have a real interest in, a real not an imaginary, and which you find to be really fit for what you are engaged in.

A. BRONSON ALCOTT, B. 1799, D. 1888.

Good books, like good friends, are few and chosen ; the more select the more enjoyable.

Next to a friend's discourse, no morsel is more delicious than a ripe book, a book whose flavor is as refreshing at the thousandth tasting as at the first.

Without Plutarch, no library were complete. Can we marvel at his fame, or overestimate the surpassing merits of his writings? It seems as I read as if none before, none since, had written lives, as if he alone were entitled to the name of biographer.

Montaigne also comes in for a large share of the scholar's regard. Opened anywhere, his page is sensible, marrowy, quotable. He seems almost the only author whose success warrants in every stroke of his pen his right to guide it. Everywhere his page is alive and rewarding, and we are disappointed at finding his book comes to an end like other books.

One cannot celebrate books sufficiently. After saying his best, still something better remains to be spoken in their praise. As with friends, one finds new beauties at every interview, and would stay long in the presence of those choice companions.

ROBERT CHAMBERS, 1802-1871.

There are the Waverley Novels! To how many thousands upon thousands has life been made less

painful or more delightful by these charming tales! The world would have gone on without them, no doubt, but it would not have gone on so agreeably. There would have been an infinite deal less happiness in it during the last twenty-five years, if they had not been written.

Cowper's Task is as good as an estate to every reading-man in the kingdom.

There are some of Burns' songs, the loss of which, if it were possible, would be to me more deplorable, as far as I am personally concerned, than the total repeal of the Habeas Corpus Act.

There are some books usually read in youth, and without which youth would not be what it is. Of these are Robinson Crusoe and Gulliver. How youth passed long ago, when there was no Crusoe to waft it away in fancy to the Pacific, and fix it upon the lonely doings of the shipwrecked mariner, is inconceivable; but we can readily suppose that it must have been essentially different. . . . Altogether, it is a glorious book, and one to which we cannot well show enough of respect.

Pope, that prince of sayers of acute and exquisite things-that most mellifluous of all the rhetorical class of poets amongst whom he flourished. He was a fine spirit and a great poet, and English literature would show a mighty blank indeed were he taken out of it.

Dryden is even better than Pope. He has immense masculine energies. There is a lashing strength about his verse that no other writer approaches. Few know

what a treasure of thought and expression lies in his Hind and Panther, and Fables. We are apt, in the large attention we pay to modern literature, to set down him and Pope in our minds as scarcely poets at all, or at the best, good versifiers; but when we open their works, and actually read them, we cease to wonder that our fathers and grandfathers talked of these men as something only a little lower than the gods.

A congenial book can be taken up by any lover of books, with the certainty of its transporting the reader within a few minutes to a region immeasurably removed from that which he desires to quit. Books are the blessed chloroform of the mind. wonder how folks in trouble did without them in old time.

We

I have cause to revere the name of Defoe, who reached his hand down through a century and a half to wipe away bitter tears from my childish eyes. The going back to school was always a dreadful woe to me, casting its black shadow far into the latter part of my brief holidays. I have had my share of suffering and sorrow since, like other men, but I have seldom felt so absolutely wretched as when, a little boy, I was about to exchange my pleasant home-life for the hardships and uncongenialities of school. And yet, I protest, I had but to take up Robinson Crusoe, and in a very few minutes I was out of all thought of the approaching calamity. . . . I had travelled over a thousand leagues of sea; I was in my snug, wellfortified cave, with the ladder upon the right side of it," so that neither man nor beast could get at me,"

...

with my half-a-dozen muskets loaded, and my powder distributed in separate parcels, so that not even a thunderbolt should do me any irreparable injury. Or, if not quite so secure, I was visiting my summer plantation among my goats and corn, or shooting, in the still astonished woods, birds of marvelous beauty; or lying upon my stomach upon the top of the hill, watching through my spy-glass the savages putting to sea, and not displeased to find myself once more alone in my own little island.

During that agonizing period which intervened between my proposal of marriage by letter to Jemima Anne, and my reception of her reply, how should I ever have kept myself alive, save for the chivalrous aid. of the Black Knight in Ivanhoe. To him, mainly, assisted by Rebecca, and (I am bound to say) by that scoundrel Brian de Bois Guilbert, are my obligations due, that I did not-through the extremities of despair and hope, suffered during that intervalbecome a drivelling idiot.

When her answer did arrive-in the negative-what was it which preserved me from the noose, the razor, or the stream, but Mr. Carlyle's French Revolution! In the woes of poor Louis Capet, I forgot my own. Who, having a grateful heart, can forget these things, or deny the Blessedness of Books?

ALEXANDER (LORD CHIEF JUSTICE) COCKBURN, 1802-1880.

Happy is he who, when the day's work is done, finds his rest, and solace, and recreation in communion with the master minds of the present and of the past

in study, in literature, and the enjoyment of pleasures which are to be derived from this source. There is no rest, no recreation, no refreshment to the wearied and jaded body and mind, worn by work and toil, equal to the intellectual pleasures to which I have just been referring.

LORD LYTTON (E. L. BULWER), 1803-1873.

I have known some people in great sorrow fly to a novel, or the last light book in fashion. One might as well take a rose-draught for the plague! Light reading does not do when the heart is really heavy. I am told that Goethe, when he lost his son, took to study a science that was new to him. Ah! Goethe was a physician who knew what he was about. In a great grief like that, you cannot tickle and divert the mind; you must wrench it away, abstract, absorb —bury it in an abyss, hurry it into a labyrinth.

There is Homer, now lost with the gods, now at home with the homeliest, the very "poet of circumstance," as Gray has finely called him; and yet with imagination enough to seduce and coax the dullest. into forgetting, for a while, that little spot on his desk which his banker's book can cover.

Virgil has genius enough to be two men-to lead you into the fields, not only to listen to the pastoral reed, and to hear the bees hum, but to note how you can make the most of the glebe and the vineyard.

There is Horace, charming man of the world, who will condole with you feelingly on the loss of your fortune, and by no means undervalue the good things of