st of the works published in Cassell's National
Library. How some of the old book-lovers who are gone--who lived in the
days when the purchase of a good book involved some personal
sacrifice--would have appreciated this valuable library! Here are 208 of
the world's best books, each one of which contains some 200 pages of
clear readable type. The published price is threepence each; but a
discount of twenty-five per cent. is allowed when four or five or more
are purchased. It would be a waste of space to give the entire list; but
a few typical examples may be taken. Here are the Essays of Lord
Macaulay; here are works by Plutarch, Herodotus, Plato, Xenophon,
Lucian, Fenelon, Voltaire, Boccaccio, Gothe, and Lessing--in English, of
course. Here is Walton's 'Complete Angler,' Goldsmith's 'Plays,' Bacon's
'Wisdom of the Ancients' and 'Essays.' Here are works by Burke, Swift,
Steele and Addison, Milton, Johnson, Pope, Sydney Smith, Coleridge,
Dickens, Landor, Fielding, Keats, Shelley, Defoe, Dryden, Carlyle,
Locke, Bolingbroke, Shakespere, and many others. All Shakespere's plays
are here complete, and each play is accompanied by the poem, story, or
previous play on which it is founded. Here, for example, is the last of
the series as yet published, 'All's Well that Ends Well'; it contains a
translation of the story of Giletta of Narbona from Painter's 'Palace of
Pleasure'; it is worth threepence to a student, if only for showing the
difference between raw material and finished product. Hundreds of new
novels, including some of those of Thackeray, Kingsley, Dickens, Lytton,
and other well-known authors, are to be obtained in most places for
4-1/2_d._, and their secondhand price is less still. Considering the
marvellous cheapness of good books, it is difficult to understand how
any one can either blackmail his neighbour for them, or encourage
working-men to do so. If a man will not deduct a few coppers now and
then from his outlay in other luxuries to purchase literature, he cannot
want literature very badly; if he does not value books sufficiently well
to buy them with his own earnings he does not deserve to have them
bought for him with other people's earnings. That poor women and others,
who are often the sole support of a large family of children, should
have their hard earnings confiscated to maintain readers--many of them
well-to-do--in gratuitous literature, is an injustice not to be
palliated by all the hollow cant about cu