He would like to have
Masson's Life too in 6 vols. (with index), and he is apt to consider the
great Puritan's prose still finer than his poetry, and will often take
down the Areopagitica that he may breathe the air of high latitudes; but
he has a corner in his heart for that evil living and mendacious bravo,
but most perfect artist, Benvenuto Cellini. While he counts Gibbon's
Rome, I mean the Smith and Milman edition in 8 vols., blue cloth, the
very model of histories, yet he revels in those books which are the
material for historians, the scattered stones out of which he builds his
house, such as the diaries of John Evelyn and our gossip Pepys, and that
scandalous book, _Grammont's Memoirs_, and that most credulous but
interesting of Scots annalists, Robert Wodrow.

According to the bookman, but not, I am sorry to say, in popular
judgment, the most toothsome kind of literature is the Essay, and you
will find close to his hand a dainty volume of Lamb open perhaps at that
charming paper on "Imperfect Sympathies," and though the bookman be a
Scot yet his palate is pleasantly tickled by Lamb's description of his
national character--Lamb and the Scots did not agree through an
incompatibility of humour--and near by he keeps his Hazlitt, whom he
sometimes considers the most virile writer of the century: nor would he
be quite happy unless he could find in the dark _The Autocrat of the
Breakfast Table_. He is much indebted to a London publisher for a very
careful edition of the _Spectator_, and still more to that good bookman,
Mr. Austin Dobson, for his admirable introduction. As the bookman's
father was also a bookman, for the blessing descendeth unto the third and
fourth generation, he was early taught to love De Quincey, and although,
being a truthful man, he cannot swear he has read every page in all the
fifteen volumes--roxburghe calf--yet he knows his way about in that
whimsical, discursive, but ever satisfying writer, who will write on
anything, or any person, always with freshness and in good English, from
the character of Judas Iscariot and "Murder as a Fine Art" to the Lake
Poets--there never was a Lake school--and the Essenes. He has much to
say on Homer, and a good deal also on "Flogging in Schools"; he can
hardly let go Immanuel Kant, but if he does it is to give his views,
which are not favourable, of _Wilhelm Meister_; he is not above
considering the art of cooking potatoes or the question of whether human
b