is a power, but it is only half of the truth. While each man should have some one subject which he masters thoroughly, if he would not be narrowed down to a specialist he must also read many books. The man who reads, liberalizes his mind, enlarges the world in which he lives, and makes himself a more agreeable and valuable man to the community.

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Let each man have his favorite line of reading, and "luxuriantly indulge it," as Burns says; but let him also have several lines of reading. If, for instance, he reads no poetry, his life will be apt to become too hard and practical. The man who finds nothing to touch him in Burns's "Cotter's Saturday Night " lacks something that is essential to a true man. The man who reads no history lives within the narrow limits of the present. is well to be familiar with a few books, but to be acquainted with many. The great books are comparatively few in number, so that a diligent reader can become tolerably familiar with them. No better service could be rendered to literature than the compilation of a select library of the books of power. It would be interesting to see Dr. Johnson's list of truly great books, or De Quincey's, or Lord Macaulay's. Mr. Emerson has given us a choice list in an essay on books; but he almost spoils all for the common reader by including some books which only a Concord philosopher would think

of reading or could understand. Carlyle attempted something of the same sort, in an address to the students of Edinburgh; but as usual, he emitted more "splutteration" than wisdom.

The lecturer then proceeded to give a list of books for English readers which would be found in all lists. Premising, with regard to translation, that while works of history and science can be adequately translated, every other book suffers immeasurably by translation, and that Homer, Dante, and Goethe still remain untranslated after all the attempts at translation of them, he began his list with poetry, commencing with Homer, and mentioning Pope's translation as the best known and most readable, though called by scholars the least faithful to the original. Next he would place a volume of representative plays of the Greek tragedians, — Æschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides, in which is given a record of an epoch of human thought of profoundest interest, when the human soul, without the aid of a revelation, was asking about “fate, foreknowledge, and free-will." President Buckham next named Virgil, with a choice among several translations; then Horace, prince of all society poets, some of whose odes in Cowper's and Dryden's translations are as good as the originals. Then, thirteen hundred years later, comes Dante, whose "Divine Comedy " is accounted one of the four great epics, the other three being the "Iliad,"

"Eneid," and "Paradise Lost." Then, coming down to English poets, he named Chaucer, embodying the coarseness, tenderness, broad and kindly humor, and sense of beauty of the English nature, by reading whom we may discover that since his time we have lost the freedom of nature, and have not yet reached the freedom of culture in our social intercourse; then Spenser's "Faerie Queene," which finds a chord of romantic sentiment in every true man and woman; then Shakespeare and Milton. In these we have nine great world-poets. Limiting the list of great poets to ten, there would be some strife for the tenth place. The lecturer pronounced for Burns or Wordsworth; and not wishing to spare either of them, would make his tenth volume up of the best things of both.

Passing over what he had written upon history, the lecturer said he would merely mention Gibbon, Hume, Hallam, Robertson, and Macaulay, as among the best in the list of about twenty volumes. The list includes no American history: not because one is not to read the history of his own country, he should know it better than that of any other, but because our great historians have written European history, and among the world's great books there is no book of American history. The best history of our civil war is by a Frenchman. The great histories of America are in the

future; though Bancroft's, if ever finished, will be a monument of learning and ability.

Biography the lecturer considered to be less appreciated by general readers than it deserves to be. Only three per cent of the reading from the Fletcher Library (Burlington, Vt.) last year was biography. "Plutarch's Lives" and Boswell's "Johnson" head the list of biographies. It is a bad sign that Plutarch is, not read by boys. Boswell's "Johnson" is one of the greatest literary treats. Among other excellent biographies are Johnson's "Lives of the Poets," Scott's Lives of Dryden and Swift, Lockhart's "Scott," Lord Campbell's "Lives of the Chancellors," Irving's "Columbus," Marshall's "Washington," Franklin's "Autobiography," and Wirt's "Patrick Henry."

In voyages and travels, Hakluyt and Purchas should be read only in the old quarto worm-eaten page. Modern explorers have so superseded Capt. Cook, Lord Anson, Bruce, and Marco Polo, that these great travellers must be laid on the top shelf, and give place to Parry and Sir John Franklin, Butler, Speke, and Livingstone.

Among readable books of science may be included the works of Tyndall and Forbes on the Alpine glaciers, Darwin and Mivart on species, Brewster and Proctor on astronomy, Guyot's "Earth and Man," and George P. Marsh's "Man and Nature."

Of essayists, Montaigne, Bacon, and Addison must be included. Not to be able to read and admire the Spectator marks a kind of mental vulgarity. If but one volume of English essays should be selected, the verdict of the English-reading world would be for Lamb's "Essays of Elia." Of literary essayists, the chief are Jeffrey, Sydney Smith, Carlyle, Macaulay, "Christopher North,” and James Russell Lowell, the latter at once the most profound of critics and most genial of writers.

Coming to fiction, President Buckham said that those who condemn it indiscriminately must condemn Æsop, the "Pilgrim's Progress," and in the opinion of many scholars the Book of Job, and certainly the parables of our Lord. There may be more truth in fiction than in fact. There is more that is valuable for a young person in "Robinson Crusoe" than in the facts of the life of Selkirk. But the kind of fiction must be such as to induce no weakening of the mental fibre or injury to the moral nature. The fiction of the Middle Ages helped on the Reformation, and Mrs. Stowe's "Uncle Tom's Cabin " gave an immense impulse to the antislavery movement. Fiction as an auxiliary to history, as the expounder of hard problems in time and eternity to those who have to reach their higher ideas through incarnations, as an embellisher of life, deserves an honorable place in) the library. But it must be good, not bad fiction,