FIRST DAY: EVENING SESSION. LECTURE I. ABSTRACT OF LECTURE. - CHOICE AND USE OA BOOKS. By M. H. BUCKHAM, LL. D., PRESIDENT UNIVERSITY Of Vermont. ISS EDGEWORTH tells a story of two M Esquimaux whose comments on the city of London, after they had been taken through the streets for the first time, were, "Too much smoke, too much noise, too much houses, too much men, too much everything." So one whose reading has been confined to his single newspaper, when introduced to a great library, is apt to feel, if not to say, "Too many books, too many magazines, too many newspapers, too much everything." But it is the literary enterprise of the world that has made the abundance of books, as it is the commercial enterprise of the world that has made London what it is; and the man who secludes himself from books and periodicals in good variety cuts himself off from the civilization of the times. It is true that the man of one book 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. 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. It 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, — Eschylus, 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,” |