that lies before me in the shape of a book, has existed thousands of years, nor since the invention of the press can anything short of an universal convulsion of nature abolish it. To a shape like this, so small yet so comprehensive, so slight yet so lasting, so insignificant yet so venerable, turns the mighty activity of Homer, and, so turning, is enabled to live and warm us for ever. To a shape like this turns the placid sage of Academus: to a shape like this the grandeur of Milton, the exuberance of Spenser, the pungent elegance of Pope, and the volatility of Prior. In one small room, like the compressed spirits of Milton, can be gathered together

The assembled souls of all that men held wise.

May I hope to become the meanest of these existences? This is a question which every author who is a lover of books asks himself some time in his life; and which must be pardoned, because it cannot be helped. I know not. I cannot exclaim with the poet,

Oh that my name were numbered among theirs, Then gladly would I end my mortal days.

For my mortal days, few and feeble as the rest of them may be, are of consequence to others. But I should like to remain visible in this shape. The little of myself that pleases myself I could wish to be accounted worth pleasing others. I should like to survive so, were it only for the sake of those who love me in private, knowing as I do what a treasure is the possession of a friend's mind, when he is no more. At all events, nothing while I live and think can deprive me of my value for such treasures. I can help the appreciation of them while I last, and love them till I die; and perhaps, if fortune turns her face once more in kindness upon me before I go, I may chance, some quiet day, to lay my overbeating temples on a book, and so have the death I most envy.--J. H. LEIGH HUNT. _My Books._

O BLESSED LETTERS

O blessed letters! that combine in one All ages past, and make one live with all, By you we do confer with who are gone, And the dead-living unto council call; By you the unborn shall have communion Of what we feel and what doth us befall.

* * * * *

What good is like to this, To do worthy the writing, and to write Worthy the reading, and the world's delight?

S. DANIEL. _Musophilus._

Though they [philosophers] write _contemptu gloriae_, yet, as Hieron observes, they will put their names to their books.--R. BURTON.

A LASTING LINK OF AGES

But words are things, and a small drop of ink, Falling, like dew, upon a thought, produces That which makes thousands, perhaps millions, think; 'Tis strange, the shortest letter which man uses Instead of speech, may form a lasting link Of ages; to what straits old Time reduces Frail man, when paper--even a rag like this, Survives himself, his tomb, and all that's his!

And when his bones are dust, his grave a blank, His station, generation, even his nation, Become a thing, or nothing, save to rank In chronological commemoration, Some dull MS. oblivion long has sank, Or graven stone found in a barrack's station In digging the foundation of a closet, May turn his name up, as a rare deposit.

And glory long has made the sages smile; 'Tis something, nothing, words, illusion, wind-- Depending more upon the historian's style Than on the name a person leaves behind: Troy owes to Homer what whist owes to Hoyle: The present century was growing blind To the great Marlborough's skill in giving knocks, Until his late Life by Archdeacon Coxe.

G. GORDON, LORD BYRON. _Don Juan._

THE VIRTUE OF A TRUE BOOK

Visible and tangible products of the Past, again, I reckon-up to the extent of three: Cities, with their Cabinets and Arsenals; then tilled Fields, to either or to both of which divisions Roads with their Bridges may belong; and thirdly--Books. In which third, truly, the last invented, lies a worth far surpassing that of the two others. Wondrous indeed is the virtue of a true Book! Not like a dead city of stones, yearly crumbling, yearly needing repair; more like a tilled field, but then a spiritual field: like a spiritual tree, let me rather say, it stands from year to year, and from age to age (we have Books that already number some hundred-and-fifty human ages); and yearly comes its new produce of leaves (Commentaries, Deductions, Philosophical, Political Systems; or were it only Sermons, Pamphlets, Journalistic Essays), every one of which is talismanic and thaumaturgic, for it can persuade men. O thou who art able to write a Book, which once in the two centuries or oftener there is a man gifted to do, envy not him whom they name City-builder, and inexpressibly pity him whom they name Conqueror or City-burner! Thou too art a Conqueror and Victor; but of the true sort, namely over the Devil: thou too hast built what will outlast all marble and metal, and be a wonder-bringing City of the Mind, a Temple and Seminary and Prophetic Mount, whereto all kindreds of the Earth will pilgrim.--T. CARLYLE. _Sartor Resartus._

ACTION AND REACTION

Some of the well-puffed fashionable novels of eighteen hundred and twenty-nine hold the pastry of eighteen hundred and thirty; and others, which are now extolled in language almost too high-flown for the merits of _Don Quixote_, will, we have no doubt, line the trunks of eighteen hundred and thirty-one.--LORD MACAULAY. _Mr. Robert Montgomery's Poems._

THE ULTIMATE TEST OF BOOKS

Some of the Histories that our age has produced are books in the truest sense of the word. They illustrate great periods in our own annals, and in the annals of other countries. They show what a divine discipline has been at work to form men; they teach us that there is such a discipline at work to form us into men. That is the test to which I have urged that all books must at last be brought; if they do not bear it, their doom is fixed. They may be light or heavy, the penny sheet or the vast folio; they may speak of things seen or unseen; of Science or Art; of what has been or what is to be; they may amuse us or weary us, flatter us or scorn us; if they do not assist to make us better and more substantial men, they are only providing fuel for a fire larger, and more utterly destructive, than that which consumed the Library of the Ptolemies.--F. D. MAURICE. _On Books._

BOOKS OF THE HOUR AND OF ALL TIME

All books are divisible into two classes, the books of the hour, and the books of all time. Mark this distinction--it is not one of quality only. It is not merely the bad book that does not last, and the good one that does. It is a distinction of species. There are good books for the hour, and good ones for all time; bad books for the hour, and bad ones for all time. I must define the two kinds before I go farther.

The good book of the hour, then,--I do not speak of the bad ones--is simply the useful or pleasant talk of some person whom you cannot otherwise converse with, printed for you. Very useful often, telling you what you need to know; very pleasant often, as a sensible friend's present talk would be. These bright accounts of travels; good-humoured and witty discussions of question; lively or pathetic story-telling in the form of novel; firm fact-telling, by the real agents concerned in the events of passing history;--all these books of the hour, multiplying among us as education becomes more general, are a peculiar characteristic and possession of the present age: we ought to be entirely thankful for them, and entirely ashamed of ourselves if we make no good use of them. But we make the worst possible use, if we allow them to usurp the place of true books: for, strictly speaking, they are not books at all, but merely letters or newspapers in good print.... A book is written, not to multiply the voice merely, not to carry it merely, but to preserve it. The author has something to say which he perceives to be true and useful, or helpfully beautiful. So far as he knows, no one has yet said it; so far as he knows, no one else can say it. He is bound to say it, clearly and melodiously if he may; clearly, at all events. In the sum of his life he finds this to be the thing, or group of things, manifest to him;--this the piece of true knowledge, or sight, which his share of sunshine and earth has permitted him to seize. He would fain set it down for ever; engrave it on rock, if he could; saying, 'This is the best of me; for the rest, I ate, and drank, and slept, loved, and hated, like another; my life was as the vapour, and is not; but this I saw and knew: this, if anything of mine, is worth your memory.' That is his 'writing'; it is, in his small human way, and with whatever degree of true inspiration is in him, his inscription, or scripture. That is a 'Book'....

Now books of this kind have been written in all ages by their greatest men:--by great leaders, great statesmen, and great thinkers. These are all at your choice; and life is short. You have heard as much before; yet have you measured and mapped out this short life and its possibilities? Do you know, if you read this, that you cannot read that--that what you lose to-day you cannot gain to-morrow? Will you go and gossip with your housemaid, or your stable-boy, when you may talk with queens and kings; or flatter yourselves that it is with any worthy consciousness of your own claims to respect that you jostle with the common crowd for _entrée_ here, and audience there, when all the while this eternal court is open to you, with its society wide as the world, multitudinous as its days, the chosen, and the mighty, of every place and time? Into that you may enter always; in that you may take fellowship and rank according to your wish; from that, once entered into it, you can never be outcast but by your own fault; by your aristocracy of companionship there, your own inherent aristocracy will be assuredly tested, and the motives with which you strive to take high place in the society of the living, measured, as to all the truth and sincerity that are in them, by the place you desire to take in this company of the Dead.--J. RUSKIN. _Sesame and Lilies._

WHO WILL BELIEVE MY VERSE

Who will believe my verse in time to come, If it were filled with your most high deserts? Though yet, heaven knows, it is but as a tomb Which hides your life and shows not half your parts. If I could write the beauty of your eyes And in fresh numbers number all your graces, The age to come would say, 'This poet lies; Such heavenly touches ne'er touched earthly faces.' So should my papers, yellowed with their age, Be scorned, like old men of less truth than tongue, And your true rights be termed a poet's rage And stretchèd metre of an antique song: But were some child of yours alive that time, You should live twice,--in it and in my rhyme.

W. SHAKESPEARE.

IMMORTALITY IN SONG

How many paltry, foolish, painted things, That now in coaches trouble every street, Shall be forgotten, whom no poet sings, Ere they be well wrapped in their winding-sheet! Where I to thee eternity shall give, When nothing else remaineth of these days, And queens hereafter shall be glad to live Upon the alms of thy superfluous praise; Virgins and matrons reading these my rhymes, Shall be so much delighted with thy story, That they shall grieve they lived not in these times, To have seen thee, their sex's only glory: So shalt thou fly above the vulgar throng, Still to survive in my immortal song.

M. DRAYTON.

ONE DAY I WROTE HER NAME

One day I wrote her name upon the strand, But came the waves and washèd it away: Again I wrote it with a second hand, But came the tide and made my pains his prey. 'Vain man,' said she, 'that dost in vain essay A mortal thing so to immortalize; For I myself shall like to this decay, And eke my name be wipèd out likewise.' 'Not so,' quoth I; 'let baser things devise To die in dust, but you shall live by fame; My verse your virtues rare shall eternize, And in the heavens write your glorious name: Where, whenas Death shall all the world subdue, Our love shall live, and later life renew.'

E. SPENSER.

WELL I REMEMBER HOW YOU SMILED

Well I remember how you smiled To see me write your name upon The soft sea-sand--'O! _what a child!_ _You think you're writing upon stone!_'

I have since written what no tide Shall ever wash away, what men Unborn shall read o'er ocean wide And find Ianthe's name again.

W. S. LANDOR.

THE MULTIPLICITY OF BOOKS

Solomon saith truly, Of making many books there is no end, so insatiable is the thirst of men therein; as also endless is the desire of many in buying and reading them. But we come to our rules.

1. _It is a vanity to persuade the world one hath much learning, by getting a great library._ As soon shall I believe every one is valiant that hath a well-furnished armoury. I guess good housekeeping by the smoking, not the number of the tunnels, as knowing that many of them, built merely for uniformity, are without chimneys, and more without fires. Once a dunce void of learning but full of books flouted a libraryless scholar with these words: _Salve doctor sine libris._ But the next day the scholar coming into this jeerer's study, crowded with books; _Salvete libri_, saith he, _sine doctore_.

2. _Few books, well selected, are best._ Yet, as a certain fool bought all the pictures that came out, because he might have his choice, such is the vain humour of many men in gathering of books: yet when they have done all, they miss their end, it being in the editions of authors as in the fashions of clothes, when a man thinks he hath gotten the latest and newest, presently another newer comes out.

3. _Some books are only cursorily to be tasted of._ Namely, first, voluminous books, the task of a man's life to read them over; secondly, auxiliary books, only to be repaired to on occasions; thirdly, such as are mere pieces of formality, so that if you look on them, you look through them; and he that peeps through the casement of the index sees as much as if he were in the house. But the laziness of those cannot be excused who perfunctorily pass over authors of consequence, and only trade in their tables and contents. These, like city-cheaters, having gotten the names of all country gentlemen, make silly people believe they have long lived in those places where they never were, and flourish with skill in those authors they never seriously studied.

4. _The genius of the author is commonly discovered in the dedicatory epistle._ Many place the purest grain in the mouth of the sack for chapmen to handle or buy: and from the dedication one may probably guess at the work, saving some rare and peculiar exceptions. Thus, when once a gentleman admired how so pithy, learned, and witty a dedication was matched to a flat, dull, foolish book; _In truth_, said another, _they may be well matched together, for I profess they are nothing akin_.

5. _Proportion an hour's meditation to an hour's reading of a staple author._ This makes a man master of his learning, and dispirits the book into the scholar. The king of Sweden never filed his men above six deep in one company, because he would not have them lie in useless clusters in his army, but so that every particular soldier might be drawn out into service. Books that stand thin on the shelves, yet so as the owner of them can bring forth every one of them into use, are better than far greater libraries....

But what do I, speaking against multiplicity of books in this age, who trespass in this nature myself? What was a learned man's compliment, may serve for my confession and conclusion: _Multi mei similes hoc morbo laborant, ut cum scribere nesciant tamen a scribendo temperare non possint_.--T. FULLER. _The Holy State and the Profane State._

SUPERFLUOUS BOOKS

I have heard some with deep sighs lament the lost lines of Cicero; others with as many groans deplore the combustion of the library of Alexandria. For my own part, I think there be too many in the world, and could with patience behold the urn and ashes of the Vatican, could I, with a few others, recover the perished leaves of Solomon. I would not omit a copy of _Enoch's Pillars_, had they many nearer authors than Josephus, or did not relish somewhat of the fable. Some men have written more than others have spoken. Pineda quotes more authors in one work than are necessary in a whole world. Of those three great inventions in Germany, there are two which are not without their incommodities, and 'tis disputable whether they exceed not their use and commodities. 'Tis not a melancholy _Utinam_ of mine own, but the desires of better heads that there were a general synod; not to unite the incompatible differences of religion, but for the benefit of learning, to reduce it as it lay at first, in a few and solid authors; and to condemn to the fire those swarms and millions of rhapsodies, begotten only to distract and abuse the weaker judgements of scholars, and to maintain the trade and mystery of typographers.--SIR T. BROWNE. _Religio Medici._

MULTIPLICATION IS VEXATION

The reason that books are multiplied, in spite of the general law that beings shall not be multiplied without necessity, is, that books are made from books. A new history of France or Spain is manufactured from several volumes already printed, without adding anything new. All dictionaries are made from dictionaries; almost all new geographical books are made from other books of geography; St. Thomas's dream has brought forth two thousand large volumes of divinity; and the same race of little worms that have devoured the parent are now gnawing the children.--VOLTAIRE. _Philosophical Dictionary: Books._

THE MULTIPLICATION OF ORIGINALS

The invention of printing has not, perhaps, multiplied books, but only the copies of them; and if we believe there were six hundred thousand in the library of Ptolemy, we shall hardly pretend to equal it by any of ours, nor, perhaps, by all put together; I mean so many originals that have lived any time, and thereby given testimony to their having been thought worth preserving. For the scribblers are infinite, that like mushrooms or flies are born and die in small circles of time; whereas books, like proverbs, receive their chief value from the stamp and esteem of ages through which they have passed.--SIR W. TEMPLE. _Ancient and Modern Learning._

THE AUTHORS' ADVANTAGE

The circumstance which gives authors an advantage ... is this, that they can multiply their originals; or rather can make copies of their works, to what number they please, which shall be as valuable as the originals themselves. This gives a great author something like a prospect of eternity, but at the same time deprives him of those other advantages which artists meet with. The artist finds greater returns in profit, as the author in fame. What an inestimable price would a Virgil or a Homer, a Cicero or an Aristotle bear, were their works like a statue, a building, or a picture, to be confined only in one place, and made the property of a single person!--J. ADDISON. _Spectator_, 166.

AN IGNORANT AGE HATH MANY BOOKS

It is observed that _a corrupt society has many laws_; I know not whether it is not equally true, that _an ignorant age has many books_. When the treasures of ancient knowledge lie unexamined, and original authors are neglected and forgotten, compilers and plagiaries are encouraged who give us again what we had before, and grow great by setting before us what our own sloth had hidden from our view.--S. JOHNSON. _Idler_, 85.

THE DIFFUSION OF BOOKS AND ITS EFFECT ON CULTURE

Nothing can supply the place of books. They are cheering or soothing companions in solitude, illness, affliction. The wealth of both continents would not compensate for the good they impart. Let every man, if possible, gather some good books under his roof, and obtain access for himself and family to some social library. Almost any luxury should be sacrificed to this.

One of the very interesting features of our times is the multiplication of books, and their distribution through all conditions of society. At a small expense a man can now possess himself of the most precious treasures of English literature. Books, once confined to a few by their costliness, are now accessible to the multitude; and in this way a change of habits is going on in society, highly favourable to the culture of the people. Instead of depending on casual rumour and loose conversation for most of their knowledge and objects of thought; instead of forming their judgements in crowds, and receiving their chief excitement from the voice of neighbours; men are now learning to study and reflect alone, to follow out subjects continuously, to determine for themselves what shall engage their minds, and to call to their aid the knowledge, original views, and reasonings of men of all countries and ages; and the results must be, a deliberateness and independence of judgement, and a thoroughness and extent of information, unknown in former times. The diffusion of these silent teachers, books, through the whole community, is to work greater effects than artillery, machinery, and legislation. Its peaceful agency is to supersede stormy revolutions. The culture, which is to spread, whilst an unspeakable good to the individual, is also to become the stability of nations.--W. E. CHANNING. _Self-Culture._

THE DISTRACTION OF CHOICE

Under our present enormous accumulation of books, I do affirm, that a miserable distraction of choice (which is the germ of such a madness) must be very generally incident to the times; that the symptoms of it are, in fact, very prevalent; and that one of the chief symptoms is an enormous 'gluttonism' for books, and for adding language to language; and in this way it is that literature becomes much more a source of torment than of pleasure. Nay, I will go further, and will say that of many, who escape this disease, some owe their privilege simply to the narrowness of their minds and the contracted range of their sympathies with literature--which enlarged, they would soon lose it! others, again, owe it to their situation; as, for instance, in a country town, where, books being few, a man can use up all his materials, his appetite is unpalled--and he is grateful for the loan of a MS., &c.: but bring him up to London--show him the wagon-loads of unused stores--which he is at liberty to work up--tell him that these even are but a trifle, perhaps, to what he may find in the libraries of Paris, Dresden, Milan, &c.--of religious houses--of English noblemen, &c.; and this same man, who came up to London blithe and happy, will leave it pale and sad. You have ruined his peace of mind: a subject which he fancied himself capable of exhausting, he finds to be a labour for centuries: he has no longer the healthy pleasure of feeling himself master of his materials; he is degraded into their slave.--T. DE QUINCEY. _Letters to a Young Man._

A LIBRARY OF ONE

Were I to name, out of the times gone by, The poets dearest to me, I should say, Pulci for spirits, and a fine, free way; Chaucer for manners, and close, silent eye; Milton for classic taste, and harp strung high; Spenser for luxury, and sweet, sylvan play; Horace for chatting with, from day to day; Shakespeare for all, but most, society.

But which take with me, could I take but one? Shakespeare,--as long as I was unoppressed With the world's weight, making sad thoughts intenser; But did I wish, out of the common sun To lay a wounded heart in leafy rest, And dream of things far off and healing,--Spenser.

J. H. LEIGH HUNT.

A LIBRARY OF TWELVE

You may get the whole of Sir Thomas Browne's works more easily than the _Hydrotaphia_ in a single form.... If I were confined to a score of English books, this I think would be one of them; nay, probably, it would be one if the selection were cut down to twelve. My library, if reduced to those bounds, would consist of Shakespeare, Chaucer, Spenser, and Milton; Lord Clarendon; Jackson, Jeremy Taylor, and South; Isaac Walton, Sidney's _Arcadia_, Fuller's _Church History_, and Sir Thomas Browne; and what a wealthy and well-stored mind would that man have, what an inexhaustible reservoir, what a Bank of England to draw upon for profitable thoughts and delightful associations, who should have fed upon them.--R. SOUTHEY (Letter to G. C. Bedford).

ANCIENT AND MODERN BOOKS

Whoever converses much among the old books will be something hard to please among the new; yet these must have their part, too, in the leisure of an idle man, and have, many of them, their beauties as well as their defaults. Those of story, or relations of matter of fact, have a value from their substance as much as from their form, and the variety of events is seldom without entertainment or instruction, how indifferently soever the tale is told. Other sorts of writings have little of esteem but what they receive from the wit, learning, or genius of the authors, and are seldom met with of any excellency, because they do but trace over the paths that have been beaten by the ancients, or comment, critic, and flourish upon them, and are at best but copies after those originals, unless upon subjects never touched by them, such as are all that relate to the different constitutions of religions, laws, or governments in several countries, with all matters of controversy that arise upon them.--SIR W. TEMPLE. _Ancient and Modern Learning._

THE BATTLE OF THE BOOKS

Immediately the two main bodies withdrew, under their several ensigns, to the farther parts of the library, and there entered into cabals and consults upon the present emergency. The Moderns were in very warm debates upon the choice of their leaders; and nothing less than the fear impending from their enemies could have kept them from mutinies upon this occasion. The difference was greatest among the horse, where every private trooper pretended to the chief command, from Tasso and Milton to Dryden and Wither. The light-horse were commanded by Cowley and Despreaux. There came the bowmen under their valiant leaders, Descartes, Gassendi, and Hobbes; whose strength was such that they could shoot their arrows beyond the atmosphere, never to fall down again, but turn, like that of Evander, into meteors; or, like the cannon-ball, into stars. Paracelsus brought a squadron of stinkpot-flingers from the snowy mountains of Rhaetia. There came a vast body of dragoons, of different nations, under the leading of Harvey, their great aga: part armed with scythes, the weapons of death; part with lances and long knives, all steeped in poison; part shot bullets of a most malignant nature, and used white powder, which infallibly killed without report. There came several bodies of heavy-armed foot, all mercenaries, under the ensigns of Guiccardini, Davila, Polydore, Virgil, Buchanan, Mariana, Camden, and others. The engineers were commanded by Regiomontanus and Wilkins. The rest was a confused multitude, led by Scotus, Aquinas, and Bellarmine; of mighty bulk and stature, but without either arms, courage, or discipline. In the last place came infinite swarms of calones, a disorderly rout led by L'Estrange; rogues and ragamuffins, that follow the camp for nothing but the plunder, all without coats to cover them.

The Army of the Ancients was much fewer in number; Homer led the horse, and Pindar the light-horse; Euclid was chief engineer; Plato and Aristotle commanded the bowmen; Herodotus and Livy the foot; Hippocrates, the dragoons; the allies, led by Vossius and Temple, brought up the rear.

All things violently tending to a decisive battle, Fame, who much frequented, and had a large apartment assigned her in the regal library, fled up straight to Jupiter, to whom she delivered a faithful account of all that passed between the two parties below; for among the Gods she always tells truth. Jove, in great concern, convokes a council in the Milky Way. The senate assembled, he declares the occasion of convening them; a bloody battle just impendent between two mighty armies of ancient and modern creatures, called books, wherein the celestial interest was but too deeply concerned. Momus, the patron of the Moderns, made an excellent speech in their favour, which was answered by Pallas, the protectress of the Ancients. The assembly was divided in their affections; when Jupiter commanded the Book of Fate to be laid before him. Immediately were brought by Mercury three large volumes in folio, containing memoirs of all things past, present, and to come. The clasps were of silver double gilt, the covers of celestial turkey leather, and the paper such as here on earth might almost pass for vellum. Jupiter, having silently read the decree, would communicate the import to none, but presently shut up the book....

Meanwhile Momus, fearing the worst, and calling to mind an ancient prophecy which bore no very good face to his children the Moderns, bent his flight to the region of a malignant deity called Criticism. She dwelt on the top of a snowy mountain in Nova Zembla; there Momus found her extended in her den, upon the spoils of numberless volumes, half devoured. At her right hand sat Ignorance, her father and husband, blind with age; at her left, Pride, her mother, dressing her up in the scraps of paper herself had torn. There was Opinion, her sister, light of foot, hoodwinked, and headstrong, yet giddy and perpetually turning. About her played her children, Noise and Impudence, Dullness and Vanity, Positiveness, Pedantry, and Ill-manners.... 'Goddess,' said Momus, 'can you sit idly here while our devout worshippers, the Moderns, are this minute entering into a cruel battle, and perhaps now lying under the swords of their enemies? Who then hereafter will ever sacrifice or build altars to our divinities? Haste, therefore, to the British Isle, and, if possible, prevent their destruction; while I make factions among the gods, and gain them over to our party.' ...

The goddess and her train, having mounted the chariot, which was drawn by tame geese, flew over infinite regions, shedding her influence in due places, till at length she arrived at her beloved island of Britain; but in hovering over its metropolis, what blessings did she not let fall upon her seminaries of Gresham and Covent Garden! And now she reached the fatal plain of St. James's library, at what time the two armies were upon the point to engage; where, entering with all her caravan unseen, and landing upon a case of shelves, now desert, but once inhabited by a colony of virtuosos, she stayed awhile to observe the posture of both armies.--J. SWIFT. _The Battle of the Books._

OLD AUTHORS TO READ

Alonso of Aragon was wont to say, in commendation of Age, that Age appeared to be best in four things; Old wood best to burn, old wine to drink, old friends to trust, and old authors to read.--F. BACON, LORD VERULAM. _Apophthegmes._

CLASSICUS

Classicus is a man of learning, and well versed in all the best authors of antiquity. He has read them so much that he has entered into their spirit, and can very ingeniously imitate the manner of any of them. All their thoughts are his thoughts, and he can express himself in their language. He is so great a friend to this improvement of the mind that if he lights on a young scholar he never fails to advise him concerning his studies.

Classicus tells his young man he must not think that he has done enough when he has only learnt languages; but that he must be daily conversant with the best authors, read them again and again, catch their spirit by living with them, and that there is no other way of becoming like them, or of making himself a man of taste and judgement.

How wise might Classicus have been and how much good might he have done in the world, if he had but thought as justly of devotion as he does of learning!... The two testaments would not have had so much as a place amongst his books, but that they are both to be had in Greek.

Classicus thinks that he sufficiently shows his regard for the holy scriptures when he tells you that he has no other book of piety besides them.--W. LAW. _A serious Call to a devout and holy Life._

THE DEAD ALONE CANONIZED

That critic must indeed be bold Who pits new authors against old. Only the ancient coin is prized, The dead alone are canonized: What was even Shakespeare until then? A poet scarce compared with Ben: And Milton in the streets no taller Than sparkling easy-ambling Waller. Waller now walks with rhyming crowds, While Milton sits above the clouds, Above the stars, his fixed abode, And points to men their way to God.

W. S. LANDOR.

THE CLASSICS

Will nothing but from Greece or Rome Please me? is nothing good at home? Yes; better; but I look in vain For a Molière or La Fontaine. Swift in his humour was as strong, But there was gall upon his tongue. Bitters and acids may excite, Yet satisfy not appetite.

W. S. LANDOR.

THE MOONS OF LITERATURE

SIR, ... we must read what the world reads at the moment. It has been maintained that this superfoetation, this teeming of the press in modern times, is prejudicial to good literature, because it obliges us to read so much of what is of inferior value, in order to be in the fashion; so that better works are neglected for want of time, because a man will have more gratification of his vanity in conversation, from having read modern books than from having read the best books of antiquity. But it must be considered, that we have now more knowledge generally diffused; all our ladies read now, which is a great extension. Modern writers are the moons of literature; they shine with reflected light, with light borrowed from the ancients. Greece appears to me to be the fountain of knowledge; Rome of elegance.--S. JOHNSON. (Boswell's _Life_.)

THE READING OF NEW BOOKS

From Lien Chi Altangi to Fum Hoam, First President of the Ceremonial Academy at Pekin, in China

There are numbers in this city who live by writing new books; and yet there are thousands of volumes in every large library unread and forgotten. This, upon my arrival, was one of those contradictions which I was unable to account for. Is it possible, said I, that there should be any demand for new books before those already published are read? Can there be so many employed in producing a commodity with which the market is overstocked; and with goods also better than any of modern manufacture!

What at first view appeared an inconsistency is a proof at once of this people's wisdom and refinement. Even allowing the works of their ancestors better written than theirs, yet those of the moderns acquire a real value, by being marked with the impression of the times. Antiquity has been in the possession of others; the present is our own: let us first therefore learn to know what belongs to ourselves, and then, if we have leisure, cast our reflections back to the reign of Shonsu, who governed twenty thousand years before the creation of the moon.

The volumes of antiquity, like medals, may very well serve to amuse the curious; but the works of the moderns, like the current coin of a kingdom, are much better for immediate use; the former are often prized above their intrinsic value, and kept with care, the latter seldom pass for more than they are worth, and are often subject to the merciless hands of sweating critics and clipping compilers: the works of antiquity were ever praised, those of the moderns read; the treasures of our ancestors have our esteem, and we boast the passion; those of contemporary genius engage our heart, although we blush to own it. The visits we pay the former resemble those we pay the great; the ceremony is troublesome, and yet such as we would not choose to forgo; our acquaintance with modern books is like sitting with a friend; our pride is not flattered in the interview, but it gives more internal satisfaction....

In England, where there are as many new books published as in all the rest of Europe together, a spirit of freedom and reason reigns among the people; they have been often known to act like fools, they are generally found to think like men.--O. GOLDSMITH. _Letters from a Citizen of the World._

THE CLASSICS ALWAYS MODERN

In science read, by preference, the newest works; in literature, the oldest. The classic literature is always modern. New books revive and re-decorate old ideas; old books suggest and invigorate new ideas.--E. G. E. L. BULWER-LYTTON, LORD LYTTON. _Caxtoniana._

ON READING OLD BOOKS

I hate to read new books. There are twenty or thirty volumes that I have read over and over again, and these are the only ones that I have any desire ever to read at all. It was a long time before I could bring myself to sit down to the _Tales of My Landlord_, but now that author's works have made a considerable addition to my scanty library.... Women judge of books as they do of fashions or complexions, which are admired only 'in their newest gloss'. That is not my way. I am not one of those who trouble the circulating libraries much, or pester the booksellers for mail-coach copies of standard periodical publications. I cannot say that I am greatly addicted to black-letter, but I profess myself well versed in the marble bindings of Andrew Millar, in the middle of the last century; nor does my taste revolt at Thurloe's _State Papers_, in russia leather; or an ample impression of Sir William Temple's _Essays_, with a portrait after Sir Godfrey Kneller in front. I do not think altogether the worse of a book for having survived the author a generation or two. I have more confidence in the dead than the living.... When I take up a work that I have read before (the oftener the better), I know what I have to expect. The satisfaction is not lessened by being anticipated. When the entertainment is altogether new, I sit down to it as I should to a strange dish--turn and pick out a bit here and there, and am in doubt what to think of the composition. There is a want of confidence and security to second appetite. New-fangled books are also like made-dishes in this respect, that they are generally little else than hashes and _rifaccimentos_ of what has been served up entire and in a more natural state at other times. Besides, in thus turning to a well-known author, there is not only an assurance that my time will not be thrown away, or my palate nauseated with the most insipid or vilest trash, but I shake hands with, and look an old, tried, and valued friend in the face, compare notes, and chat the hours away. It is true, we form dear friendships with such ideal guests--dearer, alas! and more lasting, than those with our most intimate acquaintance. In reading a book which is an old favourite with me (say the first novel I ever read) I not only have the pleasure of imagination and of a critical relish of the work, but the pleasures of memory added to it. It recalls the same feelings and associations which I had in first reading it, and which I can never have again in any other way. Standard productions of this kind are links in the chain of our conscious being. They bind together the different scattered divisions of our personal identity. They are landmarks and guides in our journey through life. They are pegs and loops on which we can hang up, or from which we can take down, at pleasure, the wardrobe of a moral imagination, the relics of our best affections, the tokens and records of our happiest hours. They are 'for thoughts and for remembrance'! They are like Fortunatus's Wishing Cap--they give us the best riches--those of Fancy; and transport us, not over half the globe, but (which is better) over half our lives, at a word's notice!

My father Shandy solaced himself with Bruscambille. Give me for this purpose a volume of _Peregrine Pickle_ or _Tom Jones_. Open either of them anywhere--at the memoirs of Lady Vane, or the adventures at the masquerade with Lady Bellaston, or the disputes between Thwackum and Square, or the escape of Molly Seagrim, or the incident of Sophia and her muff, or the edifying prolixity of her aunt's lecture--and there I find the same delightful, busy, bustling scene as ever, and feel myself the same as when I was first introduced into the midst of it. Nay, sometimes the sight of an odd volume of these good old English authors on a stall, or the name lettered on the back among others on the shelves of a library, answers the purpose, revives the whole train of ideas, and sets 'the puppets dallying'. Twenty years are struck off the list, and I am a child again. A sage philosopher, who was not a very wise man, said, that he should like very well to be young again, if he could take his experience along with him. This ingenious person did not seem to be aware, by the gravity of his remark, that the great advantage of being young is to be without this weight of experience, which he would fain place upon the shoulders of youth, and which never comes too late with years. Oh! what a privilege to be able to let this hump, like Christian's burthen, drop from off one's back, and transport oneself, by the help of a little musty duodecimo, to the time when 'ignorance was bliss', and when we first got a peep at the raree-show of the world, through the glass of fiction--gazing at mankind, as we do at wild beasts in a menagerie, through the bars of their cages--or at curiosities in a museum, that we must not touch! For myself, not only are the old ideas of the contents of the work brought back to my mind in all their vividness, but the old associations of the faces and persons of those I then knew, as they were in their lifetime--the place where I sat to read the volume, the day when I got it, the feeling of the air, the fields, the sky--return, and all my early impressions with them. This is better to me--those places, those times, those persons, and those feelings that come across me as I retrace the story and devour the page, are to me better far than the wet sheets of the last new novel.--W. HAZLITT. _The Plain Speaker._

ON READING NEW BOOKS

I cannot understand the rage manifested by the greater part of the world for reading new books. If the public had read all those that have gone before, I can conceive how they should not wish to read the same work twice over; but when I consider the countless volumes that lie unopened, unregarded, unread, and unthought of, I cannot enter into the pathetic complaints that I hear made that Sir Walter writes no more--that the press is idle--that Lord Byron is dead. If I have not read a book before, it is, to all intents and purposes, new to me, whether it was printed yesterday or three hundred years ago. If it be urged that it has no modern, passing incidents, and is out of date and old-fashioned, then it is so much the newer; it is farther removed from other works that I have lately read, from the familiar routine of ordinary life, and makes so much more addition to my knowledge. But many people would as soon think of putting on old armour as of taking up a book not published within the last month, or year at the utmost. There is a fashion in reading as well as in dress, which lasts only for the season. One would imagine that books were, like women, the worse for being old; that they have a pleasure in being read for the first time; that they open their leaves more cordially; that the spirit of enjoyment wears out with the spirit of novelty; and that, after a certain age, it is high time to put them on the shelf. This conceit seems to be followed up in practice.... The knowledge which so many other persons have of its contents deadens our curiosity and interest altogether. We set aside the subject as one on which others have made up their minds for us (as if we really could have ideas in their heads), and are quite on the alert for the next new work, teeming hot from the press, which we shall be the first to read, criticize, and pass an opinion on. Oh, delightful! To cut open the leaves, to inhale the fragrance of the scarcely dry paper, to examine the type to see who is the printer (which is some clue to the value that is set upon the work), to launch out into regions of thought and invention never trod till now, and to explore characters that never met a human eye before--this is a luxury worth sacrificing a dinner-party, or a few hours of a spare morning to. Who, indeed, when the work is critical and full of expectation, would venture to dine out, or to face a coterie of blue-stockings in the evening, without having gone through this ordeal, or at least without hastily turning over a few of the first pages, while dressing, to be able to say that the beginning does not promise much, or to tell the name of the heroine?

A new work is something in our power: we mount the bench, and sit in judgement on it; we can damn or recommend it to others at pleasure, can decry or extol it to the skies, and can give an answer to those who have not yet read it, and expect an account of it; and thus show our shrewdness and the independence of our taste before the world have had time to form an opinion. If we cannot write ourselves, we become, by busying ourselves about it, a kind of _accessories after the fact_.--W. HAZLITT. _Sketches and Essays._

A PREFERENCE FOR GREAT MODELS

By the by, I observe a point in which your taste and mine differ from each other materially. It is about new publications. I read them unwillingly. You abstain from them with difficulty, and as a matter of duty and self-denial. Their novelty has very little attraction for me; and in literature I am fond of confining myself to the best company, which consists chiefly of my old acquaintance, with whom I am desirous of becoming more intimate; and I suspect that nine times out of ten it is more profitable, if not more agreeable, to read an old book over again, than to read a new one for the first time. If I hear of a new poem, for instance, I ask myself first, whether it is superior to Homer, Shakespeare, Ariosto, Virgil, or Racine; and, in the next place, whether I already have all these authors completely at my fingers' ends. And when both questions have been answered in the negative, I infer that it is better (and, to me, it is certainly pleasanter) to give such time as I have to bestow on the reading of poetry to Homer, Ariosto and Co., and so of other things.

Is it not better to try, at least, to elevate and adorn one's mind, by the constant study and contemplation of the great models, than merely to know of one's own knowledge that such a book an't worth reading?--J. W. WARD, EARL OF DUDLEY (Letter to the Bishop of Llandaff).

THE VALUE OF MODERN BOOKS

The great productions of Athenian and Roman genius are indeed still what they were. But though their positive value is unchanged, their relative value, when compared with the whole mass of mental wealth possessed by mankind, has been constantly falling. They were the intellectual all of our ancestors. They are but a part of our treasures. Over what tragedy could Lady Jane Grey have wept, over what comedy could she have smiled, if the ancient dramatists had not been in her library? A modern reader can make shift without _Oedipus_ and _Medea_, while he possesses _Othello_ and _Hamlet_. If he knows nothing of _Pyrgopolynices_ and _Thraso_, he is familiar with _Bobadil_, and _Bessus_, and _Pistol_, and _Parolles_. If he cannot enjoy the delicious irony of Plato, he may find some compensation in that of Pascal. If he is shut out from _Nephelococcygia_, he may take refuge in _Lilliput_.... We believe that the books which have been written in the languages of Western Europe, during the last two hundred and fifty years--translations from the ancient languages of course included,--are of greater value than all the books which at the beginning of that period were extant in the world.--LORD MACAULAY. _Lord Bacon._

A SORT OF THIRD ESTATE

Each age, it is found, must write its own books; or, rather, each generation for the next succeeding. The books of an older period will not fit this. Yet hence arises a grave mischief. The sacredness which attaches to the act of creation--the act of thought--is transferred to the record. The poet chanting, was felt to be a divine man: henceforth the chant is divine also. The writer was a just and wise spirit: henceforward it is settled, the book is perfect; as love of the hero corrupts into worship of his statue. Instantly, the book becomes noxious: the guide is a tyrant. The sluggish and perverted mind of the multitude, slow to open to the incursions of Reason, having once so opened, having once received this book, stands upon it, and makes an outcry if it is disparaged. Colleges are built on it. Books are written on it by thinkers, not by Man Thinking; by men of talent, that is, who start wrong, who set out from accepted dogmas, not from their own sight of principles. Meek young men grow up in libraries, believing it their duty to accept the views which Cicero, which Locke, which Bacon, have given, forgetful that Cicero, Locke, and Bacon were only young men in libraries when they wrote these books.

Hence, instead of Man Thinking, we have the book-worm. Hence, the book-learned class, who value books as such; not as related to nature and the human constitution, but as making a sort of Third Estate with the world and the soul. Hence, the restorers of readings, the emendators, the bibliomaniacs of all degrees.

Books are the best of things, well used; abused, among the worst.--R. W. EMERSON. _The American Scholar._

OLD AND NEW BOOKS

Old books, as you well know, are books of the world's youth, and new books are fruits of its age. How many of all these ancient folios round me are like so many old cupels? The gold has passed out of these long ago, but their pores are full of the dross with which it was mingled.--O. W. HOLMES. _The Professor at the Breakfast-Table._

SECURITY IN OLD BOOKS

What a sense of security in an old book which Time has criticized for us! What a precious feeling of seclusion in having a double wall of centuries between us and the heats and clamours of contemporary literature! How limpid seems the thought, how pure the old wine of scholarship that has been settling for so many generations in those silent crypts and Falernian _amphorae_ of the Past! No other writers speak to us with the authority of those whose ordinary speech was that of our translation of the Scriptures; to no modern is that frank unconsciousness possible which was natural to a period when reviews were not; and no later style breathes that country charm characteristic of days ere the metropolis drew all literary activity to itself, and the trampling feet of the multitude had banished the lark and the daisy from the fresh privacies of language. Truly, as compared with the present, these old voices seem to come from the morning fields and not the paved thoroughfares of thought....

There are volumes which have the old age of Plato, rich with gathering experience, meditation, and wisdom, which seem to have sucked colour and ripeness from the genial autumns of all the select intelligences that have steeped them in the sunshine of their love and appreciation;--these quaint freaks of russet tell of Montaigne; these stripes of crimson fire, of Shakespeare; this sober gold, of Sir Thomas Browne; this purpling bloom, of Lamb;--in such fruits we taste the legendary gardens of Alcinoüs and the orchards of Atlas; and there are volumes again which can claim only the inglorious senility of Old Parr or older Jenkins, which have outlived their half-dozen of kings to be the prize of showmen and treasuries of the born-to-be-forgotten trifles of a hundred years ago....

There is to us a sacredness in a volume, however dull; we live over again the author's lonely labours and tremulous hopes; we see him, on his first appearance after parturition, 'as well as could be expected,' a nervous sympathy yet surviving between the late-severed umbilical cord and the wondrous offspring, doubtfully entering the Mermaid, or the Devil Tavern, or the Coffee-house of Will or Button, blushing under the eye of Ben or Dryden or Addison, as if they must needs know him for the author of the _Modest Enquiry into the Present State of Dramatique Poetry_, or of the _Unities briefly considered by Philomusus_, of which they have never heard and never will so much as hear the names; we see the country-gentlemen (sole cause of its surviving to our day) who buy it as a book no gentleman's library can be complete without; we see the spendthrift heir, whose horses and hounds and Pharaonic troops of friends, drowned in a Red Sea of claret, bring it to the hammer, the tall octavo in tree-calf following the ancestral oaks of the park. Such a volume is sacred to us. But it must be the original foundling of the book-stall, the engraved blazon of some extinct baronetcy within its cover, its leaves enshrining memorial-flowers of some passion smothered while the Stuarts were not yet unkinged, suggestive of the trail of laced ruffles, burnt here and there with ashes from the pipe of some dozing poet, its binding worn and weather-stained, that has felt the inquisitive finger, perhaps, of Malone, or thrilled to the touch of Lamb, doubtful between desire and the odd sixpence. When it comes to a question of reprinting we are more choice. The new duodecimo is bald and bare, indeed, compared with its battered prototype that could draw us with a single hair of association.--J. R. LOWELL. _Library of Old Authors._

TO MY BOOK

It will be looked for, book, when some but see Thy title, Epigrams, and named of me, Thou shouldst be bold, licentious, full of gall, Wormwood and sulphur, sharp, and toothed withal, Become a petulant thing, hurl ink and wit As madmen stones; not caring whom they hit. Deceive their malice, who could wish it so; And by thy wiser temper let men know Thou art not covetous of least self-fame, Made from the hazard of another's shame: Much less with lewd, profane, and beastly phrase, To catch the world's loose laughter, or vain gaze. He that departs with his own honesty For vulgar praise, doth it too dearly buy.

BEN JONSON.

HIS PRAYER FOR ABSOLUTION

For those my unbaptizèd rhymes, Writ in my wild unhallowed times; For every sentence, clause, and word, That's not inlaid with thee, my Lord, Forgive me, God, and blot each line Out of my book that is not thine. But if, 'mongst all, thou findst here one Worthy thy benediction; That one of all the rest shall be The glory of my work and me.

R. HERRICK. _Noble Numbers._

BOOKS THAT DO HURT

In our forefathers' time, when papistry, as a standing pool, covered and overflowed all England, few books were read in our tongue, saving certain books of chivalry, as they said for pastime and pleasure; which, as some say, were made in monasteries by idle monks or wanton canons. As one for example, 'Morte Arthur', the whole pleasure of which book standeth in two special points, in open manslaughter and bold bawdry.... This is good stuff for wise men to laugh at, or honest men to take pleasure at: yet I know, when God's Bible was banished the court, and 'Morte Arthur' received into the prince's chamber.

What toys the daily reading of such a book may work in the will of a young gentleman, or a young maid, that liveth wealthily or idly, wise men can judge, and honest men do pity. And yet ten 'Morte Arthurs' do not the tenth part so much harm, as one of these books made in Italy and translated in England.... Suffer these books to be read, and they shall soon displace all books of godly learning.--R. ASCHAM. _The Schoolmaster._

BOOKS AND THIEVES

A good book steals the mind from vain pretences, From wicked cogitations and offences; It makes us know the world's deceiving pleasures, And set our hearts on never-ending treasures. So when thieves steal our cattle, coin, or ware, It makes us see how mutable they are: Puts us in mind that we should put our trust Where felon cannot steal or canker rust. Bad books through eyes and ears do break and enter, And take possession of the heart's frail centre, Infecting all the little kingdom man With all the poisonous mischief that they can, Till they have robbed and ransacked him of all Those things which men may justly goodness call; Rob him of virtue and of heavenly grace, And leave him beggared in a wretched state. So of our earthly goods, thieves steal the best, And richest jewels, and leave us the rest. Men know not thieves from true men by their looks, Nor by their outsides no man can know books. Both are to be suspected, all can tell, And wise men, ere they trust, will try them well: Some books not worth the reading for their fruits, Some thieves not worth the hanging, for their suits. And as with industry, and art, and skill One thief doth daily rob another still, So one book from another, in this age, Steals many a line, a sentence, or a page. And as the veriest thief may have some friend So the worst books some knave will still defend.

* * * * *

Still books and thieves in one conceit do join, For, if you mark them, they are all for coin.

J. TAYLOR. _An Arrant Thief._

MOUNTEBANK AUTHORS

They [the Stationers] have so pestered their printing-houses and shops with fruitless volumes that the ancient and renowned authors are almost buried among them as forgotten; and that they have so much work to prefer their termly pamphlets, which they provide to take up the people's money and time, that there is neither of them left to bestow on a profitable book: so they who desire knowledge are still kept ignorant; their ignorance increaseth their affection to vain toys; their affection makes the stationer to increase his provision of such stuff, and at last you shall see nothing to be sold amongst us but Curranto's _Bevis of Southampton_ or such trumpery. The Arts are already almost lost among the writings of mountebank authors. For if any one among us would study Physic, the Mathematics, Poetry, or any of the liberal sciences, they have in their warehouses so many volumes of quack-salving receipts; of false propositions; and of inartificial rhymings (of which last sort they have some of mine there, God forgive me!) that unless we be directed by some artist, we shall spend half our age before we can find those authors which are worth our readings. For what need the stationer be at the charge of printing the labours of him that is master of his art, and will require that respect which his pain deserveth, seeing he can hire for a matter of forty shillings some needy ignoramus to scribble upon the same subject, and by a large promising title, make it as vendible for an impression or two, as though it had the quintessence of all art?--G. WITHER. _The Scholler's Purgatory._

PRINTERS GAIN BY BAD BOOKS

_Learning hath gained most by those books by which the printers have lost._ Arius Montanus, in printing the Hebrew Bible, commonly called the Bible of the king of Spain, much wasted himself, and was accused in the court of Rome for his good deed, and being cited thither, _Pro tantorum laborum praemio vix veniam impetravit_. Likewise Christopher Plantin, by printing of his curious interlineary Bible in Antwerp, through the unseasonable exactions of the king's officers, sunk and almost ruined his estate. And our worthy English knight, who set forth the golden-mouthed father in a silver print, was a loser by it.

_Whereas foolish pamphlets prove most beneficial to the printers._ When a French printer complained that he was utterly undone by printing a solid serious book of Rabelais concerning physic, Rabelais, to make him recompense, made that his jesting scurrilous work, which repaired the printer's loss with advantage. Such books the world swarms too much with. When one had set out a witless pamphlet, writing _finis_ at the end thereof, another wittily wrote beneath it:

----_Nay there thou liest, my friend, In writing foolish books there is no end._

And surely such scurrilous scandalous papers do more than conceivable mischief. First, their lusciousness puts many palates out of taste, that they can never after relish any solid and wholesome writers; secondly, they cast dirt on the faces of many innocent persons, which dried on by continuance of time can never after be washed off; thirdly, the pamphlets of this age may pass for records with the next, because publicly uncontrolled, and what we laugh at, our children may believe: fourthly, grant the things true they jeer at, yet this music is unlawful in any Christian church, to play upon the sins and miseries of others, the fitter object of the elegies than the satires of all truly religious.--T. FULLER. _The Holy State and the Profane State._

THE EVIL THAT MEN DO

If writings are thus durable, and may pass from age to age throughout the whole course of time, how careful should an author be of committing anything to print that may corrupt posterity, or poison the minds of men with vice and error! Writers of great talents, who employ their parts in propagating immorality, and seasoning vicious sentiments with wit and humour, are to be looked upon as the pests of society and the enemies of mankind: they leave books behind them, as it is said of those who die in distempers which breed an ill will towards their own species, to scatter infection and destroy their posterity. They act the counterparts of a Confucius or a Socrates; and seem to have been sent into the world to deprave human nature, and sink it into the condition of brutality.--J. ADDISON. _Spectator_, 166.

He who has published an injurious book, sins, as it were, in his very grave; corrupts others while he is rotting himself.--R. SOUTH.

BOOKS BAD AND GOOD

A mind unnerved, or indisposed to bear The weight of subjects worthiest of her care, Whatever hopes a change of scene inspires, Must change her nature, or in vain retires. An idler is a watch that wants both hands, As useless if it goes as when it stands, Books therefore, not the scandal of the shelves, In which lewd sensualists print out themselves; Nor those in which the stage gives vice a blow, With what success let modern manners show; Nor his who, for the bane of thousands born, Built God a church, and laughed His word to scorn, Skilful alike to seem devout and just, And stab religion with a sly side-thrust; Nor those of learned philologists, who chase A panting syllable through time and space, Start it at home, and hunt it in the dark, To Gaul, to Greece, and into Noah's ark; But such as learning without false pretence, The friend of truth, the associate of sound sense, And such as, in the zeal of good design, Strong judgement labouring in the scripture mine, All such as manly and great souls produce, Worthy to live, and of eternal use: Behold in these what leisure hours demand, Amusement and true knowledge hand in hand. Luxury gives the mind a childish cast, And while she polishes, perverts the taste; Habits of close attention, thinking heads, Become more rare as dissipation spreads, Till authors hear at length, one gen'ral cry, Tickle and entertain us, or we die. The loud demand, from year to year the same, Beggars invention and makes fancy lame, Till farce itself, most mournfully jejune, Calls for the kind assistance of a tune; And novels (witness every month's review) Belie their name and offer nothing new. The mind, relaxing into needful sport, Should turn to writers of an abler sort, Whose wit well managed, and whose classic style, Give truth a lustre, and make wisdom smile. Friends (for I cannot stint, as some have done, Too rigid in my view, that name to one; Though one, I grant it, in the generous breast, Will stand advanced a step above the rest: Flowers by that name promiscuously we call, But one, the rose, the regent of them all)-- Friends, not adopted with a school-boy's haste, But chosen with a nice discerning taste, Well-born, well-disciplined, who, placed apart From vulgar minds, have honour much at heart, And, though the world may think the ingredients odd, The love of virtue, and the fear of God! Such friends prevent what else would soon succeed, A temper rustic as the life we lead, And keep the polish of the manners clean, As their's who bustle in the busiest scene; For solitude, however some may rave, Seeming a sanctuary, proves a grave, A sepulchre in which the living lie, Where all good qualities grow sick and die.

W. COWPER, _Retirement_.

ON CERTAIN BOOKS

Faith and fixed hope these pages may peruse, And still be faith and hope; but, O ye winds! Blow them far off from all unstable minds, And foolish grasping hands of youth! Ye dews Of heaven! be pleased to rot them where they fall, Lest loitering boys their fancies should abuse, And they get harm by chance, that cannot choose; So be they stained and sodden, each and all! And if, perforce, on dry and gusty days, Upon the breeze some truant leaf should rise, Brittle with many weathers, to the skies, Or flit and dodge about the public ways-- Man's choral shout, or organ's peal of praise Shall shake it into dust, like older lies.

C. TENNYSON TURNER.

'TO THE PURE ALL THINGS ARE PURE'

'To the pure all things are pure'; not only meats and drinks, but all kind of knowledge, whether of good or evil; the knowledge cannot defile, nor consequently the books, if the will and conscience be not defiled. For books are as meats and viands are, some of good, some of evil substance; and yet God, in that unapocryphal vision, said without exception, 'Rise, Peter, kill and eat'; leaving the choice to each man's discretion. Wholesome meats to a vitiated stomach differ little or nothing from unwholesome; and best books to a naughty mind are not unapplicable to occasions of evil. Bad meats will scarce breed good nourishment in the healthiest concoction; but herein the difference is of bad books, that they to a discreet and judicious reader serve in many respects to discover, to confute, to forewarn, and to illustrate.... If it be true that a wise man, like a good refiner, can gather gold out of the drossiest volume, and that a fool will be a fool with the best book, yea, or without book, there is no reason that we should deprive a wise man of any advantage to his wisdom, while we seek to restrain from a fool that which being restrained will be no hindrance to his folly.--J. MILTON. _Areopagitica._

LIBERTY AND BAD BOOKS

The men who died to buy us liberty knew that it was better to let in a thousand bad books than shut out one good one. We cannot, then, silence evil books, but we can turn away our eyes from them; we can take care that what we read, and what we let others read, should be good and wholesome.--C. KINGSLEY. _Village Sermons: On Books._

BAD BOOKS AND DEBAUCHED MINDS

Books will perhaps be found, in a less degree than is commonly imagined, the corrupters of the morals of mankind. They form an effective subsidiary to events and the contagion of vicious society: but, taken by themselves, they rarely produce vice and profligacy where virtue existed before. Everything depends upon the spirit in which they are read. He that would extract poison from them, must for the most part come to them with a mind already debauched. The power of books in generating virtue is probably much greater than in generating vice.--W. GODWIN. _The Inquirer: Of Choice in Reading._

VIRGINIBUS PUERISQUE

To read my book, the virgin shy May blush, while Brutus standeth by: But when he's gone, read through what's writ, And never stain a cheek for it.

R. HERRICK. _Hesperides._

A WHIMSICAL SURPRISE

I should not care to be caught in the serious avenues of some cathedral alone, and reading _Candide_.

I do not remember a more whimsical surprise than having been once detected--by a familiar damsel--reclined at my ease upon the grass, on Primrose Hill (her Cythera), reading--_Pamela_. There was nothing in the book to make a man seriously ashamed at the exposure; but as she seated herself down by me, and seemed determined to read in company, I could have wished it had been--any other book. We read on very sociably for a few pages; and, not finding the author much to her taste, she got up, and--went away. Gentle casuist, I leave it to thee to conjecture, whether the blush (for there was one between us) was the property of the nymph or the swain in this dilemma. From me you shall never get the secret.--C. LAMB. _Detached Thoughts on Books and Reading._

ROMANCES ARE PERNICIOUS

Make careful choice of the books which you read. Let the Holy Scriptures ever have the pre-eminence, and next them, the solid, lively, heavenly treatises which best expound and apply the Scriptures: and next those, the credible histories, especially of the Church, and tractates upon inferior sciences and arts: but take heed of the poison of the writings of false teachers, which would corrupt your understandings: and of vain romances, play-books, and false stories, which may bewitch your fantasies and corrupt your hearts.

To a very judicious able reader, who is fit to censure all he reads, there is no great danger in the reading of the Books of any seducers: it doth but show him how little and thin a cloak is used to cover a bad cause. But alas, young soldiers, not used to such wars, are startled at a very sophism, or at a terrible threatening of damnation to dissenters (which every censorious sect can use) or at every confident triumphant boast, or at everything that hath a fair pretence of truth or godliness.... Meddle not therefore with poison, till you better know how to use it, and may do it with less danger; as long as you have no need.

As for play-books, and romances, and idle tales, I have already showed, in my _Book of Self-denial_, how pernicious they are, especially to youth, and to frothy, empty, idle wits, that know not _what a man is_, nor what he hath to do in the world. They are powerful baits of the Devil, to keep more necessary things out of their minds, and better books out of their hands, and to poison the mind so much the more dangerously, as they are read with more delight and pleasure.--R. BAXTER. _Christian Directory._

WHETHER 'TIS LAWFUL TO READ ROMANCES

Though we think then that the reading these Books may be lawful, and have some Convenience too, as to forming the Minds of Persons of Quality; yet we think 'em not all convenient for the Vulgar, because they give 'em extravagant Ideas of Practice, and before they have Judgement to bias their Fancies, and generally make 'em think themselves some King or Queen or other:--One Fool must be Mazares, t'other Artamen; and so for the Women, no less than Queens or Empresses will serve 'em, the Inconveniences of which are afterwards oftentimes sooner observed than remedied. Add to this, the softening of the Mind by Love, which are the greatest subject of these sort of Books, and the fooling away so many Hours and Days and Years, which might be much better employed, and which must be repented of: And upon the whole, we think Young People would do better, either not to read 'em at all, or to use 'em more sparingly than they generally do, when once they set about 'em.--From the _Athenian Mercury_ (1691-7).

THE DANGER OF POETS AND ROMANCES

It is impossible for me, by any words that I can use, to express, to the extent of my thoughts, the danger of suffering young people to form their opinions from the writings of poets and romances. Nine times out of ten, the morality they teach is bad, and must have a bad tendency. Their wit is employed to _ridicule virtue_, as you will almost always find, if you examine the matter to the bottom. The world owes a very large part of its sufferings to tyrants; but what tyrant was there amongst the ancients, whom the poets did not place _amongst the gods_? Can you open an English poet without, in some part or other of his works, finding the grossest flatteries of royal and noble persons? How are young people not to think that the praises bestowed on these persons are just? Dryden, Parnell, Gay, Thomson, in short, what poet have we had, or have we, Pope only excepted, who was not, or is not, a pensioner, or a sinecure placeman, or the wretched dependant of some part of the Aristocracy? Of the extent of the power of writers in producing mischief to a nation, we have two most striking instances in the cases of Dr. Johnson and Burke.... It is, therefore, the duty of every father, when he puts a book into the hands of his son or daughter, to give the reader a true account of _who_ and _what_ the writer of the book was, or is.--W. COBBETT. _Advice to Young Men and (incidentally) to Young Women in the Middle and Higher Ranks of Life._

A DAUGHTER'S FAVOURITE NOVELS

I could make neither head nor tail of it; it was neither fish, flesh, nor good red herring: it was all about my Lord, and Sir Harry, and the Captain.... The people talk such wild gibberish as no folks in their sober senses ever did talk; and the things that happen to them are not like the things that ever happen to me or any of my acquaintance. They are at home one minute, and beyond the sea the next; beggars to-day, and lords to-morrow; waiting-maids in the morning, and duchesses at night.... One would think every man in these books had the bank of England in his escritoire.... In these books (except here and there one, whom they make worse than Satan himself), every man and woman's child of them, are all wise, and witty, and generous, and rich, and handsome, and genteel, and all to the last degree. Nobody is middling, or good in one thing and bad in another, like my live acquaintance; but it is all up to the skies, or down to the dirt. I had rather read _Tom Hickathrift_, or _Jack the Giant Killer_, a thousand times.--HANNAH MORE. _The Two Wealthy Farmers._

'ONLY A NOVEL'

'What are you reading, Miss----?' 'Oh! it's only a novel!' replies the young lady; while she lays down her book with affected indifference, or momentary shame. 'It is only _Cecilia_, or _Camilla_, or _Belinda_'; or, in short, only some work in which the greatest powers of the mind are displayed; in which the most thorough knowledge of human nature, the happiest delineation of its varieties, the liveliest effusions of wit or humour, are conveyed to the world in the best chosen language.--JANE AUSTEN. _Northanger Abbey._

NOVELS AS ENGINES OF CIVILIZATION

The listlessness and want of sympathy with which most of the works written expressly for circulation among the labouring classes are read by them, if read at all, arises mainly from this--that the story told, or the lively or friendly style assumed, is _manifestly_ and _palpably_ only a cloak for the instruction intended to be conveyed--a sort of gilding of what they cannot well help fancying must be a pill, when they see so much and such obvious pains taken to wrap it up.... You will find that in the higher and better class of works of fiction and imagination duly circulated, you possess all that you require to strike your grappling-iron into their souls, and chain them, willing followers, to the car of civilization.... The novel, in its best form, I regard as one of the most powerful engines of civilization ever invented.--SIR J. HERSCHEL. _Address to the Subscribers to the Windsor Public Library._

A NOVEL OF HIGH LIFE

Lord Harry has written a novel, A story of elegant life; No stuff about love in a hovel, No sketch of a commoner's wife: No trash, such as pathos and passion, Fine feelings, expression, and wit; But all about people of fashion, Come look at his caps--how they fit!

O Radcliffe! thou once wert the charmer Of girls who sat reading all night; Thy heroes were striplings in armour, Thy heroines damsels in white. But past are thy terrible touches, Our lips in derision we curl, Unless we are told how a Duchess Conversed with her cousin the Earl.

We now have each dialogue quite full Of titles--'I give you my word, My lady, you're looking delightful'; 'O dear, do you think so, my lord!' 'You've heard of the marquis's marriage, The bride with her jewels new set, Four horses, new travelling carriage, And _déjeuner à la fourchette_?'

_Haut Ton_ finds her privacy broken, We trace all her ins and her outs; The very small talk that is spoken By very great people at routs. At Tenby Miss Jinks asks the loan of The book from the innkeeper's wife, And reads till she dreams she is one of The leaders of elegant life.

T. H. BAYLY.

LADY CONSTANCE ... guanoed her mind by reading French novels.--B. DISRAELI, EARL OF BEACONSFIELD. _Tancred._

NOVELS ARE SWEETS

Novels are sweets. All people with healthy literary appetites love them--almost all women;--a vast number of clever, hard-headed men. Why, one of the most learned physicians in England said to me only yesterday, 'I have just read _So-and-So_ for the second time' (naming one of Jones's exquisite fictions). Judges, bishops, chancellors, mathematicians, are notorious novel-readers; as well as young boys and sweet girls, and their kind, tender mothers.--W. M. THACKERAY. _Roundabout Papers: On a Lazy Idle Boy._

EVERY MAN HIS DUE

As a good housewife out of divers fleeces weaves one piece of cloth, a bee gathers wax and honey out of many flowers, and makes a new bundle of all,

_Floriferis ut apes in saltibus omnia libant_,

I have laboriously collected this cento out of various authors, and that _sine injuria_: I have wronged no authors, but given every man his own; which Hierom so much commends in Nepotian; he stole not whole verses, pages, tracts, as some do nowadays, concealing their authors' names; but still said this was Cyprian's, that Lactantius, that Hilarius, so said Minutius Felix, so Victorinus, thus far Arnobius: I cite and quote mine authors (which, howsoever some illiterate scribblers account pedantical, as a cloak of ignorance, and opposite to their affected fine style, I must and will use) _sumpsi, non surripui_; and what Varro, lib. 6 de re rust., speaks of bees, _minime maleficae, nullius opus vellicantes faciunt deterius_, I can say of myself. Whom have I injured? The matter is theirs most part and yet mine: _apparet unde sumptum sit_ (which Seneca approves); _aliud tamen, quam unde sumptum sit, apparet_; which nature doth with the aliment of our bodies, incorporate, digest, assimilate, I do _concoquere quod hausi_, dispose of what I take: I make them pay tribute, to set out this my Macaronican: the method only is mine own. I must usurp that of _Wecker e Ter. nihil dictum quod non dictum prius: methodus sola artificem ostendit_: we can say nothing but what hath been said, the composition and method is ours only, and shows a scholar. Oribasius, Aëtius, Avicenna, have all out of Galen, but to their own method, _diverso stylo, non diversa fide_. Our poets steal from Homer; he spews, saith Aelian, they lick it up. Divines use Austin's words _verbatim_ still, and our story-dressers do as much; he that comes last is commonly best,

--donec quid grandius aetas Postera, sorsque ferat melior.

R. BURTON. _The Anatomy of Melancholy._

PLAGIARIE

He [King Charles I, in his _Eikon Basilike_] borrows David's Psalmes, as he charges the Assembly of Divines in his twentieth Discourse, _To have set forth old Catechisms and confessions of faith new drest_. Had he borrowed David's heart, it had been much the holier theft. For such kind of borrowing as this, if it be not bettered by the borrower, among good Authors is accounted Plagiarie. However, this was more tolerable than Pamela's prayer, stolen out of Sir Philip.--J. MILTON. _Eikonoklastes._

TRANSPLANTATION

I number not my borrowings, but I weigh them. And if I would have made their number to prevail, I would have had twice as many. They are all, or almost all, of so famous and ancient names, that methinks they sufficiently name themselves without me. If in reasons, comparisons, and arguments, I transplant any into my soil, or confound them with mine own, I purposely conceal the author, thereby to bridle the rashness of these hasty censures that are so headlong cast upon all manner of compositions, namely, young writings of men yet living.... I will have them to give Plutarch a bob upon mine own lips, and vex themselves in wronging Seneca in me.--MONTAIGNE.

BOOK-MAKERS AND PLAGIARISTS

Some that turn over all books, and are equally searching in all papers; that write out of what they presently find or meet, without choice; by which means it happens that what they have discredited and impugned in one work, they have before or after extolled the same in another. Such are all the Essayists, even their master Montaigne. These in all they write confess still what books they have read last, and therein their own folly so much that they bring it to the stake raw and undigested; not that the place did need it neither, but that they thought themselves furnished and would vent it.

Some again, who, after they have got authority, or, which is less, opinion, by their writings, to have read much, dare presently to feign whole books and authors, and lie safely. For what never was will not easily be found, not by the most curious.

And some, by a cunning protestation against all reading, and false venditation of their own naturals, think to divert the sagacity of their readers from themselves, and cool the scent of their fox-like thefts, when yet they are so rank as a man may find whole pages together usurped from one author.--BEN JONSON. _Timber._

A LEARNED PLAGIARY

The greatest man of the last age, Ben Jonson, was willing to give place to the classics in all things: he was not only a professed imitator of Horace, but a learned plagiary of all the others; you track him everywhere in their snow. If Horace, Lucan, Petronius Arbiter, Seneca, and Juvenal had their own from him, there are few serious thoughts which are new in him.... But he has done his robberies so openly, that one may see he fears not to be taxed by any law. He invades authors like a monarch; and what would be theft in other poets, is only victory in him.--J. DRYDEN. _Essay of Dramatic Poesy._

Steal! to be sure they will, and, egad! serve your best thoughts as gipsies do stolen children--disfigure them to make them pass for their own.--R. B. SHERIDAN. _The Critic._

HIDDEN TREASURE

Writers ... are apter to be beholding to books than to men, not only as the first are more in their possession, being more constant companions than dearest friends, but because they commonly make such use of treasure found in books as of other treasure belonging to the dead and hidden under ground; for they dispose of both with great secrecy, defacing the shape or images of the one as much as of the other, through fear of having the original of their stealth or abundance discovered. And the next cause why writers are more in libraries than in company is that books are easily opened, and learned men are usually shut up by a froward or envious humour of retention, or else unfold themselves so as we may read more of their weakness and vanity than wisdom, imitating the holiday-custom in great cities, where the shops of chandlery and slight wares are familiarly open, but those of solid and staple merchandise are proudly locked up.--SIR W. DAVENANT. _Gondibert._

LITERARY COOKERY

We have been reading a treatise on the morality of Shakespeare; it is a happy and easy way of filling a book, that the present race of authors have arrived at--that of criticizing the works of some eminent poet: with monstrous extracts and short remarks. It is a species of cookery I begin to grow tired of; they cut up their authors into chops, and by adding a little crumbled bread of their own, and tossing it up a little, they present it as a fresh dish; you are to dine upon the poet;--the critic supplies the garnish; yet has the credit, as well as profit, of the whole entertainment.--HANNAH MORE. _Memoirs._

THE MANUFACTORY OF BOOKS

To a veteran like myself, who have watched the books of forty seasons, there is nothing so old as a new book. An astonishing sameness and want of individuality pervades modern books. The ideas they contain do not seem to have passed through the mind of the writer. They have not even that originality--the only originality which John Mill in his modesty would claim for himself--'which every thoughtful mind gives to its own mode of conceiving and expressing truths which are common property'--(_Autobiography_). When you are in London step into the reading-room of the British Museum. There is the great manufactory out of which we turn the books of the season. It was so before there was any British Museum. It was so in Chaucer's time--

For out of the old fields, as men saith, Cometh all this new corn from year to year, And out of old books in good faith Cometh all this new science that men lere.

It continued to be so in Cervantes' day. 'There are,' says he in _Don Quixote_, 'men who will make you books and turn them loose in the world with as much dispatch as they would do a dish of fritters.'

It is not, then, any wonder that De Quincy should account it 'one of the misfortunes of life that one must read thousands of books only to discover that one need not have read them'.... And I cannot doubt that Bishop Butler had observed the same phenomenon when he wrote, in 1729: 'The great number of books of amusement which daily come in one's way, have in part occasioned this idle way of considering things. By this means time, even in solitude, is happily got rid of without the pain of attention; neither is any part of it more put to the account of idleness, one can scarce forbear saying is spent with less thought, than great part of that which is spent in reading.'--MARK PATTISON. _Fortnightly Review: Books and Critics._

HOW VOLUMES SWELL

The muse shall tell How science dwindles, and how volumes swell; How commentators each dark passage shun, And hold their farthing candles to the sun; How tortured texts to speak our sense are made, And every vice is to the scripture laid.

E. YOUNG. _Love of Fame._

RECIPE FOR AN ANTHOLOGY

Our modern wits are not to reckon upon the infinity of matter for a constant supply. What remains, therefore, but that our last recourse must be had to large indexes and little compendiums? Quotations must be plentifully gathered, and booked in alphabet; to this end, though authors need to be little consulted, yet critics, and commentators, and lexicons carefully must. But, above all, those judicious collectors of bright parts, and flowers, and _observandas_, are to be nicely dwelt on; by some called the sieves and coulters of learning, though it is left undetermined whether they dealt in pearls or meal, and consequently, whether we are more to value that which passed through, or what stayed behind. By these methods, in a few weeks, there starts up many a writer capable of managing the profoundest and most universal subjects. For what though his head be empty, provided his commonplace book be full? And if you will bate him but the circumstances of method, and style, and grammar, and invention; allow him but the common privileges of transcribing from others, and digressing from himself, as often as he shall see occasion; he will desire no more ingredients towards fitting up a treatise that shall make a very comely figure on a bookseller's shelf; there to be preserved neat and clean for a long eternity, adorned with the heraldry of its title fairly inscribed on a label; never to be thumbed or greased by students, nor bound to everlasting chains of darkness in a library.--J. SWIFT. _A Tale of a Tub._

His Invention is no more than the finding out of his papers, and his few gleanings there, and his disposition of them is just as the book-binder's, a setting or glueing of them together.--J. EARLE. _Microcosmographie._

Good God! how many dungboats full of fruitless works do they yearly foist on his Majesty's subjects; how many hundred reams of foolish, profane, and senseless ballads do they quarterly disperse abroad.--G. WITHER (1632).

TO LEIGH HUNT, ON AN OMISSION IN HIS 'FEAST OF THE POETS'

Leigh Hunt! thou stingy man, Leigh Hunt! May Charon swamp thee in his punt, For having, in thy list, forgotten So many poets scarce half rotten, Who did expect of thee at least A few cheese-parings from thy _Feast_. Hast thou no pity on the men Who suck (as babes their tongues) the pen, Until it leaves no traces where It lighted, and seems dipped in air? At last be generous, Hunt! and prithee Refresh (and gratis too) in Lethe Yonder sick Muse, surcharged with poppies And heavier presentation-copies. She _must_ grow livelier, and the river More potent in effect than ever.

W. S. LANDOR.

OUR MASTER, MELEAGER

Our master, Meleager, he who framed The first Anthology and daintiest, Mated each minstrel with a flower, and named For each the blossom that beseemed him best. 'Twas then as now; garlands were somewhat rare, Candidates many: one in doleful strain Lamented thus, 'This is a sad affair; How shall I face my publisher again? Lacking some emblem suitable for me, My book's undone; I shall not sell a copy.' 'Take courage, son,' quoth Phoebus, 'there must be Somewhere or other certainly a poppy.'

R. GARNETT.

'Tis pleasant, sure, to see one's name in print; A book's a book, although there's nothing in't.

LORD BYRON.

THAT INVENTION OF THE ENEMY--AN ABRIDGEMENT

All my life long I have delighted in voluminous works; in other words, I have delighted in that sort of detail which permits so intimate a familiarity with the subjects of which it treats.... Even in this world of Beauties, and of Extracts, I do not believe myself quite alone in my love of the elaborate and the minute; and yet I doubt if many people contemplate very long very big books with the sense of coming enjoyment which such a prospect gives me; and few shrink, as I do, with aversion and horror from that invention of the enemy--an Abridgement. I never shall forget the shock I experienced in seeing Bruce, that opprobrium of an unbelieving age, that great and graphic traveller, whose eight or nine goodly volumes took such possession of me, that I named a whole colony of Bantams after his Abyssinian princes and princesses, calling a little golden strutter of a cock after that arch-tyrant the Ras Michael; and a speckled hen, the beauty of the poultry-yard, Ozoro Ester, in honour of the Ras's favourite wife--I never felt greater disgust than at seeing this magnificent work cut down to a thick, dumpy volume, seven inches by five; except, perhaps, when I happened to light upon another pet book--Drinkwater's _Siege of Gibraltar_, where I had first learned to tremble at the grim realities of war, had watched day by day the firing of the red-hot balls, had groped my way through the galleries, and taken refuge in the casemates,--degraded from the fair proportions of a goodly quarto into the thin and meagre pamphlet of a lending library, losing a portion of its lifelike truth with every page that was cut away.--M. R. MITFORD. _Recollections of a Literary Life._

ORIGINAL EDITIONS

We love, we own, to read the great productions of the human mind as they were written. We have this feeling even about scientific treatises; though we know that the sciences are always in a state of progression, and that the alterations made by a modern editor in an old book on any branch of natural or political philosophy are likely to be improvements. Some errors have been detected by writers of this generation in the speculations of Adam Smith. A short cut has been made to much knowledge at which Sir Isaac Newton arrived through arduous and circuitous paths. Yet we still look with peculiar veneration on the _Wealth of Nations_ and on the _Principia_, and should regret to see either of those great works garbled even by the ablest hands. But in works which owe much of their interest to the character and situation of the writers the case is infinitely stronger. What man of taste and feeling can endure _rifacimenti_, harmonies, abridgements, expurgated editions? Who ever reads a stage-copy of a play when he can procure the original? Who ever cut open Mrs. Siddons's _Milton_? Who ever got through ten pages of Mr. Gilpin's translation of John Bunyan's _Pilgrim_ into modern English? Who would lose, in the confusion of a _Diatessaron_, the peculiar charm which belongs to the narrative of the disciple whom Jesus loved? The feeling of a reader who has become intimate with any great original work is that which Adam expressed towards his bride:

'Should God create another Eve, and I Another rib afford, yet loss of thee Would never from my heart.'

No substitute, however exquisitely formed, will fill the void left by the original. The second beauty may be equal or superior to the first; but still it is not she.--LORD MACAULAY. _Boswell's Life of Johnson._

DEDICATIONS

Above all the rest, the gross and palpable flattery whereunto many not unlearned have abased and abused their wits and pens, turning (as Du Bartas saith) Hecuba into Helena, and Faustina into Lucretia, hath most diminished the price and estimation of learning. Neither is the modern dedication of books and writings, as to patrons, to be commended: for that books (such as are worthy the name of books) ought to have no patrons but truth and reason.--F. BACON, LORD VERULAM. _Of the Advancement of Learning._

PRESENTATION COPIES

I want to read you some new passages from an interleaved copy of my book. You haven't read the printed part yet. I gave you a copy of it, but nobody reads a book that is given to him. Of course not. Nobody but a fool expects him to. He reads a little in it here and there, perhaps, and he cuts all the leaves if he cares enough about the writer, who will be sure to call on him some day, and if he is left alone in his library for five minutes will have hunted every corner of it until he has found the book he sent,--if it is to be found at all, which doesn't always happen, if there's a penal colony anywhere in a garret or closet for typographical offenders and vagrants.--O. W. HOLMES. _The Poet at the Breakfast-Table._

POETS AND THEIR BIBLIOGRAPHIES

Old poets fostered under friendlier skies, Old Virgil who would write ten lines, they say, At dawn, and lavish all the golden day To make them wealthier in his readers' eyes; And you, old popular Horace, you the wise Adviser of the nine-years-pondered lay, And you, that wear a wreath of sweeter bay, Catullus, whose dead songster never dies; If glancing downward on the kindly sphere That once had rolled you round and round the Sun, You see your Art still shrined in human shelves, You should be jubilant that you flourished here Before the Love of Letters, overdone, Had swampt the sacred poets with themselves.

ALFRED, LORD TENNYSON.

MEN IN THEIR NIGHTGOWNS

Writing of Lives is very profitable, both to the memory of the party, and to posterity. They do better lance into secret humours, and present men in their nightgowns, when they are truly themselves. A general may be more perfectly discovered on his pallet, than when he appears in the head of an army.--JOHN HALL. _Horae Vacivae._

BIOGRAPHY

Oh, that mine enemy had written a book!--and that it were my life; unless indeed it provoked my friend to write another.

It has always appeared to me a strong argument for the non-existence of spirits that these friendly microscopic biographers are not haunted by the ghosts of the unfortunate men whom they persist in holding up to public contempt.--SIR A. HELPS. _Thoughts in the Cloister._

BIOGRAPHY PREFERRED TO HISTORY

Read French authors. Read Rochefoucauld. The French writers are the finest in the world, for they clear our heads of all ridiculous ideas....

Read no history, nothing but biography, for that is life without theory.--B. DISRAELI, EARL OF BEACONSFIELD. _Contarini Fleming._

ON READING TRANSLATIONS

The respectable and sometimes excellent translations of Bohn's Library have done for literature what railroads have done for internal intercourse. I do not hesitate to read all the books I have named, and all good books, in translations. What is really best in any book is translatable,--any real insight or broad human sentiment. Nay, I observe that, in our Bible, and other books of lofty moral tone, it seems easy and inevitable to render the rhythm and music of the original into phrases of equal melody. The Italians have a fling at translators,--_i traditori traduttori_; but I thank them. I rarely read any Latin, Greek, German, Italian, sometimes not a French book in the original, which I can procure in a good version. I like to be beholden to the great metropolitan English speech, the sea which receives tributaries from every region under heaven. I should as soon think of swimming across the Charles River when I wish to go to Boston, as of reading all my books in originals, when I have them rendered for me in my mother-tongue.--R. W. EMERSON. _Books._

ON FIRST LOOKING INTO CHAPMAN'S HOMER

Much have I travelled in the realms of gold, And many goodly states and kingdoms seen; Round many western islands have I been Which bards in fealty to Apollo hold. Oft of one wide expanse had I been told That deep-browed Homer ruled as his demesne; Yet did I never breathe its pure serene Till I heard Chapman speak out loud and bold: Then felt I like some watcher of the skies When a new planet swims into his ken; Or like stout Cortez when with eagle eyes He stared at the Pacific--and all his men Looked at each other with a wild surmise-- Silent, upon a peak in Darien.

J. KEATS.

TRANSLATIONS FROM THE CLASSICS

Others again here livèd in my days That have of us deservèd no less praise For their translations than the daintiest wit That on Parnassus thinks he highest doth sit. And for a chair may 'mongst the Muses call As the most curious maker of them all: As reverent Chapman, who hath brought to us Musaeus, Homer, and Herodotus Out of the Greek, and by his skill hath reared Them to that height and to our tongue endeared That, were those poets at this day alive To see their books thus with us to survive, They would think, having neglected them so long, They had been written in the English tongue.

M. DRAYTON. _To Henry Reynolds._

It is good to have translations, because they serve as a comment, so far as the judgement of one man goes.--J. SELDEN.

TO MY WORTHY AND HONOURED FRIEND MASTER GEORGE CHAPMAN

Whose work could this be, Chapman, to refine Old Hesiod's ore, and give it thus! but thine, Who hadst before wrought in rich Homer's mine.

What treasure hast thou brought us! and what store Still, still, dost thou arrive with at our shore, To make thy honour and our wealth the more!

If all the vulgar tongues that speak this day Were asked of thy discoveries, they must say, To the Greek coast thine only knew the way.

Such passage hast thou found, such returns made, As now of all men, it is called thy trade, And who make thither else, rob or invade.

BEN JONSON.

WHEN TRANSLATIONS ARE TO BE PREFERRED

The reason the classics are not read is because there still lingers a tradition, handed down from the eighteenth century, that it is useless to read them unless in the original. A tone of sarcastic contempt is maintained towards the person who shall presume to peruse Xenophon not in the original Greek, or Virgil not in the original Latin.

In the view of these critics it is the Greek, it is the Latin, that is valuable, not the contents of the volume. Shakespeare, however, the greatest genius of England, thought otherwise. It is known that his ideas of Grecian and Roman history were derived from somewhat rude translations, yet it is acknowledged that the spirit of the ancient warriors and of the ancient luxury lives in his _Antony and Cleopatra_, and nowhere in all the ancient writers is there a poem breathing the idea of Aphrodite like his _Venus and Adonis_. The example of so great a genius may shield us in an effort to free the modern mind from this eighteenth-century incubus.

The truth is, the classics are much better understood in a good translation than in the original. To obtain a sufficient knowledge of Greek, for instance, to accurately translate is almost the work of a lifetime. Concentration upon this one pursuit gradually contracts the general perceptions, and it has often happened that an excellent scholar has been deficient in common knowledge, as shown by the singular character of his own notes. But his work of translation in itself is another matter.

It is a treasure; from it poets derive their illustrations; dramatists their plots; painters their pictures. A young mind full of intelligence, coming to such a translation, enters at once into the spirit of the ancient writer. A good translation is thus better than the original.--R. JEFFERIES. _The Dewy Morn._

'THAT SILLY VANITY OF IMPERTINENT CITATIONS'

'Twas this vain idolizing of authors which gave birth to that silly vanity of impertinent citations, and inducing authority in things neither requiring nor deserving it. That saying was much more observable, _That men have beards and women none_, because quoted from Beza; and that other, _Pax res bona est_, because brought in with a 'said St. Austin'. But these ridiculous fooleries, to your more generous discerners, signify nothing but the pedantry of the affected sciolist. 'Tis an inglorious acquist to have our heads or volumes laden as were Cardinal Campeius his mules, with old and useless baggage.--J. GLANVILL. _The Vanity of Dogmatizing._

QUOTATION

In quoting of books, quote such authors as are usually read; others you may read for your own satisfaction, but not name them.

Quoting of authors is most for matter of fact; and then I write them as I would produce a witness; sometimes for a free expression, and then I give the author his due, and gain myself praise by reading him.

To quote a modern Dutchman where I may use a classic author, is as if I were to justify my reputation, and I neglect all persons of note and quality that know me, and bring the testimonial of the scullion in the kitchen.--J. SELDEN. _Table Talk._

MERIT IN QUOTATION

Next to the originator of a good sentence is the first quoter of it.... We are as much informed of a writer's genius by what he selects as by what he originates. We read the quotation with his eyes, and find a new and fervent sense; as a passage from one of the poets, well recited, borrows new interest from the rendering. As the journals say, 'the italics are ours.' The profit of books is according to the sensibility of the reader. The profoundest thought or passion sleeps as in a mine, until an equal mind and heart finds and publishes it. The passages of Shakespeare that we most prize were never quoted until within this century; and Milton's prose, and Burke, even, have their best fame within it. Every one, too, remembers his friends by their favourite poetry or other reading.

Observe, also, that a writer appears to more advantage in the pages of another book than in his own. In his own, he waits as a candidate for your approbation; in another's he is a lawgiver.--R. W. EMERSON. _Quotation and Originality._

WHAT SHAKESPEARE HATH LEFT US

Soul of the age! The applause, delight, the wonder of our stage, My Shakespeare, rise! I will not lodge thee by Chaucer, or Spenser, or bid Beaumont lie A little further, to make thee a room: Thou art a monument without a tomb, And art alive still, while thy book doth live, And we have wits to read, and praise to give.

That I not mix thee so my brain excuses; I mean, with great but disproportioned Muses. For, if I thought my judgement were of years, I should commit thee, surely, with thy peers. And tell how far thou didst our Lyly outshine Or sporting Kyd, or Marlowe's mighty line.

And though thou hadst small Latin and less Greek, From thence, to honour thee, I will not seek For names; but call forth thundering Aeschylus, Euripides, and Sophocles to us, Paccuvius, Accius, him of Cordova dead, To life again, to hear thy buskin tread And shake a stage; or when thy sock was on, Leave thee alone, for the comparison Of all that insolent Greece or haughty Rome Sent forth; or since did from their ashes come.

Triumph, my Britain! Thou hast one to show To whom all scenes of Europe homage owe. He was not of an age, but for all time! And all the Muses still were in their prime, When, like Apollo, he came forth to warm Our ears, or, like a Mercury, to charm. Nature herself was proud of his designs, And joyed to wear the dressing of his lines, Which were so richly spun, and woven so fit As, since, she will vouchsafe no other wit. The merry Greek, tart Aristophanes, Neat Terence, witty Plautus, now not please; But antiquated and deserted lie, As they were not of Nature's family.

Yet must I not give Nature all! Thy art, My gentle Shakespeare, must enjoy a part. For though the Poet's matter Nature be His art doth give the fashion. And that he Who casts to write a living line, must sweat (Such as thine are), and strike the second heat Upon the Muses' anvil, turn the same (And himself with it), that he thinks to frame; Or for the laurel he may gain a scorn! For a good Poet's made as well as born; And such wert thou! Look how the father's face Lives in his issue; even so, the race Of Shakespeare's mind and manners brightly shines In his well-turnèd and true-filèd lines; In each of which he seems to shake a lance As brandished at the eyes of Ignorance. Sweet Swan of Avon! what a sight it were To see thee in our water yet appear, And make those flights upon the banks of Thames That so did take Eliza, and our James!

BEN JONSON.

ON THE PORTRAIT OF SHAKESPEARE

This figure that thou here seest put, It was for gentle Shakespeare cut, Wherein the graver had a strife With Nature, to outdo the life. Oh, could he but have drawn his wit As well in brass, as he has hit His face, the print would then surpass All that was ever writ in brass. But, since he cannot, reader, look Not on his picture, but his book.

BEN JONSON.

SHAKESPEARE'S LIVELONG MONUMENT

What needs my Shakespeare for his honoured bones, The labour of an age in pilèd stones, Or that his hallowed relics should be hid Under a star-ypointing pyramid? Dear son of Memory, great heir of Fame, What need'st thou such weak witness of thy name? Thou in our wonder and astonishment Hast built thyself a livelong monument. For whilst to the shame of slow-endeavouring art, Thy easy numbers flow, and that each heart Hath from the leaves of thy unvalued book, Those Delphic lines with deep impression took, Then thou our fancy of itself bereaving, Dost make us marble with too much conceiving; And so sepulchred in such pomp dost lie, That kings for such a tomb would wish to die.

J. MILTON.

UNDER MR. MILTON'S PICTURE BEFORE HIS 'PARADISE LOST'

Three Poets, in three distant ages born, Greece, Italy, and England did adorn. The first in loftiness of thought surpassed, The next in majesty, in both the last: The force of Nature could no farther go; To make a third she joined the former two.

J. DRYDEN.

UPON MY BROTHER'S BOOK CALLED 'THE GROUNDS, LABOUR AND REWARD OF FAITH'

This lamp filled up, and fired by that blest spirit, Spent his last oil in this pure heavenly flame; Laying the grounds, walls, roof of faith: this frame With life he ends; and now doth there inherit What here he built, crowned with his laurel merit: Whose palms and triumphs once he loudly rang, There now enjoys what here he sweetly sang.

This is his monument, on which he drew His spirit's image, that can never die; But breathes in these live words, and speaks to the eye; In these his winding-sheets he dead doth shew To buried souls the way to live anew, And in his grave more powerfully now preacheth. Who will not learn, when that a dead man teacheth?

P. FLETCHER.

UPON THE BOOK AND PICTURE OF THE SERAPHICAL SAINT TERESA

Live in these conquering leaves: live all the same; And walk through all tongues one triumphant flame; Live here, great heart; and love, and die, and kill; And bleed, and wound, and yield, and conquer still. Let this immortal life where'er it comes Walk in a crowd of loves and martyrdoms. Let mystic deaths wait on't; and wise souls be The love-slain witnesses of this life of thee. O sweet incendiary! show here thy art, Upon this carcass of a hard cold heart; Let all thy scatter'd shafts of light, that play Among the leaves of thy large books of day, Combined against this breast at once break in, And take away from me myself and sin; This gracious robbery shall thy bounty be And my best fortunes such fair spoils of me. O thou undaunted daughter of desires! By all thy dower of lights and fires; By all the eagle in thee, all the dove; By all thy lives and deaths of love; By thy large draughts of intellectual day, And by thy thirsts of love more large than they; By all thy brim-filled bowls of fierce desire, By thy last morning's draught of liquid fire; By the full kingdom of that final kiss That seized thy parting soul, and sealed thee His; By all the Heaven thou hast in Him (Fair sister of the seraphim!); By all of Him we have in thee; Leave nothing of myself in me. Let me so read thy life, that I Unto all life of mine may die!

R. CRASHAW.

THE SEAT OF AUTHORITY

You despise books; you, whose lives are absorbed in the vanities of ambition, the pursuit of pleasure, or in indolence; but remember that all the known world, excepting only savage nations, is governed by books. All Africa, to the limits of Ethiopia and Nigritia, obeys the book of the Koran, after bowing to the book of the Gospel. China is ruled by the moral book of Confucius, and a great part of India by the Vedah. Persia was governed for ages by the books of one of the Zoroasters.

In a law-suit or criminal process, your property, your honour, perhaps your life, depends on the interpretation of a book which you never read.... You are acquainted with neither Hippocrates nor Boerhaave nor Sydenham; but you place your body in the hands of those who can read them.--VOLTAIRE. _Philosophical Dictionary_: Books.

BOOKS PREFERRED TO PREACHERS

The writings of divines are nothing else but a preaching the Gospel to the eye, as the voice preacheth it to the ear. Vocal preaching hath the pre-eminence in moving the affections, and becometh diversified according to the state of the congregations which attend it: this way the milk cometh warmest from the breast. But books have the advantage in many other respects: you may read an able preacher when you have but a mean one to hear. Every congregation cannot hear the most judicious or powerful preachers: but every single person may read the books of the most powerful and judicious; preachers may be silenced or banished, when books may be at hand: books may be kept at a smaller charge than preachers: we may choose books which treat of that very subject which we desire to hear of; but we cannot choose what subject the preacher shall treat of. Books we may have at hand every day and hour: when we can have sermons but seldom, and at set times. If sermons be forgotten, they are gone. But a book we may read over and over till we remember it; and if we forget it, may again peruse it at our pleasure, or at our leisure. So that good books are a very great mercy to the world.--R. BAXTER. _Christian Directory._

BOOKS OF MORALITY

Books of morality are daily written, yet its influence is still little in the world; so the ground is annually ploughed, and yet multitudes are in want of bread. But, surely, neither the labours of the moralist nor of the husbandman are vain: let them for a while neglect their tasks and their usefulness will be known; the wickedness that is now frequent would become universal, the bread that is now scarce would wholly fail.--S. JOHNSON. _Adventurer_, 137.

THE SECRET INFLUENCE OF BOOKS

Books have always a secret influence on the understanding: we cannot at pleasure obliterate ideas; he that reads books of science, though without any fixed desire of improvement, will grow more knowing; he that entertains himself with moral or religious treatises will imperceptibly advance in goodness; the ideas which are often offered to the mind will at last find a lucky moment when it is disposed to receive them.--S. JOHNSON. _Adventurer_, 137.

DEAD COUNSELLORS ARE SAFEST

It was the maxim, I think, of Alphonsus of Aragon that _dead counsellors are safest_. The grave puts an end to flattery and artifice, and the information that we receive from books is pure from interest, fear, or ambition. Dead counsellors are likewise most instructive, because they are heard with patience and with reverence. We are not unwilling to believe that man wiser than ourselves from whose abilities we may receive advantage without any danger of rivalry or opposition, and who affords us the light of his experience without hurting our eyes by flashes of insolence.--S. JOHNSON. _Rambler_, 87.

THE REAL WORKING EFFECTIVE CHURCH

But to the Church itself, as I hinted already, all is changed, in its preaching, in its working, by the introduction of Books. The Church is the working recognized Union of our Priests or Prophets, of those who by wise teaching guide the souls of men. While there was no Writing, even while there was no Easy-writing, or _Printing_, the preaching of the voice was the natural sole method of performing this. But now with Books!--He that can write a true Book, to persuade England, is not he the Bishop and Archbishop, the Primate of England and of all England? I many a time say, the writers of Newspapers, Pamphlets, Poems, Books, these _are_ the real working effective Church of a modern country. Nay, not only our preaching, but even our worship, is not it too accomplished by means of Printed Books?... Fragments of a real 'Church Liturgy' and 'Body of Homilies', strangely disguised from the common eye, are to be found weltering in that huge froth-ocean of Printed Speech we loosely call Literature! Books are our Church too.

On all sides, are we not driven to the conclusion that, of the things which man can do or make here below, by far the most momentous, wonderful and worthy are the things we call Books! Those poor bits of rag-paper with black ink on them;--from the Daily Newspaper to the sacred Hebrew BOOK, what have they not done, what are they not doing!--For indeed, whatever be the outward form of the things (bits of paper, as we say, and black ink), is it not verily, at bottom, the highest act of man's faculty that produces a Book? It is the _Thought_ of man; the true thaumaturgic virtue; by which man works all things whatsoever. All that he does, and brings to pass, is the vesture of a Thought. This London City, with all its houses, palaces, steam-engines, cathedrals, and huge immeasurable traffic and tumult, what is it but a Thought, but millions of Thoughts made into One;--a huge immeasurable Spirit of a THOUGHT, embodied in brick, iron, smoke, dust, Palaces, Parliaments, Hackney Coaches, Katherine Docks, and the rest of it! Not a brick was made but some man had to _think_ of the making of that brick.--The thing we called 'bits of paper with traces of black ink', is the _purest_ embodiment a Thought of man can have. No wonder it is, in all ways, the activest and noblest.--T. CARLYLE. _Heroes and Hero-Worship._

BOOKS AS SIGN-POSTS

The modern scholars have their usual recourse to the Universities of their countries; some few, it may be, to those of their neighbours; and this in quest of books rather than men for their guides, though these are living and those in comparison but dead instructors, which, like a hand with an inscription, can point out the straight way upon the road, but can neither tell you the next turnings, resolve your doubts, or answer your questions, like a guide that has traced it over, and perhaps knows it as well as his chamber. And who are these dead guides we seek in our journey? They are at best but some few authors that remain among us of a great many that wrote in Greek and Latin from the age of Hippocrates to that of Marcus Antoninus, which reaches not much above six hundred years.--SIR W. TEMPLE. _Ancient and Modern Learning._

THE NEED OF A GUIDE TO BOOKS

The colleges, whilst they provide us with libraries, furnish no professor of books; and, I think, no chair is so much wanted. In a library we are surrounded by many hundreds of dear friends, but they are imprisoned by an enchanter in these paper and leathern boxes; and, though they know us, and have been waiting two, ten, or twenty centuries for us,--some of them,--and are eager to give us a sign, and unbosom themselves, it is the law of their limbo that they must not speak until spoken to; and as the enchanter has dressed them, like battalions of infantry, in coat and jacket of one cut, by the thousand and ten thousand, your chance of hitting on the right one is to be computed by the arithmetical rule of Permutation and Combination,--not a choice out of three caskets, but out of half a million caskets all alike. But it happens in our experience, that in this lottery there are at least fifty or a hundred blanks to a prize. It seems, then, as if some charitable soul, after losing a great deal of time among the false books, and alighting upon a few true ones which made him happy and wise, would do a right act in naming those which have been bridges or ships to carry him safely over dark morasses and barren oceans, into the heart of sacred cities, into palaces and temples. This would be best done by those great masters of books who from time to time appear,--the Fabricii, the Seldens, Magliabecchis, Scaligers, Mirandolas, Bayles, Johnsons, whose eyes sweep the whole horizon of learning. But private readers, reading purely for love of the book, would serve us by leaving each the shortest note of what he found.--R. W. EMERSON. _Books._

THE TRUE UNIVERSITY OF THESE DAYS

To look at Teaching, for instance. Universities are a notable, respectable product of the modern ages. Their existence too is modified, to the very basis of it, by the existence of Books. Universities arose while there were yet no Books procurable; while a man, for a single Book, had to give an estate of land. That, in those circumstances, when a man had some knowledge to communicate, he should do it by gathering the learners round him, face to face, was a necessity for him. If you wanted to know what Abelard knew, you must go and listen to Abelard. Thousands, as many as thirty thousand, went to hear Abelard and that metaphysical theology of his. And now for any other teacher who had also something of his own to teach, there was a great convenience opened: so many thousands eager to learn were already assembled yonder; of all places the best place for him was that. For any third teacher it was better still; and grew ever the better, the more teachers there came. It only needed now that the King took notice of this new phenomenon; combined or agglomerated the various schools into one school; gave it edifices, privileges, encouragements, and named it _Universitas_, or School of all Sciences: the University of Paris, in its essential characters, was there. The model of all subsequent Universities; which down even to these days, for six centuries now, have gone on to found themselves. Such, I conceive, was the origin of Universities. It is clear, however, that with this simple circumstance, facility of getting Books, the whole conditions of the business from top to bottom were changed. Once invent Printing, you metamorphosed all Universities, or superseded them! The Teacher needed not now to gather men personally round him, that he might _speak_ to them what he knew: print it in a Book, and all learners far and wide, for a trifle, had it each at his own fireside, much more effectually to learn it!--Doubtless there is still peculiar virtue in Speech; even writers of Books may still, in some circumstances, find it convenient to speak also,--witness our present meeting here! There is, one would say, and must ever remain while man has a tongue, a distinct province for Speech as well as for Writing and Printing. In regard to all things this must remain; to Universities among others. But the limits of the two have nowhere yet been pointed out, ascertained; much less put in practice: the University which would completely take-in that great new fact, of the existence of Printed Books, and stand on a clear footing for the Nineteenth Century as the Paris one did for the Thirteenth, has not yet come into existence. If we think of it, all that a University, or final highest School, can do for us, is still but what the first School began doing--teach us to _read_. We learn to _read_, in various languages, in various sciences; we learn the alphabet and letters of all manner of Books. But the place where we are to get knowledge, even theoretic knowledge, is the Books themselves! It depends on what we read, after all manner of Professors have done their best for us. The true University of these days is a Collection of Books.--T. CARLYLE. _Heroes and Hero-Worship._

OXFORD AND CAMBRIDGE: TWO EPIGRAMS

The King observing with judicious eyes The state of both his Universities, To one he sent a regiment: for why? That learned body wanted loyalty. To the other he sent books, as well discerning How much that loyal body wanted learning.

J. TRAPP.

THE ANSWER

The King to Oxford sent his troop of horse, For Tories own no argument but force; With equal care to Cambridge books he sent, For Whigs allow no force but argument.

SIR W. BROWNE.

Books will speak plain, when counsellors blanch.--F. BACON, LORD VERULAM. _Of Counsell._

AGAINST WRITERS THAT CARP AT OTHER MEN'S BOOKS

The readers and the hearers like my books, And yet some writers cannot them digest; But what care I? for when I make a feast, I would my guests should praise it, not the cooks.

SIR J. HARINGTON.

A CRITIC

is one that has spelt over a great many of books, and his observation is the orthography. He is the surgeon of old authors, and heals the wounds of dust and ignorance. He converses much in fragments and _Desunt multa_'s, and if he piece it up with two lines, he is more proud of that book than the author. He runs over all sciences to peruse their syntaxes, and thinks all learning comprised in writing Latin. He tastes styles, as some discreeter palaters do wine; and tells you which is genuine, which sophisticate and bastard. His own phrase is a miscellany of old words, deceased long before the Caesars, and entombed by Varro, and the modernest man he follows is Plautus. He writes _Omneis_ at length, and _quicquid_, and his gerund is most inconformable. He is a troublesome vexer of the dead, which after so long sparing must rise up to the judgement of his castigations. He is one that makes all books sell dearer, whilst he swells them into folios with his comments.--J. EARLE. _Microcosmographie_.

STYLE _v._ SENSE

Others for language all their care express, And value books, as women men, for dress: Their praise is still,--the style is excellent: The sense, they humbly take upon content. Words are like leaves; and where they most abound, Much fruit of sense beneath is rarely found.

A. POPE. _Essay on Criticism_.

WHERE FOOLS RUSH IN

The bookful blockhead, ignorantly read, With loads of learned lumber in his head, With his own tongue still edifies his ears, And always listening to himself appears. All books he reads, and all he reads assails, From Dryden's _Fables_ down to D'Urfey's _Tales_. With him, most authors steal their works, or buy; Garth did not write his own _Dispensary_. Name a new play, and he's the poet's friend, Nay, showed his faults--but when would poets mend? No place so sacred from such fops is barred, Nor is Paul's church more safe than Paul's churchyard. Nay, fly to altars; there they'll talk you dead: For fools rush in where angels fear to tread.

A. POPE. _Essay on Criticism._

LITERARY HYPOCRISY

There are some subjects of which almost all the world perceive the futility; yet all combine in imposing upon each other as worthy of praise. But chiefly this imposition obtains in literature, where men publicly contemn what they relish with rapture in private, and approve abroad what has given them disgust at home.--O. GOLDSMITH. _Letters from a Citizen of the World._

IN THE SEAT OF THE SCORNER

They who are in the habit of passing sentence upon books,--and what ignoramus in our days does not deem himself fully qualified for sitting in the seat of the scorner?--are apt to think that they have condemned a work irretrievably, when they have pronounced it to be unintelligible. Unintelligible to whom? To themselves, the self-constituted judges. So that their sentence presumes their competency to pronounce it: and this, to every one save themselves, may be exceedingly questionable.

It is true, the very purpose for which a writer publishes his thoughts, is, that his readers should share them with him. Hence the primary requisite of a style is its intelligibleness: that is to say, it must be capable of being understood. But intelligibleness is a relative quality, varying with the capacity of the reader. The easiest book in a language is inaccessible to those who have never set foot within the pale of that language. The simplest elementary treatise in any science is obscure and perplexing, until we become familiar with the terminology of that science. Thus every writer is entitled to demand a certain amount of knowledge in those for whom he writes, and a certain degree of dexterity in using the implements of thought....

When a man says he sees nothing in a book, he very often means that he does not see himself in it: which, if it is not a comedy or a satire, is likely enough.--A. W. and J. C. HARE. _Guesses at Truth._

THE FINAL VERDICT UPON BOOKS

They who make up the final verdict upon every book are not the partial and noisy readers of the hour when it appears; but a court as of angels, a public not to be bribed, not to be entreated, and not to be overawed, decides upon every man's title to fame. Only those books come down which deserve to last. Gilt edges, vellum, and morocco, and presentation copies to all the libraries, will not preserve a book in circulation beyond its intrinsic date. It must go with all Walpole's Noble and Royal Authors to its fate. Blackmore, Kotzebue, or Pollock may endure for a night, but Moses and Homer stand for ever. There are not in the world at any one time more than a dozen persons who read and understand Plato: never enough to pay for an edition of his works; yet to every generation these come duly down, for the sake of those few persons, as if God brought them in his hand. 'No book,' said Bentley, 'was ever written down by any but itself.' The permanence of all books is fixed by no effort friendly or hostile, but by their own specific gravity, or the intrinsic importance of their contents to the constant mind of man.--R. W. EMERSON. _Spiritual Laws._

Talent alone cannot make a writer. There must be a man behind the book.--R. W. EMERSON. _Goethe._

THE CRITICS' INFLUENCE ON THE PUBLIC

The opinion of the great body of the reading public is very materially influenced even by the unsupported assertions of those who assume a right to criticize. Nor is the public altogether to blame on this account. Most even of those who have really a great enjoyment in reading are in the same state, with respect to a book, in which a man who has never given particular attention to the art of painting is with respect to a picture. Every man who has the least sensibility or imagination derives a certain pleasure from pictures. Yet a man of the highest and finest intellect might, unless he had formed his taste by contemplating the best pictures, be easily persuaded by a knot of connoisseurs that the worst daub in Somerset House was a miracle of art.

Just such is the manner in which nine readers out of ten judge of a book. They are ashamed to dislike what men who speak as having authority declare to be good.--LORD MACAULAY. _Mr. Robert Montgomery's Poems._

TASTE IN LITERATURE AND ART

I know many persons who have the purest taste in literature, and yet false taste in art, and it is a phenomenon which puzzles me not a little; but I have never known any one with false taste in books, and true taste in pictures. It is also of the greatest importance to you, not only for art's sake, but for all kinds of sake, in these days of book deluge, to keep out of the salt swamps of literature, and live on a little rocky island of your own, with a spring and a lake in it, pure and good. I cannot, of course, suggest the choice of your library to you: every several mind needs different books; but there are some books which we all need, and assuredly, if you read Homer, Plato, Aeschylus, Herodotus, Dante, Shakespeare, and Spenser, as much as you ought, you will not require wide enlargement of shelves to right and left of them for purposes of perpetual study.--J. RUSKIN. _The Elements of Drawing._

'There is no book so bad,' said the bachelor, 'but something good may be found in it.'--CERVANTES.

THE FILIAL PIETY OF BOOKS

Nor is there any paternal fondness which seems to savour less of absolute instinct, and which may be so well reconciled to worldly wisdom, as this of authors for their books. These children may most truly be called the riches of their father, and many of them have with true filial piety fed their parent in his old age; so that not only the affection but the interest of the author may be highly injured by those slanderers whose poisonous breath brings his book to an untimely end.

Lastly, the slanderer of a book is, in truth, the slanderer of the author ... neither can any one give the names of sad stuff, horrid nonsense, &c., to a book, without calling the author a blockhead; which, though in a moral sense it is a preferable appellation to that of villain, is, perhaps, rather more injurious to his worldly interest.--H. FIELDING. _Tom Jones._

THE MOTE AND THE BEAM

To complain in print of the multitude of books seems to me a self-accusing vanity, whilst the querulous reprehenders add to the cause of complaint and transgress themselves in that which they seem to wish amended. 'Tis true, the births of the press are numerous, nor is there less variety in the humours and fancies of perusers, and while the number of the one exceeds not the diversity of the other some will not think that too much which others judge superfluous. The genius of one approves what another disregardeth. And were nothing to pass the press but what were suited to the universal gusto, farewell, typography!... I seek no applause from the disgrace of others, nor will I, huckster-like, discredit any man's ware to recommend mine own. I am not angry that there are so many books already (bating only the anomalies of impiety and irreligion), nor will I plead the necessity of publishing mine from feigned importunities.--J. GLANVILL. _The Vanity of Dogmatizing._

The foolishest book is a kind of leaky boat on the sea of wisdom; some of the wisdom will get in, anyhow.--O. W. HOLMES. _The Poet at the Breakfast-Table._

CENSORSHIP

Popish books teach and inform; what we know, we know much out of them. The fathers, church story, school-men, all may pass for popish books; and if you take away them, what learning will you leave? Besides, who must be judge? The customer or the waiter? If he disallows a book it must not be brought into the kingdom; then Lord have mercy upon all scholars! These puritan preachers, if they have anything good, they have it out of popish books, though they will not acknowledge it, for fear of displeasing the people. He is a poor divine that cannot sever the good from the bad.--J. SELDEN. _Table Talk_.

THE IMPRIMATUR

Learning hath of late years met with an obstruction in many places which suppresses it from flourishing or increasing, in spite of all its other helps, and that is the inquisition upon the press, which prohibits any book from coming forth without an imprimatur; an old relic of popery, only necessary for the concealing of such defects of government which of right ought to be discovered and amended.--C. BLOUNT. _A Just Vindication of Learning_, 1693.

A GREAT BOOK IS A GREAT EVIL

[Greek: Méga biblíon méga kakón]

A man who publishes his works in a volume has an infinite advantage over one who communicates his writings to the world in loose tracts and single pieces. We do not expect to meet with anything in a bulky volume till after some heavy preamble, and several words of course, to prepare the reader for what follows: nay, authors have established it as a kind of rule, that a man ought to be dull sometimes, as the most severe reader makes allowances for many rests and nodding-places in a voluminous writer. This gave occasion to the famous Greek proverb which I have chosen for my motto, _That a great book is a great evil_....

An essay writer must practise in the chemical method and give the virtue of a full draught in a few drops. Were all books reduced thus to their quintessence, many a bulky author would make his appearance in a penny-paper: there would be scarce such a thing in nature as a folio: the works of an age would be contained on a few shelves, not to mention millions of volumes that would be utterly annihilated....

When knowledge, instead of being bound up in books, and kept in libraries and retirements, is thus obtruded upon the public; when it is canvassed in every assembly, and exposed upon every table; I cannot forbear reflecting upon that passage in the Proverbs, 'Wisdom crieth without, she uttereth her voice in the streets.'--J. ADDISON. _Spectator_, 124.

A LITTLE BOOK THE MOST EXCELLENT

For books we shall generally find that the most excellent in any art or science have been still the smallest and most compendious; and this not without ground, for it is an argument that the author was a master of what he wrote, and had a clear notion and a full comprehension of the subject before him. For the reason of things lies in a little compass, if the mind could at any time be so happy as to light upon it. Most of the writings and discourses in the world are but illustration and rhetoric, which signifies as much as nothing to a mind eager in pursuit after the causes and philosophical truth of things.... The truth is, there could be no such thing as art or science, could not the mind of man gather the general natures of things out of the heap of numberless particulars, and then bind them up into such short aphorisms or propositions, that so they may be made portable to the memory, and thereby become ready and at hand for the judgement to apply and make use of as there shall be occasion.--R. SOUTH. _Sermon against long extempore prayers._

There are many books written by many men, from which two truths only are discoverable by the readers; namely, that the writers thereof wanted two things,--principle and preferment.--C. C. COLTON. _Lacon._

BOOKS WITH ONE IDEA IN THEM

An amusing catalogue might be made of books which contain but one good passage. They would be a sort of single-speech Hamiltons; if Balaam's palfrey might not be thought a more apt counterpart to them. Killigrew's play of the Parson's Wedding, which in length of massy dullness exceeds many books, is remarkable for one little spark of liveliness. The languishing fine lady of the piece exclaims most characteristically, upon coming in tired with walking: 'I am glad I am come home, for I'm e'en as weary with this walking. For God's sake, whereabouts does the pleasure of walking lie? I swear I have often sought it till I was weary, and yet I could ne'er find it.'--Charron on Wisdom, a cumbrous piece of formality, which Pope's eulogium lately betrayed me into the perusal of, has one splendid passage, page 138, (I think) English translation. It contrasts the open honours with which we invest the sword, as the means of putting man out of the world, with the concealing and retiring circumstances that accompany his introduction into it. It is a piece of gorgeous and happy eloquence.--What could Pope mean by that line,--'sage Montaigne, or more sage Charron?' Montaigne is an immense treasure-house of observation, anticipating all the discoveries of succeeding essayists. You cannot dip in him without being struck with the aphorism, that there is nothing new under the sun. All the writers on common life since him have done nothing but echo him. You cannot open him without detecting a _Spectator_ or starting a _Rambler_; besides that his own character pervades the whole, and binds it sweetly together. Charron is a mere piece of formality, scholastic dry bones, without sinew or living flesh.--C. LAMB. _Table Talk._

BOOKS OF ONE THOUGHT

Few books have more than one thought: the generality indeed have not quite so many. The more ingenious authors of the former seem to think that, if they once get their candle lighted, it will burn on for ever. Yet even a candle gives a sorry, melancholy light unless it has a brother beside it, to shine on it and keep it cheerful. For lights and thoughts are social and sportive: they delight in playing with and into each other. One can hardly conceive a duller state of existence than sitting at whist with three dummies: and yet many of our prime philosophers have seldom done anything else.--A. W. and J. C. HARE. _Guesses at Truth._

INDUCTIVE CRITICISM

A heedy reader shall often discover in other men's compositions perfections far differing from the author's meaning, and such as haply he never dreamed of, and illustrateth them with richer senses and more excellent constructions.--MONTAIGNE.

READING BETWEEN LINES

In hours of high mental activity we sometimes do the book too much honour, reading out of it better things than the author wrote,--reading, as we say, between the lines. You have had the like experience in conversation: the wit was in what you heard, not in what the speakers said. Our best thought came from others. We heard in their words a deeper sense than the speakers put into them, and could express ourselves in other people's phrases to finer purpose than they knew.--R. W. EMERSON. _Quotation and Originality._

PURPLE PATCHES

There are some fine passages, I am told, in that book.

Are there? Then beware of them. Fine passages are mostly _culs de sac_. For in books also does one see

Rich windows that exclude the light And passages that lead to nothing.

A. W. and J. C. HARE. _Guesses at Truth._

There's more ado to interpret interpretations than to interpret things, and more books upon books than upon any other subject. We do but inter-glose ourselves. All swarmeth with commentaries; of authors there is great penury.--MONTAIGNE.

THE ROYAL ROAD

ERASMUS. I am told there is a certain compendious art, that will help a man to accomplish himself with all the liberal sciences by a very little labour.

DESIDERIUS. What is that you talk of? Did you ever see the book?

ERASMUS. I did see it, and that was all, having nobody to instruct me in the use of it.

DESIDERIUS. What was the subject of the book?

ERASMUS. It treated of various forms of dragons, lions, leopards; and various circles, and words written in them, some in Greek, some in Latin, and some in Hebrew and other barbarous languages.

DESIDERIUS. Pray, in how many days' time did the title-page promise you the knowledge of the arts and sciences?

ERASMUS. In fourteen.

DESIDERIUS. In truth, a very noble promise. But did you ever know anybody that has become learned by that notable art?

ERASMUS. No.

DESIDERIUS. No, nor nobody ever did, or ever will, till we can see an alchemist grow rich.

ERASMUS. Why, is there no such art then? I wish with all my heart there was.

DESIDERIUS. Perhaps you do, because you would not be at the pains which are required to become learned.

ERASMUS. You are right.

DESIDERIUS. It seemed meet to the Divine Being that the common riches, gold, jewels, silver, palaces, and kingdoms should be bestowed on the slothful and undeserving; but the true riches, and such as are properly our own, must be gotten by labour.

ERASMUS. _Colloquies: The Notable Art._

READERS AND WRITERS

Many books require no thought from those who read them, and for a very simple reason;--they made no such demand on those who wrote them. Those works therefore are the most valuable, that set our thinking faculties in the fullest operation.--C. C. COLTON. _Lacon._

STUDIES

Studies serve for delight, for ornament, and for ability. Their chief use for delight, is in privateness and retiring; for ornament, is in discourse; and for ability, is in the judgement and disposition of business; for expert men can execute, and perhaps judge of particulars, one by one; but the general counsels, and the plots and marshalling of affairs come best from those that are learned. To spend too much time in studies, is sloth; to use them too much for ornament, is affectation; to make judgement wholly by their rules, is the humour of a scholar: they perfect nature, and are perfected by experience: for natural abilities are like natural plants, that need pruning by study; and studies themselves do give forth directions too much at large, except they be bounded in by experience. Crafty men contemn studies, simple men admire them, and wise men use them; for they teach not their own use; but that is a wisdom without them and above them, won by observation. Read not to contradict and confute, nor to believe and take for granted, nor to find talk and discourse, but to weigh and consider. Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested: that is, some books are to be read only in parts; others to be read, but not curiously; and some few to be read wholly, and with diligence and attention. Some books also may be read by deputy, and extracts made of them by others; but that would be only in the less important arguments, and the meaner sort of books; else distilled books are, like common distilled waters, flashy things. Reading maketh a full man; conference a ready man; and writing an exact man; and, therefore, if a man write little, he had need have a great memory; if he confer little, he had need have a present wit; and if he read little, he had need have much cunning, to seem to know that he doth not. Histories make men wise; poets, witty; the mathematics, subtile; natural philosophy, deep; moral, grave; logic and rhetoric, able to contend: _Abeunt studia in mores_; nay, there is no stand or impediment in the wit, but may be wrought out by fit studies: like as diseases of the body may have appropriate exercises; bowling is good for the stone and reins, shooting for the lungs and breast, gentle walking for the stomach, riding for the head and the like; so if a man's wit be wandering, let him study the mathematics; for in demonstrations, if his wit be called away never so little, he must begin again; if his wit be not apt to distinguish or find difference, let him study the schoolmen, for they are _Cymini sectores_. If he be not apt to beat over matters, and to call up one thing to prove and illustrate another, let him study the lawyers' cases: so every defect of the mind may have a special receipt.--F. BACON, LORD VERULAM. _Essays._

HOW TO SPEND OUR DAYS

After some while meditation, I walk up to my masters and companions, my books: and, sitting down amongst them, with the best contentment, I dare not reach forth my hand to salute any of them till I have first looked up to heaven, and craved favour of Him to whom all my studies are duly referred, without whom I can neither profit nor labour. After this, out of no over-great variety, I call forth those which may best fit my occasions; wherein I am not too scrupulous of age: sometimes I put myself to school, to one of those ancients, whom the Church hath honoured with the name of Fathers, whose volumes I confess not to open without a secret reverence of their holiness and gravity: sometimes to those latter doctors, which want nothing but age to make them classical: always to God's Book. That day is lost whereof some hours are not improved in those divine monuments: others I turn over out of choice; these out of duty.--JOSEPH HALL. (Letter to Lord Denny.)

THE CHOICE OF BOOKS

In study there must be an expulsive virtue to shun all that is erroneous; and there is no science but is full of such stuff, which by direction of tutor and choice of good books must be excerned. Do not confound yourself with multiplicity of authors; two is enough upon any science, provided they be plenary and orthodox; _Philosophy_ should be your substantial food, _Poetry_ your banqueting stuff; _Philosophy_ hath more of reality in it than any Knowledge, the _Philosopher_ can fathom the deep, measure mountains, reach the stars with a staff, and bless heaven with a girdle.

But among these Studies you must not forget the _unicum necessarium_; on Sundays and Holidays let _Divinity_ be the sole object of your speculation, in comparison whereof all other knowledge is but cobweb-learning.--J. HOWELL. _Familiar Letters._

CHEWING THE CUD

Reading furnishes the mind only with materials of knowledge; it is thinking makes what we read ours. We are of the ruminating kind, and it is not enough to cram ourselves with a great load of collections; unless we chew them over again they will not give us strength and nourishment.... The memory may be stored, but the judgement is little better, and the stock of knowledge not increased, by being able to repeat what others have said or produce the arguments we have found in them. Such a knowledge as this is but knowledge by hearsay, and the ostentation of it is at best but talking by rote, and very often upon weak and wrong principles. For all that is to be found in books is not built upon true foundations, nor always rightly deduced from the principles it is pretended to be built on.... The mind is backward in itself to be at the pains to trace every argument to its original, and to see upon what basis it stands, and how firmly; but yet it is this that gives so much the advantage to one man more than another in reading. The mind should, by severe rules, be tied down to this at first uneasy task; use and exercise will give it facility. So that those who are accustomed to it, readily, as it were with one cast of the eye, take a view of the argument, and presently, in most cases, see where it bottoms. Those who have got this faculty, one may say, have got the true key of books, and the clue to lead them through the mizmaze of variety of opinions and authors to truth and certainty. This young beginners should be entered in, and showed the use of, that they might profit by their reading.... This way of thinking on and profiting by what we read will be a clog and rub to any one only in the beginning; when custom and exercise has made it familiar, it will be dispatched in most occasions, without resting or interruption in the course of our reading.--J. LOCKE. _Conduct of the Understanding._

THE SUFFICIENCY OF HOMER

Read Homer once, and you can read no more; For all books else appear so mean, so poor, Verse will seem prose, but still persist to read, And Homer will be all the books you need.

J. SHEFFIELD, DUKE OF BUCKINGHAM. _Essay on Poetry._

HOMER AND VIRGIL

Be Homer's works your study and delight, Read them by day, and meditate by night; Thence form your judgement, thence your maxims bring, And trace the Muses upward to their spring. Still with itself compared, his text peruse; And let your comment be the Mantuan Muse. When first young Maro in his boundless mind A work to outlast immortal Rome designed, Perhaps he seemed above the critic's law, And but from Nature's fountains scorned to draw: But when to examine every part he came, Nature and Homer were, he found, the same. Convinced, amazed, he checks the bold design; And rules as strict his laboured work confine, As if the Stagirite o'erlooked each line. Learn hence for ancient rules a just esteem: To copy nature is to copy them.

A. POPE. _Essay on Criticism._

READ WITHOUT PREJUDICE

Read boldly, and unprejudiced peruse Each favourite modern, e'en each ancient Muse. With all the comic salt and tragic rage, The great stupendous genius of our stage, Boast of our island, pride of humankind, Had faults to which the boxes are not blind; His frailties are to every gossip known, Yet Milton's pedantries not shock the town. Ne'er be the dupe of names, however high, For some outlive good parts, some misapply. Each elegant _Spectator_ you admire, But must you therefore swear by Cato's fire? Masks for the court, and oft a clumsy jest Disgraced the Muse that wrought the _Alchemist_. 'But to the ancients'--Faith! I am not clear, For all the smooth round type of Elzevir, That every work which lasts in prose or song Two thousand years deserves to last so long: For--not to mention some eternal blades Known only now in academic shades, (Those sacred groves where raptured spirits stray, And in word-hunting waste the livelong day) Ancients whom none but curious critics scan,-- Do read Messala's praises if you can. Ah! who but feels the sweet contagious smart While soft Tibullus pours his tender heart? With him the Loves and Muses melt in tears, But not a word of some hexameters! 'You grow so squeamish and so devilish dry You'll call Lucretius vapid next.' Not I: Some find him tedious, others think him lame, But if he lags his subject is to blame. Rough weary roads through barren wilds he tried, Yet still he marches with true Roman pride; Sometimes a meteor, gorgeous, rapid, bright, He streams athwart the philosophic night. Find you in Horace no insipid odes?-- He dared to tell us Homer sometimes nods; And but for such a critic's hardy skill Homer might slumber unsuspected still.

J. ARMSTRONG. _Taste._

READING ACCORDING TO INCLINATION

He [Dr. Johnson] said, that for general improvement, a man should read whatever his immediate inclination prompts him to; though, to be sure, if a man has a science to learn, he must regularly and resolutely advance. He added, 'what we read with inclination makes a much stronger impression. If we read without inclination, half the mind is employed in fixing the attention; so there is but one half to be employed on what we read.' He told us, he read Fielding's _Amelia_ through without stopping. He said, 'If a man begins to read in the middle of a book, and feels an inclination to go on, let him not quit it, to go to the beginning. He may perhaps not feel again the inclination.'

Dr. Johnson advised me to-day, to have as many books about me as I could; that I might read upon any subject upon which I had a desire for instruction at the time. 'What you read _then_ (said he) you will remember; but if you have not a book immediately ready, and the subject moulds in your mind, it is a chance if you again have a desire to study it.' He added, 'If a man never has an eager desire for instruction, he should prescribe a task for himself. But it is better when a man reads from immediate inclination.'

Another admonition of his was, never to go out without some little book or other in the pocket. 'Much time,' added he, 'is lost by waiting, by travelling, &c., and this may be prevented, by making use of every possible opportunity for improvement.'--J. BOSWELL. _Life of Johnson._

READ FEW BOOKS WELL

Read few books well. We forget names and dates; and reproach our memory. They are of little consequence. We feel our limbs enlarge and strengthen; yet cannot tell the dinner or the dish that caused the alteration. Our minds improve though we cannot name the author and have forgotten the particulars.

Read all books through; and bad books most carefully, lest you should lose one good thought, being determined never to look into them again. A man may read a great deal too much.--J. HORNE TOOKE. _Recollections of S. Rogers._

BOOKS AS FRUITFUL TREES

Under a strong persuasion that little of real value is derived by persons in general from a wide and various reading; but still more deeply convinced as to the actual mischief of unconnected and promiscuous reading, and that it is sure, in a greater or less degree, to enervate even where it does not likewise inflate; I hope to satisfy many an ingenious mind, seriously interested in its own development and cultivation, how moderate a number of volumes, if only they be judiciously chosen, will suffice for the attainment of every wise and desirable purpose; that is, in addition to those which he studies for specific and professional purposes. It is saying less than the truth to affirm that an excellent book (and the remark holds almost equally good of a Raphael as of a Milton) is like a well-chosen and well-tended fruit-tree. Its fruits are not of one season only. With the due and natural intervals, we may recur to it year after year, and it will supply the same nourishment and the same gratification, if only we ourselves return to it with the same healthful appetite.--S. T. COLERIDGE. _Prospectus to a Course of Lectures._

READING SEVERAL BOOKS AT A TIME

The advice I would give to any one who is disposed really to read for the sake of knowledge is, that he should have two or three books in course of reading at the same time. He will read a great deal more in that time and with much greater profit. All travels are worth reading, as subsidiary to reading, and in fact essential parts of it: old or new, it matters not--something is to be learnt from all. And the custom of making brief notes of reference to everything of interest or importance would be exceedingly useful.--R. SOUTHEY (Letter to Henry Taylor).

WHEN AND WHERE TO READ

Much depends upon _when_ and _where_ you read a book. In the five or six impatient minutes, before the dinner is quite ready, who would think of taking up the _Fairy Queen_ for a stop-gap, or a volume of Bishop Andrewes' sermons?

Milton almost requires a solemn service of music to be played before you enter upon him. But he brings his music, to which, who listens, had need bring docile thoughts, and purged ears.

Winter evenings--the world shut out--with less of ceremony the gentle Shakespeare enters. At such a season, the _Tempest_, or his own _Winter's Tale_.--

These two poets you cannot avoid reading aloud--to yourself, or (as it chances) to some single person listening. More than one--and it degenerates into an audience.

Books of quick interest, that hurry on for incidents, are for the eye to glide over only. It will not do to read them out. I could never listen to even the better kind of modern novels without extreme irksomeness.

A newspaper, read out, is intolerable.--C. LAMB. _Detached Thoughts on Books and Reading._

SMALL AUTHORS DANGEROUS

It is dangerous to have any intercourse or dealing with small authors. They are as troublesome to handle, as easy to discompose, as difficult to pacify, and leave as unpleasant marks on you, as small children. Cultivate on the other hand the society and friendship of the higher; first that you may learn to reverence them, which of itself is both a pleasure and a virtue, and then that on proper occasions you may defend them against the malevolent, which is a duty. And this duty cannot be well and satisfactorily performed with an imperfect knowledge, or with an inadequate esteem.--W. S. LANDOR. _Imaginary Conversations: Barrow and Newton._

BOOKS THAT PROVOKE THOUGHT

It is wholesome and bracing for the mind, to have its faculties kept on the stretch. It is like the effect of a walk in Switzerland upon the body. Reading an Essay of Bacon's, for instance, or a chapter of Aristotle or of Butler, if it be well and thoughtfully read, is much like climbing up a hill, and may do one the same sort of good.... For my own part, I have ever gained the most profit and the most pleasure also, from the books which have made me think the most: and, when the difficulties have once been overcome, these are the books which have struck the deepest root, not only in my memory and understanding, but likewise in my affections. For this point too should be taken into account. We are wont to think slightly of that, which it costs us a slight effort to win. When a maiden is too forward, her admirer deems it time to draw back. Whereas whatever has associated itself with the arousal and activity of our better nature, with the important and memorable epochs in our lives, whether moral or intellectual, is,--to cull a sprig from the beautiful passage in which Wordsworth describes the growth of Michael's love for his native hills--

Our living being, even more Than our own blood,--and could it less?--retains Strong hold on our affections, is to us A pleasurable feeling of blind love, The pleasure which there is in life itself.

If you would fertilize the mind, the plough must be driven over and through it. The gliding of wheels is easier and rapider, but only makes it harder and more barren. Above all, in the present age of light reading, that is, of reading hastily, thoughtlessly, indiscriminately, unfruitfully, when most books are forgotten as soon as they are finished, and very many sooner, it is well if something heavier is cast now and then into the midst of the literary public. This may scare and repel the weak: it will rouse and attract the stronger, and increase their strength by making them exert it. In the sweat of the brow is the mind as well as the body to eat its bread.--A. W. and J. C. HARE. _Guesses at Truth._

RULES FOR READING

The best rule of reading will be a method from nature, and not a mechanical one of hours and pages. It holds each student to a pursuit of his native aim, instead of a desultory miscellany. Let him read what is proper to him, and not waste his memory on a crowd of mediocrities. As whole nations have derived their culture from a single book,--as the Bible has been the literature as well as the religion of large portions of Europe,--as Hafiz was the eminent genius of the Persians, Confucius of the Chinese, Cervantes of the Spaniards; so, perhaps, the human mind would be a gainer, if all the secondary writers were lost--say, in England, all but Shakespeare, Milton, and Bacon--through the profounder study so drawn to those wonderful minds. With this pilot of his own genius, let the student read one, or let him read many, he will read advantageously....

The three practical rules, then, which I have to offer, are,--1. Never read any book that is not a year old. 2. Never read any but famed books. 3. Never read any but what you like; or, in Shakespeare's phrase,

No profit goes where is no pleasure ta'en: In brief, sir, study what you most affect.

Montaigne says, 'Books are a languid pleasure;' but I find certain books vital and spermatic, not leaving the reader what he was: he shuts the book a richer man. I would never willingly read any others than such.--R. W. EMERSON. _Books._

A DIET OF BOOKS

I would not be hurried by any love of system, by any exaggeration of instincts, to underrate the Book. We all know, that, as the human body can be nourished on any food, though it were boiled grass and the broth of shoes, so the human mind can be fed by any knowledge. And great and heroic men have existed, who had almost no other information than by the printed page. I only would say, that it needs a strong head to bear that diet. One must be an inventor to read well. As the proverb says, 'He that would bring home the wealth of the Indies must carry out the wealth of the Indies.' There is, then, creative reading as well as creative writing. When the mind is braced by labour and invention, the page of whatever book we read becomes luminous with manifold allusion. Every sentence is doubly significant, and the sense of our author is as broad as the world. We then see, what is always true, that, as the seer's hour of vision is short and rare among heavy days and months, so is its record, perchance, the least part of his volume. The discerning will read, in his Plato or Shakespeare, only that least part,--only the authentic utterances of the oracle; all the rest he rejects, were it never so many times Plato's and Shakespeare's.--R. W. EMERSON. _The American Scholar._

A COURSE OF READING

Let us turn our attention to the intellectual advantages accompanying the pursuit, since the proper function of books is in the general case associated with intellectual culture and occupation. It would seem that, according to a received prejudice or opinion, there is one exception to this general connexion, in the case of the possessors of libraries, who are under a vehement suspicion of not reading their books. Well, perhaps it is true in the sense in which those who utter the taunt understand the reading of a book. That one should possess no books beyond his power of perusal--that he should buy no faster than as he can read straight through what he has already bought--is a supposition alike preposterous and unreasonable. 'Surely you have far more books than you can read,' is sometimes the inane remark of the barbarian who gets his books, volume by volume, from some circulating library or reading club, and reads them all through, one after the other, with a dreary dutifulness, that he may be sure that he has got the value of his money.

It is true that there are some books--as Homer, Virgil, Horace, Milton, Shakespeare, and Scott--which every man should read who has the opportunity--should read, mark, learn, and inwardly digest.... But is one next to read through the sixty and odd folio volumes of the Bollandist _Lives of the Saints_, and the new edition of the Byzantine historians, and the State Trials, and the _Encyclopaedia Britannica_, and Moreri, and the Statutes at large, and the _Gentleman's Magazine_ from the beginning, each separately, and in succession? Such a course of reading would certainly do a good deal towards weakening the mind, if it did not create absolute insanity.

But in all these just named, even in the Statutes at large, and in thousands upon thousands of other books, there is precious honey to be gathered by the literary busy bee, who passes on from flower to flower. In fact, 'a course of reading,' as it is sometimes called, is a course of regimen for dwarfing the mind, like the drugs which dog-breeders give to King Charles spaniels to keep them small. Within the span of life allotted to man there is but a certain number of books that it is practicable to read through, and it is not possible to make a selection that will not, in a manner, wall in the mind from a free expansion over the republic of letters. The being chained, as it were, to one intellect in the perusal straight on of any large book, is a sort of mental slavery superinducing imbecility. Even Gibbon's _Decline and Fall_, luminous and comprehensive as its philosophy is, and rapid and brilliant the narrative, will become deleterious mental food if consumed straight through without variety. It will be well to relieve it occasionally with a little Boston's _Fourfold State_, or Hervey's _Meditations_, or Sturm's _Reflections for Every Day in the Year_, or _Don Juan_, or Ward's _History of Stoke-Upon-Trent_.--J. H. BURTON. _The Book-Hunter._

OF READING

Read not Milton, for he is dry; nor Shakespeare, for he wrote of common life: Nor Scott, for his romances, though fascinating, are yet intelligible: Nor Thackeray, for he is a Hogarth, a photographer who flattereth not: Nor Kingsley, for he shall teach thee that thou shouldest not dream, but do. Read incessantly thy Burke; that Burke who, nobler than he of old, Treateth of the Peer and Peeress, the truly Sublime and Beautiful: Likewise study the 'creations' of 'the Prince of modern Romance'; Sigh over Leonard the Martyr, and smile on Pelham the puppy: Learn how 'love is the dram-drinking of existence'; And how we 'invoke, in the Gadara of our still closets, The beautiful ghost of the Ideal, with the simple wand of the pen.' Listen how Maltravers and the orphan 'forgot all but love', And how Devereux's family chaplain 'made and unmade kings': How Eugene Aram, though a thief, a liar, a murderer, Yet, being intellectual, was amongst the noblest of mankind. So shalt thou live in a world peopled with heroes and master-spirits; And if thou canst not realize the Ideal, thou shalt at least idealize the Real.

C. S. CALVERLEY. _Proverbial Philosophy._

POETS AS COMMENTATORS

I hold that no man can have any just conception of the history of England who has not often read, and meditated, and learnt to love the great poets of England. The greatest of them, such as Chaucer, Shakespeare, Massinger, George Herbert, Milton, Cowley, Dryden, Pope, and Burns, often throw more rich and brilliant colours, and sometimes even more clear and steady lights, on the times and doings of our forefathers, than are to be gathered out of all the chroniclers together, from the Venerable Bede to the philosophical Hume. They are at least the greatest and best commentators on those chroniclers.--SIR JAMES STEPHEN. _Desultory and Systematic Reading._

THE METHOD OF READING PROFANE HISTORY

In perusal of history, first, provide you some writers in chronology and cosmography. For if you be ignorant of the times and places when and where the things you read were done, it cannot choose but breed confusion in your reading, and make you many times grossly to slip and mistake in your discourse. When, therefore, you set to your book, have by you Helvicus, his _Chronology_, and a map of the country in which you are conversant; and repair unto them to acquaint you with time and place, when and where you are. If you be versing the ancient histories, then provide you Ptolemy's maps, or Ortelius, his _Conatus Geographici_: if the latter, then some of the modern cards....

Before you come to read the acts of any people, as those that intend to go to bowls will first see and view the ground upon which they are to play, so it shall not be amiss for you first to take a general view of that ground, which you mean more particularly to traverse, by reading some short epitome.... This will give you a general taste of your business, and add light unto particular authors....

From the order of reading and the matters in reading to be observed, we come to the method of observation. What order we are for our best use to keep in entering our notes into our paper-books.

The custom which hath most prevailed hitherto was commonplacing, a thing at the first original very plain and simple; but by after-times much increased, some augmenting the number of the heads, others inventing quainter forms of disposing them: till at length commonplace books became like unto the Roman Breviary or Missal. It was a great part of clerkship to know how to use them. The vastness of the volumes, the multitude of heads, the intricacy of disposition, the pains of committing the heads to memory, and last, of the labour of so often turning the books to enter the observations in their due places, are things so expensive of time and industry, that although at length the work comes to perfection, yet it is but like the silver mines in Wales, the profit will hardly quit the pains. I have often doubted with myself whether or no there were any necessity of being so exactly methodical. First, because there hath not yet been found a method of that latitude, but little reading would furnish you with some things, which would fall without the compass of it. Secondly, because men of confused, dark and cloudy understandings, no beam or light of order and method can ever rectify; whereas men of clear understanding, though but in a mediocrity, if they read good books carefully, and note diligently, it is impossible but they should find incredible profit, though their notes lie never so confusedly. The strength of our natural memory, especially if we help it, by revising our own notes; the nature of things themselves, many times ordering themselves, and _tantum non_, telling us how to range them; a mediocrity of care to see that matters lie not too chaos-like, will with very small damage save us this great labour of being over-superstitiously methodical. And what though peradventure something be lost, _Exilis domus est_, &c. It is a sign of great poverty of scholarship, where everything that is lost is missed; whereas rich and well-accomplished learning is able to lose many things with little or no inconvenience.--J. HALES. _Golden Remains._

EPITOMES

Epitome is good privately for himself that doth work it, but ill commonly for all other that use other men's labour therein: a silly poor kind of study, not unlike to the doing of those poor folk, which neither till nor sow nor reap themselves, but glean by stealth upon other men's grounds. Such have empty barns for dear years.... Epitome hurteth most of all in divinity itself. Indeed books of commonplaces be very necessary to induce a man into an orderly general knowledge, how to refer orderly all that he readeth, _ad certa rerum capita_, and not wander in study.... But to dwell in epitomes, and books of commonplaces, and not to bind himself daily by orderly study, to read with all diligence, principally the holiest Scripture, and withal the best doctors, and so to learn to make true difference betwixt the authority of the one and the counsel of the other, maketh so many seeming and sunburnt ministers as we have; whose learning is gotten in a summer heat, and washed away with a Christmas snow again.--R. ASCHAM. _The Schoolmaster._

ABSTRACTS OF BOOKS

My abstracts of each book were made in the French language: my observations often branched into particular essays; and I can still read, without contempt, a dissertation of eight folio pages on eight lines (287-94) of the fourth _Georgic_ of Virgil....

This various reading, which I now conducted with discretion, was digested, according to the precept and model of Mr. Locke, into a large commonplace book; a practice, however, which I do not strenuously recommend. The action of the pen will doubtless imprint an idea on the mind as well as on the paper: but I much question whether the benefits of this laborious method are adequate to the waste of time; and I must agree with Dr. Johnson (_Idler_, No. 74), 'that what is twice read is commonly better remembered than what is transcribed'....

I will embrace this occasion of recommending to the young student a practice which about this time [1759] I myself adopted. After glancing my eye over the design and order of a new book, I suspended the perusal till I had finished the task of self-examination, till I had revolved, in a solitary walk, all that I knew, or believed, or had thought on the subject of the whole work, or of some particular chapter: I was then qualified to discern how much the author added to my original stock; and if I was sometimes satisfied by the agreement, I was sometimes armed by the opposition of our ideas.--E. GIBBON. _Autobiography._

BESCRIBBLING WITH NOTES

Somewhat to aid the weakness of my memory and to assist her great defects; for it hath often been my chance to light upon books which I supposed to be new and never to have read, which I had, not understanding, diligently read and run over many years before, and all bescribbled with my notes: I have a while since accustomed myself to note at the end of my book (I mean such as I purpose to read but once) the time I made an end to read it, and to set down what censure or judgement I gave of it; that so it may at least at another time represent unto my mind the air and general idea I had conceived of the author in reading him.--MONTAIGNE.

BOOKS TO BE MARKED

If the books which you read are your own, mark with a pen or pencil the most considerable things in them which you desire to remember. Then you may read that book the second time over with half the trouble, by your eye running over the paragraphs which your pencil has noted. It is but a very weak objection against this practice to say, 'I shall spoil my book;' for I persuade myself that you did not buy it as a bookseller, to sell it again for gain, but as a scholar, to improve your mind by it; and if the mind be improved, your advantage is abundant, though your book yields less money to your executors.--I. WATTS. _Logic._

UNDERSCORING

'On a subsequent evening, when I called by invitation to consult some other volumes, the conversation turned on the practice of underscoring books of study. Sir William spoke highly of the practice, as attended with many advantages, especially in the saving of time and labour. Intelligent underlining gave a kind of abstract of an important work, and by the use of different coloured inks to mark a difference of contents, and discriminate the doctrinal from the historical or illustrative elements of an argument or exposition, the abstract became an analysis very serviceable for ready reference. He mentioned that this principle had been carried to a ludicrous extreme in the publication of a coloured New Testament by an Anglicized German, Wirgmann by name.... In this book, entitled _Divarication of the New Testament into Doctrine and History_, the pages were all coloured, most of them parti-coloured, the doctrine being throughout visually separated from the history by this device; the doctrine being, if I remember rightly, blue, and the history red. The author expressed his belief that all the sects of Christendom had arisen from a confusion of these elements, and that his grand discovery in the "Divarication" would annihilate sects, establish pure Christianity as a sacred science, and become hereafter a Euclid in Theology.'--SIR WILLIAM HAMILTON. _Life_ by J. Veitch.

THE PARSON'S ACCESSORY KNOWLEDGE

The Country Parson hath read the Fathers also, and the Schoolmen, and the later writers, or a good proportion of all, out of all which he hath compiled a book, and Body of Divinity, which is the storehouse of his sermons, and which he preacheth all his life; but diversely clothed, illustrated, and enlarged. For though the world is full of such composures, yet every man's own is fittest, readiest, and most savoury to him. Besides, this being to be done in his younger and preparatory times, it is an honest joy ever after to look upon his well-spent hours.--G. HERBERT. _A Priest to the Temple._

COMMONPLACE BOOKS

For the disposition and collocation of that knowledge which we preserve in writing, it consisteth in a good digest of commonplaces, wherein I am not ignorant of the prejudice imputed to the rise of commonplace books, as causing a retardation of reading, and some sloth or relaxation of memory. But because it is but a counterfeit thing in knowledges to be forward and pregnant, except a man be deep and full, I hold the entry of commonplaces to be a matter of great use and essence in studying, as that which assureth copy of invention, and contracteth judgement to a strength. But this is true, that of the methods of commonplaces that I have seen, there is none of any sufficient worth: all of them carrying merely the face of a school, and not of a world; and referring to vulgar matters and pedantical divisions, without all life or respect to action.--F. BACON, LORD VERULAM. _Of the Advancement of Learning._

A NEW METHOD OF A COMMONPLACE