, with a grand humility.
You may speak freely with any, without a thought of your inferiority;
for books are perfectly well-bred, and hurt no one's feelings by any
discriminations." Sir William Waller observed, "In my study, I am sure
to converse with none but wise men, but abroad it is impossible for me
to avoid the society of fools." "It is the glorious prerogative of the
empire of knowledge," says Webster, "that what it gains it never loses.
On the contrary, it increases by the multiple of its own power; all its
ends become means, all its attainments help to new conquests."

"At this hour, five hundred years since their creation," says De
Quincey, "the tales of Chaucer, never equaled on this earth for their
tenderness and for life of picturesqueness, are read familiarly by many
in the charming language of their natal day, and by others in the
modernization of Dryden, of Pope, and Wordsworth. At this hour, one
thousand eight hundred years since their creation, the pagan tales of
Ovid, never equaled on this earth for the gayety of their movement and
the capricious graces of their narrative, are read by all Christendom."

"There is no Past so long as Books shall live," says Lytton.

"No wonder Cicero said that he would part with all he was worth so he
might live and die among his books," says Geikie. "No wonder Petrarch
was among them to the last, and was found dead in their company. It
seems natural that Bede should have died dictating, and that Leibnitz
should have died with a book in his hand, and Lord Clarendon at his
desk. Buckle's last words, 'My poor book!' tell a passion that forgot
death; and it seemed only a fitting farewell when the tear stole down
the manly cheeks of Scott as they wheeled him into his library, when he
had come back to Abbotsford to die. Southey, white-haired, a living
shadow, sitting stroking and kissing the books he could no longer open
or read, is altogether pathetic."

"No entertainment is so cheap as reading," says Mary Wortley Montagu;
"nor any pleasure so lasting." Good books elevate the character, purify
the taste, _take the attractiveness out of low pleasures_, and lift us
upon a higher plane of thinking and living. It is not easy to be mean
directly after reading a noble and inspiring book. The conversation of a
man who reads for improvement or pleasure will be flavored by his
reading; but it will not be about his reading.

Perhaps no other thing has such power to lift the poor