CHAPTER 1. THE CHOICE OF BOOKS. When we survey the really illimitable field of hu knowledge, the vast accumulation of works already p ed, and the ever-increasing flood of new books poured by the modern press, the first feeling which is apt to in the mind is one of dismay, if not of despair. We a who is sufficient for these things? What life is enough-what intellect strong enough, to master ev tithe of the learning which all these books contain? the reflection comes to our aid that, after all, the really portant books bear but a small proportion to the n Most books are but repetitions, in a different form, of has already been many times written and printed. rarest of literary qualities is originality. Most writers mere echoes, and the greater part of literature is the p ing out of one bottle into another. If you can get hol the few really best books, you can well afford to be igno of all the rest. The reader who has mastered Kan "Elements of Criticism," need not spend his time over multitudinous treatises upon rhetoric. He who has Plutarch's Lives thoroughly has before him a galler heroes which will go farther to instruct him in the ments of character than a whole library of modern b raphies. The student of the best plays of Shakesp may save his time by letting other and inferior drama alone. He whose imagination has been fed upon Ho Dante, Milton, Burns, and Tennyson, with a few of world's master-pieces in single poems like Gray's El may dispense with the whole race of poetasters. Until have read the best fictions of Scott, Thackeray Hawthorne, George Eliot, and Victor Hugo, y not be hungry after the last new novel,-sure to ten in a year, while the former are perennial. which is once formed upon models such as named, will not be satisfied with the trashy bo spasmodic school of writing. What kind of books should form the predomi in the selection of our reading, is a question adn widely differing opinions. Rigid utilitarians may only books of fact, of history and science, works full of knowledge, should be encouraged. Others w in behalf of lighter reading, or for a universal ra must be admitted that the most attractive readin mass of people is not scientific or philosophical. B are many very attractive books outside the field of and outside the realm of fiction, books capable of pleasure as well as instruction. There are few bo render a more substantial benefit to readers of than good biographies. In them we find those experiences and adventures, those traits of charact environment of social and domestic life, which fo chief interest in works of fiction. In fact, the nove best estate, is only biography amplified by imaginati enlivened by dialogue. And the novel is successf when it succeeds in depicting the most truly the circumstances, and characters of real life. A well biography, like that of Dr. Johnson, by Boswell, Scott, by Lockhart, or Charles Dickens, by Forste: the reader an insight into the history of the tim lived in, the social, political, and literary environme: the impress of their famous writings upon their con raries. In the autobiography of Dr. Franklin, one most charming narratives ever written, we are take |