erful test of this quality. It "holds the boards" at
the small provincial theatre, it is enacted by Mr. Crummles to an
illiterate peasantry, and it is performed by the greatest actor to the
most select city audience. It is made the subject of study by learned
commentators. It is world-embracing.

Are there in the English language, including translations, a hundred
books that stand the test as _Hamlet_ stands it? No two men would make
the same list of books that answer to this demand of an universal appeal,
and obviously each nation must make its own list. Mine is for English
boys and girls just growing into manhood and womanhood, or for those who
have had no educational advantages in early years. I exclude living
writers, and I give the hundred in four groups.

POETRY.

1. The Bible. {260a}

2. _The Odyssey_, translated by Butcher and Lang. {260b}

3. The _Iliad_, translated by Lang, Leaf and Myers. {260b}

4. Aeschylus, translated by George Warr. {261a}

5. Sophocles, translated by J. S. Phillimore. {261a}

6. Euripides, translated by Gilbert Murray. {261a}

7. Virgil, translated by Dryden. {261b}

8. Catullus, translated by Theodore Martin. {261c}

9. Horace, translated by Theodore Martin. {261d}

10. Dante, translated by Cary. {262a}

11. Shakspere, _Hamlet_. {262b}

12. Chaucer, _Canterbury Tales_. {262c}

13. FitzGerald, _Omar Khayyam_. {263a}

14. Goethe, _Faust_. {263b}

15. Shelley. {263c}

16. Byron. {263d}

17. Wordsworth. {264a}

18. Keats. {264b}

19. Burns. {264c}

20. Coleridge. {264d}

21. Cowper. {264e}

22. Crabbe. {265a}

23. Tennyson. {265b}

24. Browning. {265c}

25. Milton. {265d}

FICTION.

1. _The Arabian Nights Entertainment_. {266a}

2. _Don Quixote_, by Cervantes. {266b}

3. _Pilgrim's Progress_, by Bunyan. {266c}

4. _Robinson Crusoe_, by Defoe. {266d}

5. _Gulliver's Travels_, by Swift. {267a}

6. _Clarissa_, by Richardson. {267b}

7. _Tom Jones_, by Fielding. {267c}

8. _Rasselas_, by Johnson. {267d}

9. _Vicar of Wakefield_, by Goldsmith. {268a}

10. _Sentimental Journey_, by Sterne. {268b}

11. _Nightmare Abbey_, by Peacock. {268c}

12. _Kenilworth_, by Walter Scott. {268d}

13. _Pere Goriot_, by Balzac. {268e}

14. _The Three Musketeers_, by Dumas. {269a}

15. _Vanity Fair_, by Thackeray. {269b}

16. _Villette_, by Charlotte Bronte. {269c}

17. _David Copperfield_, by