poet.

Archdeacon Farrar gives, perhaps, the best test for a favourite author,
that is, the selection of his works in the event of all others being
destroyed. He writes, "But if all the books in the world were in a blaze,
the first twelve which I should snatch out of the flames would be the
Bible, _Imitatio Christi_, Homer, AEschylus, Thucydides, Tacitus, Virgil,
Marcus Aurelius, Dante, Shakespeare, Milton, Wordsworth. Of living authors
I would save first the works of Tennyson, Browning and Ruskin."

Another excellent test is that set up by travellers and soldiers. A book
must be good when one of either of these classes decides to place it among
his restricted baggage. Mr. H.M. Stanley writes, "You ask me what books I
carried with me to take across Africa. I carried a great many--three
loads, or about 180 lbs. weight; but as my men lessened in numbers,
stricken by famine, fighting and sickness, they were one by one
reluctantly thrown away, until finally, when less than 300 miles from the
Atlantic, I possessed only the Bible, Shakespeare, Carlyle's Sartor
Resartus, Norie's Navigation, and Nautical Almanac for 1877. Poor
Shakspeare was afterwards burned by demand of the foolish people of Zinga.
At Bonea, Carlyle and Norie and Nautical Almanac were pitched away, and I
had only the old Bible left." He then proceeds to give a list of books
which he allowed himself when "setting out with a tidy battalion of men."

Lord Wolseley writes, "During the mutiny and China war I carried a
Testament, two volumes of Shakespeare that contained his best plays, and
since then, when in the field, I have always carried: Book of Common
Prayer, Thomas a Kempis, Soldier's Pocket Book.... The book that I like
reading at odd moments is 'The Meditations of Marcus Aurelius.'" He then
adds, for any distant expedition, a few books of History (Creasy's
"Decisive Battles," Plutarch's "Lives," Voltaire's "Charles XII.,"
"Caesar," by Froude, and Hume's "England"). His Fiction is confined to
Macaulay's "History of England" and the "Essays."

Mr. Quaritch remarks that "Sir John's 'working man' is an ideal creature.
I have known many working men, but none of them could have suggested such
a feast as he has prepared for them." He adds, "In my younger days I had
no books whatever beyond my school books. Arrived in London in 1842, I
joined a literary institution, and read all their historical works. To
read fiction I had no time. A friend of mine read novel