"If I were not a king, I would be a university man; and if it were so that I must be a prisoner, if I might have my wish, I would desire to have no other prison than that library, and to be chained together with so many good authors, et mortuis magister."-Speech of James I., during his visit to the Bodleian Library in 1605.

"The mind shall banquet, though the body pine."

-Shakespeare.

"I no sooner come into the library, but I bolt the door to me, excluding lust, ambition, avarice, and melancholy herself; and in the very lap of eternity, amongst so many divine souls, I take my seat with so lofty a spirit and sweet content, that I pity all our great ones, and rich men, that know not this happiness."-Heinsius, Keeper of the Library at Leyden.

"Golden volumes! richest treasures!

Objects of delicious pleasures! You my eyes rejoicing please, You my hands in rapture seize ! Brilliant wits, and musing sages, Lights who beam'd through many ages; Left to your conscious leaves their story, And dared to trust you with their glory; And now their hope of fame achieved, Dear volumes, you have not deceived!" -Imitation of Rantzau's address to his books, D'Israeli's Curiosities of Literature. "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. As good almost to 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."-Milton.

"Books should to one of these four ends conduce,

For Wisdom, piety, delight, or use." -Denham. "The benefit which is derived from LITERATURE will depend, not so much upon the LITERATURE itself, as upon the skill with which it is studied, and the judgment with which

it is selected."-Buckle.

"Religion, patriotism, public and private happiness, pure and fixed principles of taste, intellectual refinement of the most exalted kind, in its present and future results, are all involved in a sedulous and straight forward cultivation of the pursuit of literature. . . . . From Cicero to Richard of Bury, the stream of such authorities is uniformly bright and strong, and callous must be the heart, or obtuse the intellect of that young man, upon whom such authorities make no impression." -Dibdin.

"Books are each a world; and books, we know,
Are a substantial world, both pure and good;
Round these, with tendrils strong as flesh and blood,
Our pastime and our happiness will grow."

-Wordsworth.

"For out of the old fieldes, as men saithe,
Cometh al this new corne fro yere to yere ;
And out of old bookes, in good faithe,
Cometh al this new science that men lere."
-Chaucer.

"The chief Glory of every People arises from its Authors."Johnson.

"The accumulated WISDOM of ages is deposited in BOOKS."-W. T. Lowndes.

"It is BOOKS that teach us to define our pleasures when young, and which, having so taught us, enable us to recall them with satisfaction when old."-Leigh Hunt.

"The past but lives in words; a thousand ages

Were blank, if books had not evoked their ghosts.
And kept the pale unbodied shades to warn us
From fleshless lips."
-Lord Lytton.

"Were I to pray for a taste which should stand me in stead, under every variety of circumstance, and be a source of happiness and cheerfulness to me during life, and a shield against its ills, however things might go amiss and the world frown upon me, it would be A TASTE FOR READING. Give a man this

You place him in

taste, and the means of gratifying it, and you can hardly fail of making him a happy man; unless, indeed, you put into his hands a most perverse selection of BOOKS. contact with the best society in every period of history, -with the wisest, the wittiest, the tenderest, the bravest, and the purest characters who have adorned humanity. You make him world has been created for him!"-Sir John Herschel's address a denizen of all nations, a contemporary of all ages. The at the opening of the Eton Library in 1833.

"Histories make men wise; poets, witty; the mathematics, subtile; natural philosophy, deep; moral, grave; logic and rhetoric, able to contend."-Lord Bacon.

"Books, as Dryden has aptly termed them, are spectacles to read Nature. Eschylus and Aristotle, Shakespeare and Bacon, are Priests who preach and expound the mysteries of Man and the Universe. They teach us to understand and feel what we see, to decipher and syllable the hieroglyphics of the senses."

"Books are standing counsellors and preachers, always at hand, and always disinterested; having this advantage over oral instructors, that they are ready to repeat their lesson as often as we please."-Anonymous.

"I have FRIENDS whose society is extremely agreeable to me; they are of all ages, and of every country. They have

"Next to acquiring good friends, the best acquisition is that of good books. I have somewhere seen it observed, that we should make the same use of a Book that the Bee does of a Flower; she steals sweets from it, but does not injure it."Colton.

"If the crowns of all the kingdoms of Europe were laid down at my feet in exchange for my BOOKS and my love of READING, I would spurn them all."-Fenelon.

"Books are men of higher stature, And the only men that speak aloud for future times to hear." -Elizabeth Barrett Browning. 112

and obtained high honours for their knowledge of the Sciences. It is easy to gain access to them; for they are always at my service, and I admit them to my company, and dismiss them from it, whenever I please. They are never troublesome, but immediately answer every question I ask them. Some relate to me the events of past ages, while others reveal to me the secrets of nature. Some teach me how to live, and others how to die. . . . . They open to me, in short, the various avenues of all the arts and sciences, and upon their information I safely rely in all emergencies. In return for all these services, they only ask me to accommodate them with a convenient chamber in some corner of my humble habitation, where they may repose in peace."-Petrarch.