IGHT AND LIBRARIES, 400
24. POETRY OF THE LIBRARY, 417
25. HUMORS OF THE LIBRARY, 430
26. RARE BOOKS, 444
27. BIBLIOGRAPHY, 459
INDEX, 501

A BOOK FOR ALL READERS

CHAPTER 1.

THE CHOICE OF BOOKS.

When we survey the really illimitable field of human knowledge, the vast
accumulation of works already printed, and the ever-increasing flood of
new books poured out by the modern press, the first feeling which is apt
to arise in the mind is one of dismay, if not of despair. We ask--who is
sufficient for these things? What life is long enough--what intellect
strong enough, to master even a tithe of the learning which all these
books contain? But the reflection comes to our aid that, after all, the
really important books bear but a small proportion to the mass. Most
books are but repetitions, in a different form, of what has already been
many times written and printed. The rarest of literary qualities is
originality. Most writers are mere echoes, and the greater part of
literature is the pouring out of one bottle into another. If you can get
hold of the few really best books, you can well afford to be ignorant of
all the rest. The reader who has mastered Kames's "Elements of
Criticism," need not spend his time over the multitudinous treatises upon
rhetoric. He who has read Plutarch's Lives thoroughly has before him a
gallery of heroes which will go farther to instruct him in the elements
of character than a whole library of modern biographies. The student of
the best plays of Shakespeare may save his time by letting other and
inferior dramatists alone. He whose imagination has been fed upon Homer,
Dante, Milton, Burns, and Tennyson, with a few of the world's
master-pieces in single poems like Gray's Elegy, may dispense with the
whole race of poetasters. Until you have read the best fictions of
Scott, Thackeray, Dickens, Hawthorne, George Eliot, and Victor Hugo, you
should not be hungry after the last new novel,--sure to be forgotten in a
year, while the former are perennial. The taste which is once formed upon
models such as have been named, will not be satisfied with the trashy
book, or the spasmodic school of writing.

What kind of books should form the predominant part in the selection of
our reading,