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HOME
RE A DI N G
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BY
CHARLES DUDLEY WARNER, M. F. SWEETSER, F. B. PERKINS, CYRUS.
HAMLIN, HAMILTON W. MABIE, EDWARD EVERETT HALE,
JOSEPH COOK, HENRY WARD BEECHER AND
LYMAN ABBOTT
Edited with an Introduction by
LYMAN ABBOTT
WITH WHICH IS INCLUDED A NEW AND REVISED EDITION OF
SUGGESTIONS FOR LIBRARIES
BY GEORGE PALMER PUTNAM
TOGETHER WITH PRICED LISTS OF SUGGESTED SELECTIONS OF 500, 1,000 AND 2,000 VOLUMES
OF THE MOST DESIRABLE AND IMPORTANT BOOKS
1
2
NEW YORK
G. P. PUTNAM’S SONS
27 AND 29 WEST 230 STREET

(1)) /
COPYRIGHT BY
G. P. PUTNAM'S SONS,
.و88

CONTENTS.
PAGE
INTRODUCTION
I
I.
WHAT THE PEOPLE READ, by M. F. Sweetser.
5
5
II.
WHY YOUNG PEOPLE READ TRASH, by Charles Dudley
Warner.
15.
III.
WHAT TO READ, by Fred. B. Perkins.
23
IV. PLANS OF READING, by Fred. B. Perkins.
31
V. PLANS OF READING, by Cyrus Hamlin.
41
VI.
PLANS OF READING, by H. W. Beecher.
48
VII.
THE ART OF READING, by Hamilton W. Mabie.
57
VIII.
THE CHOICE OF Books, by Edward Everett Hale.
62
IX.
How To MAKE DULL Boys READ, by Joseph Cook. ".
70
X.
How TO PRESERVE THE RESULTS. OF READING, by
Joseph Cook.
78
XI.
HINTS FOR PEOPLE THAT DO NOT READ, by Lyman
Abbott.
85
XII. A SYMPOSIUM, by Many Contributors.
93
SUGGESTIONS FOR HOUSEHOLD LIBRARIES, by George Palmer
Putnam.
.
109
FIRST LIST—500 volumes of the most essential books.
• 117
SECOND LIST-500 volumes of the next most desirable.
123
THIRD LIST—1,000 volumes supplementing previous selections. .
130
A COLLECTION OF 50 VOLUMES suggested as the nucleus of a Library.

INTRODUCTION.
THE
HE home ought no more to be without a library than
without a dining room and kitchen.
If you have but
one room, and it is lighted by the great wood fire in the flam-
ing fireplace, as Abraham Lincoln's was, do as Abraham Lin-
coln did : pick out one corner of your fireplace for a library,
and use it. Every man ought to provide for the brain as well
as for the stomach.
This does not require capital ; there are now cheap editions
of the best books ; it only requires time and forecast. We
write in a private library, and a fairly good one for working
purposes, of three thousand and odd volumes ; we began it
twenty years ago, on a salary of $1,000 a year, with five books
—a commentary in four volumes and a dictionary. The best
libraries are not made ; they grow.
In forming a library, if your means are small, do not buy
what you can beg or borrow. Depend, as Joseph Cook does,


2
INTRODUCTION.
as many of the greatest authors have done, on public libraries
—the District Library, the Lyceum, the Book Club, the Circu-
lating Library—or on more fortunate friends. Buy only what
you cannot borrow.
At first buy only books that you want immediately to read.
Do not be deluded imto buying books because they are classics,
or cheap, or that you may get rid of an agent. One book read
is worth a dozen books looked at. No book is possessed till it
is read.
Reference books constitute an exception, and an important
exception, to this rule. These are the foundations of a good
library. The essential reference books are Webster's Diction-
ary—for the family use Webster is incomparably the best-
a good atlas and a cyclopædia. Any school atias will do
(and a second-hand one can be had for almost nothing),
though, if you are able to purchase it, a good atlas is much
better; and best of all is a wise selection of atlases. There
is no best cyclopædia ; your choice must depend upon your
resources, pecuniary and mental.
In purchasing books, exercise a choice in editions. The
lowest priced books are not always the cheapest. Buy books
of transient interest or minor importance—all novels, for ex-
ample, and current books of travel-in cheap forms, On the
other hand, histories, classics of all sorts, and generally all

INTRODUCTION.
3
permanent books, should be bought in good binding and good
type. It takes well-seasoned lumber to make a good family
library.
Have a place for your library. Respectable hanging-shelves
can be bought in our cities and towns for a dollar and up-
ward. A dollar spent in pine lumber, and a little mechanical
skill, will make a larger and better one. Varnished pine is
handsome enough for any parlor. A place for books will cry
to be filled till it gets its prayer answered. Book-shelves
preserve books. One shelf of books gathered together is a
better library than twice the number scattered from attic to
cellar,
Finally, a taste for reading is an essential pre-requisite to a
useful library. A well is of no use if you never draw water
from it. At the same time a good library in the household,
accessible to all, from baby to grandmother, is one of the best
influences with which to develop a taste for reading. Have no
books so fine that they cannot be used. Have few or none
under lock and key. Books were made for readers, not readers
for books.
These articles, contributed by different writers, out of their
own wide observation and life experience, were originally
sought for the columns of The Christian Union, in the hope
that they would conduce to the development of family libraries
4
INTRODUCTION.
in many homes. They are now gathered into one volume,
with such modifications in form as were necessary to make a
homogeneous volume, with the belief that in this permanent
form they will continue to serve this mission yet more efficiently.

L. A.
22 WASHINGTON SQUARE, N, Y.

HINTS FOR HOME READING.
I.
WHAT THE PEOPLE READ.
By M. F. SWEETSER.
CHAT
HARLES LAMB once said, in his quaint and delightful
way, that he wished to ask a
grace before reading "
more than a
grace before dinner." There never was a peo-
ple so addicted to reading as our own, even amid the electric
rush of western life, and ever fresh material is being prepared
for their edification and amusement at the rate of seventy new
books per day, besides uncounted millions of papers and maga-
zines. Is this literary feast of such a character that we may
ask a blessing upon it, or should we rather recite the Black
Paternoster before partaking thereof ?
“ Read not the Times ; read the Eternities," cried Thoreau,
from his academic grove by Walden Pond. But it is essential
that the citizen of a republic should read the Times also, and
there is no duty which the average American discharges more
5

6
M. F. SWEETSER.
faithfully and zestfully. Every morning and evening millions
of newspapers are flung off, hot from the roaring presses, to be
eagerly perused in cars, shops and offices by all men who can
read. Those papers are in chief demand which are alive and
spicy, howbeit, unfortunately, these traits are often quite sep-
arable from sagacity and purity, and the Macaulay order of
journalism is incompatible with paragraphing. When to the
city dailies we add the rural weeklies, the story papers, the
agricultural and specialist organs, and the great host of religi-
ous papers, the wonder rises how America can find time to
attend to such a mass of ephemeral prints, and it seems that
the larger part of our reading must be done outside of books.
And so extensive is the purview of the modern newspaper, so
various are the subjects of which it treats, and so highly trained
(in many cases) are the editors, that the systematic reader
thereof may readily become possessed of a fund of broad and
available knowledge. Many men of high position, with great
libraries in their houses, read almost nothing but newspapers,
and from this source alone obtain copious resources for con-
versation on many subjects, so that they often appear more in-
telligent than the professional scholar. The dark side of the
picture is found in the accounts of ghastly and demoraliz-
ing events whose details are given with such zest in some
of the papers; and in the rollicking levity with which certain

WHAT THE PEOPLE READ.
7
of the later humorists treat the most sacred and serious
subjects.
The magazines occupy a midway position between the news-
papers and books, and contain literature which in many cases
is not ephemeral. Their circulation is very large, and half-a-
dozen have an aggregate sale of nearly half a million copies
per month ; while there are scores of others with large lists of
subscribers. Profit, pleasure and instruction may be gained
in reading the chief illustrated magazines, as well as the “At-
lantic Monthly” and the Reviews; but most of the smaller
periodicals are weak, meagre and platitudinous to the last
degree.
The paramount position which fiction holds in the estimation
of our reading public is definitely attested by a recent tabula-
tion of the reports of more than a score of public libraries,
which showed that sixty-eight per cent., or a little more than
two-thirds of the books taken out, were novels.
The great
Public Library of Boston, with its 370,000 volumes, also re-
ports that fully two-thirds of its issues are of this class, al-
though the corisoling statement is added that the ratio is much
less than a few years ago, before the attractive catalogues of
history, biography and travel were published. Various expedi-
ents have been suggested, with a view to reducing this great
preponderance of light reading, but the evil is one which it is
8
M. F. SWEETSER,
difficult to ameliorate, at least by any system of library legisla-
tion. Another examination of the issûes of the Boston Public
Library shows that the ratio of the standard historical and
social-life stories taken out, is to the merely sensational and
visionary as thirteen to forty, or, in other words, that three-
fourths of the novel-reading is given to the lowest attainable
class of literature, Thus more than half of the volumes circu-
lated by this great library, with all its safeguards and in one of
the most enlightened communities of America, are vapid even
if not vicious, and unimproving, if not absolutely harmful.
There are advocates of the panem et circenses theory of govern-
ment who find even this state of affairs encouraging, believing
that it is a gain to the body politic to have the lower classes
devoting that time to novel-reading which might otherwise be
employed in more dangerous ways. The principle may be
good under certain circumstances but the substitute is certainly
a perilous one.
The Buckles and Leckys of the twentieth century may dem-
onstrate the directness of the connection between the rise and
development of the tramp-scourge and the contemporaneous
flooding of the Republic with cheap and inflammatory litera-
ture, in whose pages honest industry is contemned and heroism
is found only in a wild and roving life and an eager readiness
to resort to physical violence. For years unscrupulous publish-


WHAT THE PEOPLE READ.
9
ens.
ers have been sowing dragons' teeth in the precious soil made
fallow by the war epoch, and now the appalling harvest is
springing up on every side.
The love of fictitious narrative is so strong and confirmed a
trait of human character that great efforts should be made to
render it in some way beneficial to society and the individual,
or at least far different in its results from what it now threat-
Charles Reade prepared himself for his life-work by
reading a novel a day for several years ; and now, out of the
ripeness of his experience, proclaims that the only worthy end.
of fiction is to correct national and social abuses. Sir Johm
Herschel recorded his conviction that the novel is one of the
most powerful engines of civilization ever invented. Canon
Farrar recommends clergymen to read good novels in their
leisure hours ; and a famous Oxford lecturer has advised all.
students in holy orders to peruse romances carefully, to en--
large their ideas and to give them social graces..
Anthony Trollope says that the novel has well-nigh suc--
ceeded to the sermon as a former of character, and Dr. Draper:
claims that the printing-press has superseded the pulpit. If
this is quite true (and we fear that it is not altogether un-
true) the world is in a bad way, and it behooves our illuminati
cease their interminable dissensions about ecclesiastical
millinery and abstract theories, and to take counsel as to the
to
IO
M. F. SWEETSER.

remedy. If the high duties and principles of a true and noble
life can no longer be as efficiently inculcated by essays and
addresses as by extended parables and under disguise of ro-
mance, the new methods must be deeply studied and lovingly
wrought out. The seeds which Richardson planted in Eng-
land and Charles Brockden Brown in America, have developed
into trees which overshadow the Anglo-Saxon race, and it can-
not yet be seen whether their fruits shall be full of healing or
of spiritual death. The unsullied purity and splendor of
Scott are counteracted by the grossness of Fielding ; the sin-
scourging invectives of Thackeray by the hot poison of Lau-
rence; the saintly purity of Macdonald by the inflamed
sug-
gestions of Ouida, Mr. Carker and Becky Sharp are as well
known as Leatherstocking and Romola ; and Claude Duval
and Jack Shepard have a wider constituency than Adam Bede.
Thackeray has somewhere said that all people with healthy
literary appetites love novels, but the meaning of the objective
word has been sadly perverted even since his day.
The most serious attack of unbeneficial literature is made
upon the youth of the country, and its avenue of advance is
through the flash newspaper and the low grade of cheap novel.
The number of the former is legion, and their general uniform
is illustrated by sensational head-lines and tawdry wood-
cuts. No fewer than twenty-five of these papers are published

WHAT THE PEOPLE REID.
II
in New York alone, and it is estimated that they have three
million readers every week. Many others are printed in other
cities and count their added millions of readers. Besides the
ordinary channels of the mails they are scattered broadcast.
through the country by the news companies, and their coarse
illustrations are seen on every news-stand and in the stationery
shops of the remotest hamlets, amid the pastoral innocence of
the hill-country and the prairies. There is no other agency
which is so effectually leavening the nation, for the flash paper
penetrates to solitudes where even the circuit-rider never ap-
pears, and far beyond the blue-and-white signs of the tele-
graph companies.
A recent reviewer, after examining great numbers of these
multiplying productions of a degraded press, writes that:
Nothing good can be said of them. They must be charac-
terized as bad, worse, worst." The titles of the stories are vi-
ciously sensational and the situations are of the most impossible
character, with high spice of hair-brcadth adventure, prurient
description and scandalous suggestion. Picturesqueness, deli-
cacy, purity are all alien to these blood-curdling fictions, and
the normal and healthy conditions of life are not considered.
The heroes are those most regardless of long-settled social and
natural laws, and their most notable achievements are triumph-
ant revolts against the very nature of things. Their arma-

I 2
M. F. SWEETSER..
ment is complete and efficient, their combative skill is marvel-
ous, and their language and habits are those of the slums.
Occasionally a trite moralism or a plagiarized description is
introduced as a foil, or as a contrast by which to heighten the
color of the narrative, but the next chapter brings back the
rattle of the frontier revolvers, the howls of the South Sea
pirates and the vulgar-genteel dialogues of the buckram lords
and ladies. And the reader ever draws a lengthening chain,
for no sooner is Chincapin Dick brought to his reward in the
last chapter of one story than Deadwood Jim enters the most
interesting part of his brutal career in the same paper, and
Calamity Jane appears on the scene in the first chapters of
another serial.
And what is the result of all this mighty flood of unsavory
literature ? Evil, and evil, and evil again. The tranquil and
industrious home life, with its sacred peace and unceasing
blessings, is held up to scorn, and the ideal career is one of
wild adventure and lawless force, ending in the acquisition of
dazzling honors and delights. Appetites depraved by heredity
are pampered and glutted in their unnatural tastes and during
the most tender formative years, and the broad road to perdi-
tion is opened before the myriads of little feet. The unevent-
ful life of school and shop, the working days and monotonous
evenings, are set over against the dashing deeds and passion-
ate joys of the putative heroes of the printed page, and appear


WHAT THE PEOPLE READ.
13
all the more dull and profitless by the comparison.
Still worse
and more pernicious lessons are taught to mere children, who
become wise beyond their years, and are prepared for deadly
dangers. The school-boy swaggers about his home, and talks
the Bowery slang, and apes the inflections of the hoodlum, and
then with his comrades endeavors to outrival the extraordinary
ruffians who are set up as the heroes of his hidden reading.
The instructors in some of our public schools keep a watch on
the reading of their pupils, and report that the most unruly
and rebellious boys are those who are addicted to the study of
these fictions.
Many of the women of America find their light mental ex-
hilaration in a similar manner in the pages of certain maga-
zines professedly devoted to their amusement, and in the long
lines of novels written by experts of the Southworth school.
There is also a group of weekly papers working on the same
line, and constantly purveying a light, frothy and turgid litera-
ture to its readers. This class of fiction is by far less danger-
ous than the stronger and more fiery forms which are placed
before the sterner sex; and yet the imaginary conditions of
life therein depicted and suppositious possibilities set forth, un-
doubtedly stimulate thoughts which result in terrible revolts
against the laws of social safety.
Their is another class of publications, issued secretly from
hidden press, whose pages are saturated with the most ter-
14
M. F. SWEETSER.
they fall.
rible poison, and breathe out a fatal spiritual malaria wherever
Therein the foulest morasses of sensualism are por-
trayed in the plainest language, appreciatively, skillfully and
even enthusiastically, and the art of Hades is called in to il-
lustrate the reeking pages. Carefully-sealed circulars are sent
out broadcast, mainly to young people, of both sexes, giving
lists of these books and their prices, and inviting orders.
College and academy catalogues are often used as mediums for
obtaining addresses, and the curiosity of the students is relied
upon as a powerful assistance to the traffickers. The books
are gloated over in secret, and are handed on from one youth to
another, until whole neighborhoods are deeply infected with
the virulent poison, and the gravest consequences ensue.
If
in the mysterious future beyond the tomb there is a torture
more horrible and pitiless than any other, it must be reserved
for the men who live by this infernal trade, and who lure inno-
cent souls into the downward paths of perdition for the sake
of a few dollars of gain. If the State may adjudge the, pen-
alty of death for those who slay the body, how much more
should it exterminate, as vipers or scorpions, those who brutal-
ize the youth and flower of the community, and thus prepare
unnumbered woes for society. Of late years, the Society for
the Suppression of Vice has dealt many vigorous and, valiant
blows at this hydra-headed monster, and has gained several
important successes.


II.
WHY YOUNG PEOPLE READ TRASH.
By CHARLES DUDLEY WARNER.
I"
T seems to be assumed, in all the discussions on Books
and Reading, that reading is, like exercise in the open
air, a good thing in itself ; that there is some virtue in the
mere act of reading without reference to the thing read. It is
true that the art of reading is a necessity in our modern life;
a person is at a great disadvantage without it ; but I fancy
that its value in the making of character, which is the great
object of life, is a little over-estimated. Certainly, when a
person has only learned how to read and not what to read, he
is in great peril.
Reading as a means of cultivation, or as a pastime, we must
remember, is altogether a modern habit, and it only prevails as
a general habit in a few countries. The great majority of
mankind get along without books and without newspapers,
and
15

16.
CHARLES DUDLEY WARNER.
still exhibit most of the essential virtues and all the vices of
reading communities. I knew a New England man who by
diligence and shrewdness had amassed a good fortune and
wore black broadcloth clothes every day; he understood men
and human nature, and by his ability he obtained control of
all the political movements of his region, and he used his
influence exactly as the reading politicians used theirs; and
yet he could not read a word, and could write nothing except
his name--he did not write that elegantly, but it had a good
appearance on a check. He was conspicuous in the com-
munity where he lived by reason of his literary deficiency, but
he would not have been in ancient Greece nor in modern
Italy. His education was that of the majority of successful
men in past ages, and even in not remote times, when the
clerkly accomplishments of reading and writing were con-
sidered effeminate. Most of our representatives at Washing-
ton can read—though some of them not to much purpose and
write, though they cannot all read their own writing, but many
of them. retain that old prejudice, not to say contempt, in
regard to the lettered class which men of action have always
felt. The first Napoleon was illiterate ; he was an insatiable
devourer of facts and ideas—that is, such as he could use for
himself—and he did not value the medium through which he
got them; he never resorted to books. He used the news-
WHY YOUNG PEOPLE READ TRASH.
17
papers, it is true, but exactly as he would use a squad of
soldiers, or a battery, or a flag of defiance or of truce; he used
them, as they have been used occasionally since his day, as a
medium to lie in. But there was one good thing about Na-
poleon : he had a wholesome fear of literature and literary
people ; he was able to apprehend their ability to diffuse ideas
which were hostile to his method of governing. Some of our
public men resemble him in that.
I think the extent of the habit of reading is much over-
estimated even in reading countries. There is a large reading
class in Germany, in China, in England, in America, in Ice-
land, and in the cities of France ; outside of these countries
and a few colonies reading is not indulged in. Of all these
countries the United States is the land in which the habit of
reading is most prevalent; and yet the most striking fact
about our population is that so few of them read when most
of them know how-I mean how to read to themselves, for so
rare is the accomplishment of reading out aloud that we have
to pay money to hear such performers on our language; they
are rarer than fair piano players. Nearly everybody takes a
daily snatch at the newspaper, at the summary of news or the
telegraph columns, and the base-ball record, and occasionally
persons follow for days the columns devoted to some singular
accident or curious murder-even women have acquired the

18
CHARLES DUDLEY WARNER.

run
art of deftly skimming the cream off the morning journal-
but comparatively few of the entire population, even the
educated, read books. Unless a book by some good luck
becomes the fashion and is recommended in conversation, few
see it; the number of people who originally seek out the
readable book from their habit of craving it is very small.
When a story becomes the fashion everybody reads it; but
who is everybody? Why, a new novel is to have a
if
ten thousand copies of it are published—ten thousand copies
for forty millions of people. And there are books that
“everybody” has read, and all the newspapers talk of, which
have not got beyond the third or fourth thousand. The late
Samuel Bowles once told me his experience. He had written
his capital book on the Far West at the time of the Pacific
railway excitement, when millions of people were eager for the
information his book contained. Never did book seem to be
in greater demand ; it was sold in England as well as in
America, and all the newspapers of both countries quoted
from it and commented on it. Mr. Bowles said that he never
met a person who had not read it—or who did not say he had
read it, I forget which. And yet, he asked, how
And yet, he asked, how many copies
dc you suppose satisfied this enormous demand of everybody ?
Fifteen thousand filled the market.
We boast about the circulation of our newspapers.
The
WHY YOUNG PEOPLE READ TRASH.
19
best of them are daily marvels of news, of information, of
miscellaneous reading, of entertainment of all sorts. They are
the cheapest things manufactured in modern days. Consider-
ing the capital in brains, industry and money put into every
number, they are at their price the wonder of our civilization.
And yet the most wonderful thing about them to me is the
smallness of their circulation compared to the population.
Take such a centre as New York, with a compact population
of nearly two millions, and radiating lines of quick distribution
that enable the newspapers within a few hours to reach
millions more, and set against this the actual circulation of the
three or four commanding journals. It is a mere bagatelle.
Still there are many newspapers, and a large proportion of
the population sees one every day—that is, of the city popu-
lation ; but the number of people who master the contents of a
daily newspaper is not large. Readers pick out of them the
items of business or amusement or politics that interest them.
And it is hardly fair to credit our people with the habit of
reading because they glance at the daily newspapers, or because
in the country they are in the habit of spreading the excellent
weeklies over their faces to keep the flies from disturbing their
Sunday nap. I believe that the majority of business men read
a book very rarely ; the majority of young men in business and
in society I fancy read little—they do not give their evenings


20
CHARLES DUDLEY WARNER.
to reading, and are not apt to take up a book unless it becomes
the talk of society. People who spend a great deal of money on
dress, on dinners, on amusement, would think it extravagant to
buy a book, and if one is commended to them they will wait till
they can borrow it or get it from the library. They do not
hesitate two minutes about an ordinary two dollar dinner, but
they will wait months to borrow a fifty cent book,
Those who have to deal with the education of the young
get revealing glimpses into the state of culture in the house-
holds of our highly intelligent country. A professor in one of
our leading colleges told me not long ago that a freshman came
to him, after he had been recommending certain books in the
literature class, and said he had never read a book in his life,
This was literally true; except his text books he had never
read a book; he had passed a fair examination, but of reading
he knew no more than a Kaffir. Another professor in another
college, also one of the highest in the country (both of these
are Eastern colleges, in the centre of the best culture in
America), told me more recently that a sophomore who stood
well in his class came to ask him where he obtained certain
facts which he referred to in the class-room.
It came out
that the young man never had read a book, didn't know what
the sensation was, or how to set about it, and had not the
faintest conception of literature. He had no notion of the
WHY YOUNG PEOPLE READ TRASH.
2 I
pleasure or profit to be got from reading; the world of books
was absolutely beyond his imagination, and he could not
conceive what people found in it. The professor at length
induced him to read one of Scott's novels, but the boy found
it a very tedious and uninteresting occupation. These two
instances are extreme, but only in a degree; a taste for liter-
ature is not common, and ignorance of it is common even
among college undergraduates.
And we might expect this to be the case where we see so
few households in which reading is a habit. Here in New
England there are books which have gradually accumulated in
almost every house. Not seldom
you will find a large number
of books, standard works, books of the best literature ; but in
some of these houses which have book-shelves lined with the
riches of all ages the questions you will most often hear are,
“What shall I read?” “What is there to read ?" Those
who ask these questions are readers after a sort; they are
probably the people who read the seventy per cent. of the
books drawn from the circulating libraries, this seventy per
cent. being the new novels.
Now, what I am coming at in this rambling paper is not
proof that reading is a good thing, though much might be said
in favor of the habit, and many people would not exchange
it for all Mr. Vanderbilt's wealth. I am seeking one of the

9

22
CHARLES DUDLEY WARNER.
reasons why the young who read at all read nothing but trash,
as they are said to do. It is because their parents, or older
persons about them, either have not the habit of reading or
they also read trash, In such households as I have described,
where the elders go about declaring that there is nothing to
read, the children catch the tone and think there is nothing to
read—that is, nothing except the latest story-book or the picture-
paper. In the lower strata of society, where the mother has
neither time nor inclination to read anything, and the father
pores over the “Police Gazette,” it is quite natural that his son
should take the “Boy's Own"
Own” story paper about ruffians and
burglars. The short of it is that the children in this country
follow their elders. And I suspect that the vast majority of
people care little for reading except as it furnishes them a smat-
tering of news or gives them a temporary excitement.
III.
WHAT TO READ.

BY FRED. B. PERKINS,
AS
S many persons, so many opinions,” says the Latin
proverb. Can there be a “ Ten Comandments” for
reading whose obvious universal simplicity and wisdom prove
them by the mere statement ? Not yet, if at all. At present
the question, “What shall we read ?” is almost as universal as the
question, “What did the Sirens sing ? The utmost that can
well be attempted is to set down a few hints about the present
state of things in the matter of reading-hints, if possible, not
entirely useless to the scholar and, if possible, of some service
to the average intelligent youth.
It is out of the question to read everything. There are some
eight thousand newspapers and periodicals in the United States
and Canada alone, from daily to quarterly, and almost every
one of them has some good original writing in it. Take the
23

24
FRED. B. PERKINS,
newspapers and periodicals of England and English America
only, and their issues (not number of copies, but number of
issues) are about 620,000 a year; all different, and a great
many very valuable. To read these, at say 300 working days
a year of ten hours each, you would have to turn off (roughly
counting) 2,066 a day, or 207 an hour, or about three and a
half a minute; about one in every eighteen seconds. Try,
,
now, what you can do in eighteen seconds with a Saturday's
Daily Tribune, triple sheet; or with one number of The Chris-
tian Union ; or with this single short paper. Why, it would be
a smart clerk who could unfold and lay out and cut the
periodicals as fast as that, ready for you to read. And this
without one book. The new books appear at say 25,000
volumes annually in Christendom, being about eight and a
half volumes per hour for your ten hour day's work. We can't
read everything.
Take another illustration of the extent of this "great and
terrible wilderness." There have been printed cyclopædias
almost ever since there was any printing. Now, in the scholas-
tic period, the whole body of attainable learning was con-
sidered to lie within two courses of study, one of three
branches, the other of four, often called the trivium and the
quadrivium, and together composing “the seven liberal arts ;'
and there was an old Latin phrase that was used to describe a

WHAT TO READ.
25
and astronomy.
complete scholar : “Qui tria, qui septem, qui omne scibile novit ;"
a man who knows the three, who knows the seven-in short,
who knows all that is to be known. Now, the names of these
two groups of studies will show how small was the range of
mediæval learning. The trivium, “the three,” were all con-
cerned about language; viz., grammar, logic and rhetoric.
The quadrivium, “the four,” were music, arithmetic, geometry
This was the whole of the seven liberal
arts;” the forms of thought, two departments of mathematics,
one accomplishment, and the study of the heavens without the
telescope. A cyclopædia of that day can be found in some
large library or bibliographer's collection. It was one small
quarto volume, not much larger than the school editions of
Webster's Dictionary; and it would be quite within practi--
cability to know it all by heart, as people have known the
Bible. But look at the current edition of the Encyclopædia
Britannica in twenty-two volumes, each of them at least five:
times as large as the whole Middle Age cyclopædia, and the
whole, therefore, a hundred and ten times as large. Vain the
attempt to commit.that to memory. But, further, we have one.
separate cyclopædia of one branch of knowledge, Ziems,
sen's Encyclopædia of Medical Science,” in seventeen volumes
about as large as those of the Encyclopædia Britannica; others
of mechanical science almost as extensive. Again I say, we


26
FRED. B. PERKINS.
can't read everything! Indeed, the very definition of a uni-
versal scholar has perforce changed. It is no longer a man who
knows everything, but only a man who knows how to look for
everything ; and even such scholars are not to be found grow-
ing on every bush.
How, then, to select ? What shall we read? Abundance of
codes are to be found. One is about as good as another.
Take, and follow, the first one you come across, only remem-
bering to do so no longer than you can enjoy it. Each is
commonly either a record of what the codifier has found to
suit his individual character, or what he has speculated out, or
has received, as necessarily best for all characters. Mr. Em-
erson's three rules, which I have had occasion to criticise
in another place, seem to be of the former class. They
are :
1. Never read any book that is not a year old,
2. Never read any but famed books.
3. Never read any books but what you like.
They are suggestions “How not to do it,” of course; cau-
tions rather than directions ; but I repeat that if you add to
each the clause unless you like,” they will do very well.
As to answering my own question, “What to read,” it cannot
be done in full in less than a volume. Within the
scope
of
this article it will be best not to attempt giving lists of books,
$
WHAT TO READ.
27
analyses and estimates, but to suggest something to assist read-
ers in making their own selections.
Road the great books, if you can (it is not every one who can
do it the first time he tries); the great poets, historians, phil-
osophers, even theologians. Anyone who has well read the
masterpieces (to read well a masterpiece is very nearly to de-
liberately study it) has the principal material for a well fur-
nished mind. The Bible; Homer, Virgil, Dante, Shakes-
peare, Milton, Goethe, Burns, Wordsworth, Hugo ; Æschylus,
Sophocles, Aristophanes, Molière ; Herodotus, Thucydides,
Livy, Sallust, Cæsar, Tacitus, Plutarch, Gibbon, Hallam ; Plato,
Aristotle, Bacon, Locke, Kant, Hamilton, Spencer-the
epoch-making" names as the Germans well call them ; one
who knows even moderately well the chief works of those men is
already liberally educated—and boys and girls can enjoy them
all, unless, perhaps, it be the final list of the philosophers. To
understand such works as these is to understand human life
and history in a broad, comprehensive way, as one understands
the main slopes and great river-valleys of a country by mount-
ing its highest peaks and looking abroad from them.
Read periodicals. Not idly and wastefully, but so as to keep
up with the truth of the present as well as to learn the truth of
the past. More and more, wise and good thoughts are pub-
lished in these temporary forms. Anyone who has access to a

66

28
FRED. B. PERKINS.
good number of them, and can acquire some faculty of selec-
tion, may choose say one article each out of six-or twenty-
magazines and papers, that will keep him abreast of the prog-
ress of the age.
A splendid feeling it is; like the swimmer's
delight of riding forward on great waves in the sea. You see all
the kingdoms of the world ; and General Butler—who hates the
newspapers—would say, shown them by the devil too. But it
is not so.
Much of the kindest and wisest thought of the day
brightens newspaper columns and magazine pages. The im-
portant thing is to avoid being limited to one journal ; to see
as many as possible, and to learn to choose what is valuable
and to skip the rest.
Amusing reading ; use with moderation. Some persons dis-
like it as a child does rhubarb and magnesia. I knew an ex-
ceptionally intelligent editor, a lively, genial man, who always
showed unfeigned distaste at fiction and the reading of it.
Probably a book of travels, a biography, a natural history,
would have been amusing to him. I know a lady of much cul-
ture, unusual excellence of character and high mental qualities,
who finds Pickwick a monotonously stupid book. Such a con-
dition of mind I cannot enter into. Select, therefore, for
amusement something that amuses you : a comic almanac if it
amuses you ; and from that upward to the thoughts of Joubert
or Pascal or Antoninus.
But take this amusement as you
WHAT TO READ.
29
would take dancing, or fishing, or a nap in your chair : when
you really properly may. At other times refrain from it. In
work-time, work; in rest-time, rest.
History is the backbone, natural science excepted. Unless his-
torically, upon the basis of the utmost possible historical
knowledge, there can be no thorough acquaintance with theol-
ogy, philosophy, political economy, social conditions and af-
fairs-in short, with all human life and progress and activity
on earth ; though of course the routine drudgery of business
and investigation in physics do not require it. Let the general
rule, therefore, be to have all your reading and all your
think-
ing upon the best and fullest body of historical knowledge
that you can acquire. Read, to begin with, one good summary
of universal history, and commit to memory a short chronology,
at the rate of one or two facts and dates to a century ; read
one good history of your own country (Hildreth's is the best
one), and one of your own State and town, if such there be ;
then a good history of England, then one of France, one of
Germany, and so on, filling out the series as far as circumstan-
ces permit.
Employ the coöperative methods. Make full use of
Make full use of any library
within reach, and join a book club if you can.
What has thus been said may be summed up in a few
words:


30
FRED. B. PERKINS.
The utmost possible reading is a very little out of an enor-
mous mass.
Codes of rules for reading may be tried but must not be re-
lied on.
The famous books are, above all, indispensable.
Judicious use of a selection of periodicals is highly desir-
able.
Mere amusement in reading should be only cautiously in-
dulged.
Historical methods are the only sound ones in most lines of
reading
The coöperative methods should be used.
IV.

PLANS OF READING.
BY FRED. B. PERKINS,
HA
AVING dealt in a preceding paper-in an imperfect
way enough, it is true-with some general notions
about reading, my idea now is to suggest a course of reading.
But the fact is that, in the general sense of the words, the
thing cannot be done. There is no one course of reading
which is the ideal best one any more than there exists Plato's
ideal tree, being (he thought) the tree, in general or in the ab-
stract; and he said it existed somewhere. As soon state ex-
actly the one best career in life. A course of reading on all
subjects ? On what single class or single subject ? For a youth
or an adult ? For one of defective education, of average, or of
superior ?. For study, for information, for accomplishment or
for pleasure ?
It is true that a general course can be laid out, as was done
31

32
FRED. B. PERKINS.
by Chancellor Kent and by many others; but the vast extent
and dry aspect of such a course is a real Sahara to be scared
away from; not a “paradise of dainty devices to be attracted
into. A general course can be laid out, but it cannot be fol-
lowed, at least, not unless there is a great part of a life-time
to give to it. Two points, therefore, I shall state to begin
with: First, any general course of reading, long or short,
will almost certainly be mainly historical ; as, for instance, Py-
croft's, the most sensibly handled of any of the sort in Eng-
lish ; where his historical part (including biography and col-
laterals) fills nearly five-sixths of his whole book. And,
second, partial courses within the limits of some period in
time, or on some definitely limited subject of research, or within
some distinct lines of acquirement, can always be made inter-
esting and profitable, and can be followed. One of two such
courses, will show, I think, very easily, what I say cannot be
done, and what can be.
Suppose, then, first, a young farmer, merchant or mechanic,
with a common school education and perhaps a year or two of
academy besides, whose object in reading is not merely to do
some reading, not merely to “improve his mind,” but to do a
better, because more definitely practicable, thing, something
well worthy of manly ambition and manly thought-we will
say, to give himself a competent education as a voter or
FLANS OF READING.
33
American sovereign. European sovereigns are most carefully
and elaborately trained for their profession-and so ought ours
to be.
For such a purpose I know no better first book than that
plain, dignified and powerful old-fashioned narrative, Mar-
shall's “Life of Washington.” The great and upright lawyer's
simple and strong account of the great and upright general
and ruler's life is full of high and healthy lessons. At the end,
read Washington's farewell address twice. And then read, if
it can be done with pleasure, or even without too much fatigue,
" The Federalist.” That monumental exposition of the very
bones and vitals and heartstrings of our national organization
is not obsolete yet, and will not be very soon ; and, while of
the highest importance always, it is especially so
at this
moment. I wish no man could vote next year who could not
pass a fair examination in “The Federalist.”. Still, if this mas-
sive structure of systematic reasoning is found too hard, put it
by for some later year. I can hardly imagine a voter of any na-
tural goodness of character casting a careless or unprincipled
vote after a careful reading of Marshall. If Marshall's “Life
of Washington ” cannot be got take Irving's.
Lives of great men are vivifying centres of historic knowla.
edge. Using the law of contrast, take now Plutarch's Lives"
and read them, and consider, as you go on, the differences be...


34
FRED. B. PERKINS.
tween an ancient heathen and a modern Christian great man.
And as you closed Washington's Life with his farewell address,
close the series of Plutarch's heroes with a thoughtful reading
—if you can find it interesting enough—of the “ Thoughts of
the Emperor. Marcus Aurelius Antoninus.". These two works
will show you the best things that the heathens could do or
think-Plutarch is action, Antoninus is morality.
Follow this somewhat pictorial method of beginning with a
short course of history intended to present the progress of civ-
ilization and to give materials for a general view of humanity
as a body, as the previous books were meant to exhibit noble
individual and political and moral ideas. First comes Grote's
Greece ;" and, if Finlay's is accessible (it is too little
known), read that. These two books give an excellent and
unbroken account of Grecian history from the mythological
times down to and through the Greek Revolution. If Grote's
eight volumes and Finlay's seven are too much, substitute
Smith continued by Felton, which comes down to 1855 in one
volume. Next, Mommsen's “Rome," and then Gibbon's “De-
cline and Fall,” which do, after a fashion, for Rome what
Grote and Finlay do for Greece. And if these are too long
(together ten or twelve volumes), substitute Liddell's, Lord's,
or Smith's single volume. For the Middle Ages read Hal-
and if that is not to be hąd, Robertson's “View of
lam ;
PLANS OF READING.
35
Europe in the Middle Ages will do very well, and so will
Green's History of the Middle Ages ;” and when the his-
tory is thus gone over read Froissart's " Chronicles " for a
wonderfully striking and life-like contemporary account.
Now take Russell's or Dyer's “Modern Europe,” then Ali-
son's (1789 to 1852); always remembering that Alison is dis-
tinctly a Tory (aristocratic and anti-republican) writer.
Having thus secured a connected view of the main story of
human progress, narrow the scope and complete the study of
this historical course by a few books on England and our own
country. Green's “ History of the English People ” (the sec-
ond enlarged edition) is perhaps the best of the short histo-
ries ; if there is time for a longer one read Knight's “ Popular
History,” eight volumes ; and follow this with Stubbs' “ Con-
stitutional History of England,” if you do not find it too
tough ; this is a very instructive book, but very solid, too:
Read, for enjoyment at least as much as for instruction, Mac-
aulay's history, which (with a preliminary sketch) covers the
period from 1685 to 1702 (James II and William III). For the
period from William III to the end of our Revolutionary war
read Lord Mahon's (afterward Earl Stanhope) history. In
like manner as Macaulay and Mahon give repeated and more
detailed accounts of interesting periods, it will be useful to
read Miss Martineau's “ History of the Peace,” following on


36
FRED. B. PERKINS.
Alison's account of the Napoleonic wars, and very opposite to
him in spirit, covering the time from 1800 to 1854.
Having thus viewed, though briefly, mankind in social prog-
ress from the dawn of history to the present generation, and
then reviewed more closely that particular nation whose blood
and manners and institutions, more than any other, we inherit,
it remains to study our own nation, with whose greatest his-
toric figure we began. Hildreth's history (6 vols. 8vo.) is the
best ; it comes down to 1820; but it is dry. Bryant's (so-
called) will do reasonably well ; it is to have one more vol-
ume yet—four large octavos in all ; and Ollier's, known as
Cassell's, is also a fairly good book. Indeed, any one of the
one-volume high-school histories—Willard's, Wilson's, Quack-
enboss'-has more in it than any ordinary person can remem-
ber. And now I would have “The Federalist,” if it proved
impregnable at first, tried it again, and I would follow it
with Dr. Von Holst's “ Constitutional History of the United
States.” Then I would have my young man read the history
of his own State—there is one, sometimes good and some-
times not so good, for almost afl of them—and the history of
his own town or city, if there is one, and, lastly, the Constitu-
tion of his own State, and the municipal ordinances of his
town or city, if any; and I believe that young man will
make an intelligent, judicious and useful voter ; and, besides
PLANS OF READING.
37
that, it will be very strange if during this course of reading he
has not noted a good many questions on which to read
further, or other books to examine. Such a course ought to
give him a start at least as an independent selector for him-

self.
I have not space enough left to describe any other course so
fully, but one or two of different sorts may be barely indicated.
Biographical. A peculiary fresh and interesting view of
general or special history can be obtained by selecting a series
of Lives, or Lives and Times, of the most prominent and in-
fluential personages who have appeared among men. Here it
will be found that the earliest biographies are Biblical, that of
Moses being probably the best to begin with. The chain can
not be kept unbroken, but some such succession could be made
out as this : Moses ; the founder of a nation, David ; the rise
of empire. Confucius ; a heathen moral philosophy ; Pericles ;
a civilized Greek dictatorship. Socrates ; a Greek mission for
free inquiry. Alcibiades ; Greek “personal politics." De-
mosthenes; Greek patriotic democracy. Xenophon ; Greek
soldiership and literature. Plato ; Greek idealism. Aristotle ;
Greek national science. Alexander; Greek conquest. Han-
nibal; fighting it out in a losing cause.
Mathias and the
Maccabæan family; patriotism upheld by a true religion,
Cæsar ; Roman military genius, literature and statesmanship.

38
FRED. B. PERKINS.
7
Augustus ; Roman administration.
Herod; a tyranny.
Christ; a. Redeemer. I need not continue the list, but of
course the materials become rapidly more sufficient, and then
ample, and then overpowering. It must not be supposed that
such a series represents any systematic development or succes-
sion on any single principle except, in a general way, the prin-
ciple that the world improves. It is now a personal quality,
now a national tendency, now an almost ideal cause" that
is represented, as the varying tides of the stream of time shift
one way and another. Separate books on the great majority
of such men are to be found ; such as the brief histories of
Alexander the Great, Hannibal and Julius Cæsar, by Mr. J. S.
C. Abbott, which would do very well for most readers; and,
on the principles of library cataloguing as now practised, the
books which any library has about each will appear in the cata-
logue under his name in its alphabetical place.
Literary ; by masterpieces. One of Emerson's rules about
reading to which I have before referred is, never to read
any but “famed books.” That I do not believe is a
wise rule ; it is too exclusive ; but I can imagine very pro-
found delight in a course of reading of the masterpieces of
human intellect in their chronological order; first coming
down the line of the poets, then of the dramatists, then of the
historians, then of the biographers, then of the philosophers (if
PLANS OF READING.
39
it be possible to read them), then of the wits and humorists,
then of the romancers, then of the essayists, and so on.
Religious; by sacred books. This, it is true, requires too
much learning for its adequate study to be suited to popular
reading ; but is worth a brief reference by way of comparison.
We have the Chinese classics, the Buddhist Tripitaka, the
Brahminical Vedas, the Zoroastrian Zend Avesta, the Sikh Adi
Granth, the Greek Theogony of Hesiod (which comes as near
being a sacred book as any they had), the Jewish Talmud, the
Mohammedan Koran, the Scandinavian Edda, the Christian
Bible. All these, or sufficient parts of them for the purpose,
have now been translated into English. Much of many of
them is inexpressibly dreary reading ; and yet the study of
them in their historic and moral and spiritual relations is pro-
foundly instructive and fascinating.
I have thus attempted to show how, instead of attempting to
fix on one great (and as I believe impracticable and impossible)
single ideal course of reading, the useful way must be to aim
at something much more modest ; at one or another partial
course, such as to fall within the possible reading time of one
who has a living to earn. I cannot stop without adding that
whatever is read, or is not, a good newspaper, coming not more
seldom than weekly, should be read as a matter of duty The
perfect newspaper does not exist. If, now, there could be


40
FRED. B. PERKINS.
me.
combined the merits (so far as they differ) of the New York
I'ribune and I'he Christian Union, the result would about suit
But a paper of their grade and general purposes and at-
tainments will constantly keep the mind wide awake, and con-
stantly suggest interesting trains of historical deduction, by the
connection, every now and then, of to-day's news with any and
every historical course of reading.
1

V.
PLANS OF READING.
BY CYRUS HAMLIN.
M
AKE yourself familiar with De Quincey's distinction
between the “literature of knowledge” and the
"literature of power,” and Ruskin's between “ books of the
hour” and “books of all time." The former is found in De
Quincey's, “Letters to a Young Man whose education has been
neglected," the latter in Ruskin's “Sesame and Lilies" in the
lecture on Kings' Treasuries. In applying these distinctions
do not forget the range of power we are to cultivate. It is not
alone the feeling hopeful and strong that we want, but the ac-
tually having power in the various calls of life ; as well among
the needy, the sick, the sorrowing, as in the ordinary social
gathering, and with congenial friends, and in our own thoughts
and
purposes. Starting with this intent, there are several alter-
natives to choose between.
41

42
CYRUS HAMLIN.
One might set about gaining an acquaintance with the great
facts and events of history; those that have most powerfully
affected mankind. Take, for example, the rise and spread of
Christianity, the Crusades, the revival of learning, the Refor-
mation of the 16th century, the Puritan Revolution in Eng-
land. Such a course would naturally lead to an acquaintance
with the great movements of thought among men, the develop-
ment of the various forms of art, of music, of literature; Eng-
lish literature first and chief.
Another, and for many a more interesting way of arriving at
substantially the same result, would be to take the great char-
acters of history. It is no small thing, to begin with, to be in
this way deeply impressed with the fact that there have been
in the world men so different from their fellows in some way,
so distinguished above them in will, or imagination, or power
of intellect or of action, that they may properly be called
great. The impression of such a character is one of the most
vivifying and health-giving that can be made upon the mind of
either young or old. It is a great mistake to consider the his-
tory of mankind as simply the history of its greatest men. At
the same time the lives of great men furnish a very convenient
means of acquaintance with history in general. But the more
important advantage is the acquaintance with great qualities,
with great forces of character, which are the great forces of so-
PLANS OF READING.
43
ciety and the world. And more light will be thrown upon your
own character and life, on what is needful and possible for you,
than by much study of self.
A list of names could easily be made out which would give
the very essence of human history and life. It would of course
vary with the taste of the reader, or the judgment of the coun-
sellor. The following is only a partial hint of what one might
be, taking names in different departments representing great
epochs, traits of character and movements of thought : Con-
stantine, St. Augustine, Charlemagne, Alfred the Great, St.
Anselm, Richard I of England, Wiclif, Simon de Montfort,
Savonarola, Luther, William of Orange, Queen Elizabeth of
England, Michael Angelo, Cromwell, Beethoven. There is an
English book, not republished in this country, very convenient
and valuable in such a plan and worthy of being read in any
placing : “Lectures on Great Men," by F. Myers. There is
not space here to indicate individual biographies.
If you are not attracted by any consecutive plan, propose to
yourself to become familiar with the great books of the world ;
those that men will not let die. A capital introduction to them
is through the series of “Ancient Classics for English readers,”
edited by Collins, and “Foreign Classics,” edited by Mrs.
Oliphant, together with the series of “ English Men of Let-
ters.” But do not undertake to read all. Select the most


4+
CYRUS HAMLIN.
notable. And do not merely read about the authors and the
books. Read the great books themselves, and read them
studiously. Of the larger works, or collections, read portions.
Everyone, for example, ought to read of Plato, the “ Apology
of Socrates," the “Crito,” the “Phædo," the latter with due
regard to the unsoundness of its reasoning. Publishers of
'Libraries” could do worse than issue some of these dialogues
in cheap form.
If you desire a less extensive plan, and your taste runs in
that direction, take the great poets : Homer, Æschylus, Sopho-
cles, Euripides, Virgil, Dante, Spenser, Shakespeare, Milton.
Make each a centre of study. Read the poems, or the
dramas; then group other reading about these ; work out
from each one in the directions which may be suggested, or
may be most attractive to you-poetry, literary criticism, phil-
osophy, history. Such a plan, while most interesting, will lead
into the regions of the deepest experience of mankind, the
truest and best thought and emotion that the heart of man
knows, and will also by natural connection lead to much of the
rmost important history.
In fact, it matters but little where one begins if there be a
thorough purpose to go forward. Human nature, with all its
vagaries, is so thoroughly one that thoughtful study will carry
one from the starting-point into all the chief fields of thought
PLANS OF READING.
45
and research, not by the mere hunting out every name that
may be mentioned, or every classical or historical allusion,
but by the natural current and affiliation of the main drift
of the work, its leading ideas, its great sentiments and pas-
sion.
Another outline is suggested by one of the features of John
Ruskin's scheme for the training of English youth-the St.
George's Company. His intent, if I remember correctly, is
that the associates in the company shall correctly learn, among
other things, the history of five cities-Athens, Rome, Venice,
Florence, London. To these should be added Jerusalem, as a
centre of the most important early religious history. Such a
plan would combine in the most comprehensive and varied
way the different elements of interest and instruction in the
long and strange experience of men, and would bring one into
direct acquaintance with the most important developments of
human nature and the moral and intellectual powers, most con-
stant and efficient, in the past and the present, in moulding the
convictions, the hopes and the daily conduct of men. А.
particular commendation of this course is that, if faithfully
pursued, it will lead one to consider the principles of polit-
ical life and the relations of men in society, and so throw
light on those questions which are daily gaining in interest


40
CYRUS HAMLIN.
and gravity, and which no intelligent person can afford to
neglect.
The purpose of these plans is not entertainment, though any
of them will furnish this in abundance ; nor the acquirement
of knowledge, though they all lead to this. They start from
and return to the idea that the object of our reading, as of any
serious thought, is to know how to live ; that therefore we
must know the world in which we live, and that is as much a
world of reason, imagination, affection, as it is of physical toil,
or business struggle, or social ambition.
We live by admiration, hope and love. You can hardly
take a better guide in your reading. What things to de-
light in with reverence, what things to hope for, and what
things to love deeply and purely—this is what you want
from books and in books just as from and in living persons.
Το
pass through the simple experiences of human nature,
the responsibilities, the hopes, the griefs as well as the glad-
nesses, that attach to our common lot, to taste them in their
pureness, to bear them with quietness and courage, to do our
work with all our heart—this is a great thing ; to gain help
for this is the great purpose in our reading, as in every friend-
ship and all endeavor. And one of the chiefest blessings of
books is that they bring to us the spirit of those who have
felt the most deeply and acted the most manfully. They
PLANS OF READING.
47
cannot take the place of actual experience, but they pre-
pare for it. They interpret it to us ; they bring to the light
much that lies undiscerned in our own natures, and rightly
used, guide the way to the true fellowship of patient and noble
living which makes all men akin.


VI,
PLANS OF READING.
HENRY WARD BEECHER'S METHOD.*
L
use
AICUS. What are your methods of reading and of
preserving the results of what you read ?
Mr. Beecher. I read for three things ; first, to know what
the world has done in the last twenty-four hours, and is
about to do to-day ; second, for the knowledge which I
specially want to in my work; and, third, for what
will bring my mind into a proper mood. Different authors
produce different effects upon my mind. Amongst the
authors whom I frequently read are De Tocqueville, Mathew
Arnold, Madame Guyon, and some of the old religious writ-
ers—some of the mystical ones. Thomas à Kempis' “Im-
itation of Christ I keep within reach of my hands, both
up stairs, and down. The frets and cares of life are apt
* An exact stenographic report of an actual conversation.
48
PLANS OF READING.
49
to keep the lower section of the brain perturbed, and when
you want to go to work on anything you are apt to carry
trouble with you.
There is an under-swell of discontent and
unhappiness in you which unfits for the work which you want
to do, and some authors have the peculiar quality of lifting
you out of that into a serene and happy state. They excite
the imagination and moral sentiment and lift me away above
the dust into a state of mind in which I can work with facility
and pleasure.
Laicus. Does fiction serve you in that way?
Mr. Beecher. Sometimes it does; but generally not.
There are some authors of fiction whose works I like, but I
usually prefer some work of solid information,
I find I can
enter to a very large extent oftentimes into the feelings which
inspired the author when he wrote the book, and can tell what
fibre of the man's mind was stirred as he wrote it. I feel it
sensitively in mine, and a certain high temper and tone are at-
tractive and exciting and uplifting to me.
Laicus. What is the use of poetry in that respect ?
Mr. Beecher. It depends on whose it is. Poetry that
elevates and poetry that gratifies are very different indeed ;
there is a great deal of interesting poetry that does not lift
you, but merely entertains you where you are. But there is
some poetry which carries you up to a higher sphere, particu-


50
H. W. BEECHER.
any other
other way.
larly John Milton's prose-poetry, and the writings of men like
old Daniel. He is not much read now-a-days. This is also
true of some of Shakespeare's sonnets, which are perhaps the
most wonderful of anything he ever wrote.
Laicus. This is reading to get yourself into a right state of
mind; what we may call moral hygienic reading. On what
do you depend for your knowledge of current thought-upon
books or upon periodicals ?
Mr. Beecher. I gather it from both books and periodicals,
and from conversation with men, from whom I get much that
cannot be learned in
I am a very slow
reader.
Laicus. I have always told people just the reverse ; and I
am going to tell them the same on this point, notwithstanding
your statement.
I once went to your house (you have perhaps
forgotten it) and gave you the proof-sheets of a book on phren-
ology, of about three hundred pages,
I
suppose,
which I want-
ed you to look through. You got up from the table and went
and sat down in the window ; you took the book, turning over
the leaves, sometimes apparently half a dozen at a time, saying
as you went through the book : “That isn't true; that's
what I have been preaching all my life ; ” “nonsense ; that's
a pretty good idea ; “never thought of this in that way be-
fore," etc., and by the time we were half-way through the des-
9) 66
PLANS OF READING.
51
sert you had finished the book and given me your opinion
on it.
I
Mr. Beecher. I could do that on a subject with which I was
already very familiar, but not otherwise. Reading with me in-
cites to reflection instantly. I cannot separate the origination
of ideas from the reception of ideas ; the consequence is, as I
read I always begin to think in various directions, and that
makes my reading slow ; and that being the origin of it psy-
chologically, it has grown into such a habit that if I read a
novel even, I read slowly. A common story that my wife
would read in less than twenty-four hours I generally take two
or three weeks to get through, though not necessarily so.
read a few chapters, lay the book aside, and take it up again at
some other time. I find no difficulty in doing that.
Laicus. How do you make your selection of books from
the great number that are published ? How do you judge what
is worth reading and what is not ?
Mr. Beecher. Emerson says that a book ought never to be
read before it is twenty years old.
Laicus. That's not your rule, is it ?
Mr. Beecher. No. I never inquire about the age of the
book, but I am largely guided in purchasing them by men
whose business it is to be posted in books. There are certain
men to whom I can go and ask, “What is this author ? What


52
H. W. BEECHER.
is the standing of this book? What has been said about it?"
and they will tell me in a few moments just what I want to
know. They can describe a book just as Sir Joseph Hooker
can describe a plant. I go to men in that regard as I do in
everything else. Whenever I want anything I go to the man
whose business it is to be informed on the matter, and when I
have been to two or three men of that sort I can often make
out of what I have got from them a better statement than any
one of them could make for himself.
Laicus. How is it in respect to old books—Plato, Bacon,
and the like?
Mr. Beecher. Bacon I have read, but I cannot say I ever
absorbed Bacon as I have John Milton.
I have read a great
deal of Edmund Burke. At one time he was a great favorite
with me; and so was Dr. Johnson for a time ; and the old
théologians, Barrow and South, I also largely read. Barrow is
the one solitary man speaking the English tongue who was a
master of adjectives, and could use them endlessly and never
once amiss ; for, to a large extent, adjectives are like leaves on
a switch ; they may make it look pretty, as a branch, but they
prevent it striking tinglingly when you use it. They cover up
and smother the sense, and a style that is choice in its adjec-
tives is far preferable to one that abounds in adjectives. I
recollect a case in which my father at a public meeting
PLANS OF READING.
53
was appointed to draw up an article. He had written one
sentence: “It is wrong." Some one in the meeting got up
and moved in his enthusiasm that this be corrected, and that
the sentence read : “It is exceedingly wrong.” My father got
up and said, in his mild way, When I was writing out this
resolution in its original shape that was the way I wrote it; but,
to make it stronger, I took out the 'exceedingly.'”
Laicus. You have made no mention as yet of reading for
style, except incidentally.
Mr. Beecher. ' I never read for style.
Laicus. Would you
advise
young men to do so ?
Mr. Beecher. I think a young man might read for style
profitably ; but, after all, reading for style has a very limited
function after a man gets ideas. The best essay on style that
I know is that by Herbert Spencer; and every young man
ought to get it, read it and practise it. He says that is the
best style which takes the thought or feeling or fancy of the
speaker, and has the power of reproducing it on the retina of
another person's mind. Though the manner and the moods
of doing this may vary in detail, there are certain great fixed
principles which do not vary. First among these Herbert
Spencer places this: that it is to be done with the least
possible labor to the person receiving the idea ; and in this
respect he is directly opposed to Coleridge, who puts forward


54
H. W. BEECHER.
the theory that a man who has to dig for knowledge gets more
benefit than one who acquires it without the trouble of dig-
ging.
Laicus. Don't you suppose your soaking yourself in John
Milton has affected your style ?
Mr. Beecher. It gave me a conception of power and vigor
which I otherwise should not have had. I got fluency out of
Burke very largely, and I obtained the sense of adjectives out
of Barrow, besides the sense of exhaustiveness. He possesses
that rare merit of being exhaustive but never exhausting.
Laicus. I find in regard to myself that certain writers
stimulate me ; that is true of Emerson and true of Carlyle. I
don't pretend to be a student of Emerson ; but he always sets
me thinking. There are some other writers I read, who are
enervating. And I often find that my mind insensibly drifts
somewhat into the methods of the last author I have read.
Mr. Beecher. That will not do any harm, because it only
lasts a little while ; it is the habit of some sympathetic na-
tures ; but it cures itself with the next new author they take
up. If I were to read this week in some of the nöbler writ-
ings of John Milton, you would hear the trumpet sounding
next Sunday in Plymouth Church.
Laicus. Have you anything to say about reading history ?
Mr. Beecher. I should urge it. It is one of those things
PLANS OF READING.
55
which, like languages, it is very desirable to be acquainted
with, and, if a young man is early put through it, is likely to
be valuable to him during his life. But I don't believe muchi.
in history.
It is very imperfect testimony of men's natures
and thoughts, and gives one-sided views of their actions.
You have to correct it yourself all the time, which you never
will do. Average history is the most ingenious of fictions.
Laicus. What plan would you recommend to a young man
for preserving the results of his reading ? Have you yourself
pursued any method to develop the habit of retentiveness of
the subject-matter you read ?—which is a very important
thing
Mr. Beecher. I never had the power of retaining sen-
tences ; I seldom lose thoughts. I absorb the thoughts. My
reading is like rain-drops, which, pattering down on the lake,
become the lake itself. I never could repeat anything, It
was the stone of stumbling and the rock of offense that as a
boy I could never repeat the catechism ; I do not believe I
co’ld quote a dozen passages of Scripture correctly, and I do
not know a hymn in the English language I could recite.
Laicus. Have you any plan of marking books, or of
journalizing or copying the pith of what you read ?
Mr. Beecher. No. But I think a common-place book a
very good thing indeed. I would advise every young man to

1

56
H. W. BEECHER,
get into the habit of keeping something of the sort. The
great point is to read nothing without reflection. Dr. Macau-
lay, who used to preach in New York, told me when he was a
boy at college that he began to read enthusiastically, but that
at the foot of every page he read he stopped and obliged him-
self to give an account of what he had read on that page. At
first he had to read it three or four times before he got his
mind firmly fixed. But he rigorously compelled himself to
conform to the process, until now he says after he has read a
book through once he can almost recite it from the beginning
to the end. It is a very simple habit to form early in life, and
is invaluable for acquiring accuracy and thorough knowledge
of the material with which a man has to deal.

VII.
THE ART OF READING.
BY HAMILTON W. MABIE,
E
VERY intelligent traveler who travels with a purpose
outlines his route, selects the places of interest which he
desires to visit and carefully apportions his time. If one is to
traverse a certain area of territory in a given period his move-
ments must be guided by forethought and method.
He can-
not afford to gratify his vagrant impulses by loitering at one
point and another as his moods suggest,
Reading is mental traveling through regions far more various
and attractive than any which the longest routes of terrestrial
journeyings afford. The tourist annihilates space, the reader
destroys both space and time. The world of thought and ac-
tion is spread out before him, and his greatest difficulty is apt
to be that he does not know how to traverse it. He wastes his
time in short and unprofitable excursions when he might be
taking account of the antipodes.
57
58
HAMILTON W. MABIE.

Many people expend in desultory reading time and effort
that, wisely directed, would make them masters of epochs and
literatures. The art of reading is to read in such a way that
with the utmost economy of time one can secure the richest re-
sults. Reading habits are generally formed, as are other hab-
its, unconsciously. One who is just beginning to read or one
who has already read much can form good reading habits, and
so acquire the art of reading, as easily as any other habits can
be formed, and no easier. Attention to a few rules for a rea-
sonable time will result in the unconscious adoption of the
rules by the mind which makes them habits, and relieves one
from any further conscious effort. The art of reading cannot
be conveyed in a single article, and two or three practical sug-
gestions to busy people must be the limit of the present ef-
fort.
We cannot all be scholars, because scholarship demands un-
interrupted hours and a continuous and absorbing attention,
which in most cases the demands of active life make impossi-
ble; but anyone who has access to books may become educa-
ted in a very liberal sense and without infringing on daily du-
ties, if he only knows how to set about it. An element of the
first importance is time. Many busy people declare that they
have no time for reading; but they are mistaken. They have
all the time there is, and some of the world's busiest men have
7

THE ART OF READING.
59
found that enough to make themselves accomplished in one or
more departments of knowledge. The trouble is not lack of
time but wasteful habits in regard to it. Many persons enter-
tain the notion that one must have regular and definite hours
of the day or week set apart for reading in order to accom-
plish anything valuable. There never was a greater mistake.
The busiest life has margins of time which may serve, like the
borders of the old missals, to enrich and exalt the common-
places written between. Fifteen minutes in the morning and
as many in the evening devoted faithfully to reading will add
appreciably in the course of a few months to one's store of
knowledge. Always have a book at hand, and, whether the
opportunity brings you two hours or ten minutes, use it to the
full. An English scientist learned a language in the time his
wife kept him waiting for the completion of her evening toi-
lettes; and at the dinner given to Mr. Froude in this city some
years ago, Mr. Beecher said that he had read through that
author's brilliant but somewhat lengthy history in the intervals
of dinner. Every life has pauses between its activities. The
time spent in local travel in street-cars and ferries is a golden
opportunity, if one will only resolutely make the most of it.
It is not long spaces of time but the single purpose that turns
every moment to account that makes great and fruitful acquisi-
tions possible to men and women who have other work in life.

60
HAMILTON W. MABIE.
In order to have a book always at hand one must decide in
advance what he is going to read next. For lack of this kind
of forethought many readers waste time enough to make them-
selves good literary scholars. They are never quite decided
what to get and generally end with the first volume that comes
to hand, which is likely to be something of only passing in-
terest, if not entirely worthless. Therefore by all means adopt
some system. Get from an experienced friend or make up for
yourself a list of books. Take an epoch and read its history,
its literature, its art, its discoveries ; take a literature and mas-
ter it, author by author, with the aid of a good general history;
or make a list of the standard books on some subject that in-
terests you,
and read them. In whatever direction your taste
may guide you, if it is a healthy one, go, but mark out your
path before you start so that you need lose no time on the way.
Having put your list in some convenient form resolutely adhere
to it. This may involve some effort at first, but one cannot
get substantial results of any kind without some persistency,
certainly not from reading. Macaulay looks formidable, but
it is astonishing how, when the charm of a book makes itself
felt, the pages seem to grow shorter, and how a degree of per-
sistence possible even to an undisciplined mind will take one
through the most formidable histories,
To get the best results from reading one must give himself
THE ART OF READING.
61
up to it. For the time being every object but the printed
page must be forgotten. One must be entirely abstracted from
his surroundings. This suggestion will not be so easily adopted
as those already given. It involves an amount of mental dis-
cipline which one naturally shrinks from. There is, however,
the widest difference in results between reading with a mind
continually diverted by the things that are going on around
one, and reading with a mind intently and absorbingly fixed on
the subject in hand. The busy reader must not only carry his
book with him, he must make his study wherever he happens
to be. A book photographs itself on a mind which exposes to
it a clear and sensitive surface. To sit in a railway car, and
by opening the pages of a book to transport one's self in a sec-
ond into the age of Pericles or the gardens of the Medici at
Florence, is the modern version of Aladdin's lamp, and makes

one master of treasures more rare and lustrous than those
which adorned the palaces of Bagdad.
a usted

VIII.
THE CHOICE OF BOOKS.
BY EDWARD EVERETT HALE,
WHE
67
HEN a young man or a young woman, fresh from
school, has the good luck for the first time to sit
silent and listen to the talk of a group of well-read people, I
think that, mingled with the pleasure of listening, there is apt
to come in a feeling of despair. “How do they know so
much?” How can they have read so much, and where shall
I begin ?” I knew a young man, who afterward became in-
sane, who was so impressed by his own ignorance that he went
to the college librarian and asked him at which end of the
library it was customary for students to begin. He used to
tell the story in college, as if he had asked a fool's question,
It is a question to which the wisest men have addressed them-
selves, with varying success. The most intricate plans for the
arrangement of libraries and catalogues have been made in
62
THE CHOICE OF BOOKS.
63
answer.
the hope of helping a solution. For the question is: By
which avenue shall we best enter the domain of literature, so
that in the shortest time we may go through all its side-avenues,
cross-paths and mazes? And, indeed, the question involves
the other question: Would it not be better to go first upon a
high tower and look down upon the maze, or, perhaps, to take
a quick bicycle-run through the largest paths, by way of in-
troduction to that slow plodding on foot of a life-time in which
one shall at last come to the knowledge of every detail ?
To these questions I do not propose any scientific or logical
That would be the business rather of orators address-
ing the Phi Beta Kappa, or the Alpha Delta Phi, or other
literary societies. I shall rather try to give some practical
recipes which work well, and for which if I were challenged I
could give the theory; but I shall here leave out the theory,
though I may sometimes suggest it.
In the first place, we must make this business agreeable.
Whichever avenue we take into the maze must be one of the
pleasant avenues, or else, in a world which the good God has
made very beautiful, the young people will go a-skating, or
a-fishing, or a-swimming, or a-voyaging, and not a-reading, and
no blame to them. Now, we shall not insure this pleasant-
ness of the work by any well-digested list of books beginning
with “Stone's History of the Neolithic Ages,” “Stock's His-

1

64
EDWARD EVERETT HALE.
> 66
tory of the Idolaters,' "Long's Essay on the Laws of Descent,"
and coming out on “Drone's Conspectus of Future Civiliza-
tion.” We learn something worth learning when we see that
in public libraries the first volumes of histories are much more
worn than the second, the second than the third, while the
fifth and sixth are scarce worn at all. This means that the
young readers, who started as numerous as the pilgrims on
Mirza's bridge, fell by the way as rapidly as they did. And, as
only one English officer came up to General Jackson's line alive
and then turned around amazed to ask why his men did not
follow him, so there is hardly one in a thousand who attacks Lin-
gard or Froude with the audacity of youth who ever comes
out with the laurels of victory at the end of the tenth or
twelfth volume. Alexander Everett used to say, “ Books must
be legible. You might as well write with white ink on white
paper, or with blue ink on blue paper, as write so as to put
the reader to sleep, or in any way discourage him from read-
ing." And the converse of this applies in the matter we have
in hand. As this business can be made agreeable let us make
it so, and enlist in our pilgrimage not only the ascetics who
think it a duty to be unhappy and uncomfortable but that
larger number of persons who, though not depraved, are glad
to have a good time as they go. No fear in this world but
the ascetics will find a plenty of stupid reading, and can with-

THE CHOICE OF BOOKS,
65
out our instruction make their course as disagreeable as they
choose.
Let us then, instead of starting with a list of books to be
read in six months, or six years, or sixty-six, take some par-
ticular book which young people of sense are quite sure to
like. Suppose we take the single volume of Macaulay's Es-
says, which may be bought in a nice English edition for a
dollar. Let us hope there is a club willing to read this at
once, consisting of three nice girls, or two nice girls and a boy,
or two nice boys and a girl, or three nice boys. Even now I
do not propose that they should begin the book and read it
through. Why should they? It is made up of articles which
were written at different periods, as Macaulay had time or oc-
casion. But suppose they took the “Life of William Pitt,
Lord Chatham.” Suppose they knew that Pitt 'was somehow
mixed
up with the history of America. They would know
this from the names of “Pittsfield” and “ Pittsburg,” if they
had formed the good habit of thinking or asking about names.
Suppose they knew that nothing Macaulay wrote would be
dull, and so, for their first evenings, read the two articles on
the life of Pitt.
They will not read very far before the sense of their own ig-
norance overpowers them. They will find people alluded to
that they never heard of, and things spoken of as perfect mat-


66
EDWARD EVERETT HALE.
ters of course of which none of the three knew anything.
Very well. What of that? Just what we are reading for is
to learn these very things. Eternity is before us if we only
begin promptly-now-as the archangels do.
Let each of the three then have a piece of blank paper
and
a pencil, so as to note in a moment and without stopping the
reading some of the things in which he most feels his igno-
rance, or what he most wants to know. I use the blank
paper at the end of the book if the book is my own. No
matter if the different members of the club make different
lists. Let them jot down a word or two with reference to the
page of the book they are reading.
Here is such a list :
MACAULAY'S LIFE OF Pitt. Edinburgh R., January, 1834,
Oct., 1844.*
Orleans Diamonds. Essays, II., 225.
Rotten Boroughs.
Chesterfield. Ton.
230.
Jacobite Rebellion.
Pepys, 241.
The Pretender, 245.
Murrays, 247
Minorca, 226.
* Of course if your notes are in the book this title is unnecessary.
THE CHOICE OF BOOKS.
67
Brown's Estimate.
Admiral Byng, 259.
Goree. Ticonderoga. Wolfe. 267.
Lord George Sackville, 271.
Of course I do not say that you yourself, reading in an-
other mood, would not make a different list. I do not pretend
that this is the best list. It is a list. And if you will take its
hints it will lead
you
in the
way
in which you should go, sup-
posing always that you have made it for yourself. That is,
I suppose that such little notes will call to your mind so many
subjects on which you are ignorant, and about which
you
will
like to learn.
Now, what I propose is that, before the club meets the next
time, each of its members shall loyally try to make good his
ignorance on some of those points. Sometimes the cyclo-
pædia will help you—sometimes the mere fact that your eyes
are opened makes you see the thing: Thus, the mere fact that
you wrote down the words “Regent's diamond,” makes those
words start out from the newspaper where there is an article
about the “Regent's diamond” which you would never have
looked at twice, had you not been reading Macaulay's essay.
Any library, however small, your own or a friend's, will help
you much more than you can dream before you have tried.
And the great merit of the “ Public Libraries,” however lim-

68
EDWARD EVERETT HALE.

ited their funds or the numbers of their books, is that they
do help directly such readers as you are beginning to be. Not
least is the resource of conversation. Ask any person you
really like, who is not a sheer fool, to help you. If you meet
the minister in the street car, say to him squarely, Can
you
tell me, Mr. Edwards, what 'Brown's Estimate ' is?” May be
he will know. May be he will not. But he ought to be able
to find out, or put you on the way to.
Now, mark, I do not say that all these questions are to be
answered at once, or half of them. I only say that each of
you is to make a loyal effort to rub down his list, or her list,
before the reading club meets again. When it meets give ap-
preciable time to the lists, before you go on with the reading.
It may be in very fast talk:
fast talk. But let each one bring in his
quota. The talk will be something like this:
“What in the world are you lugging, Fergus ?”
“Why! I have got the original folio edition of Pope's ' Es-
say on Man.' Dean McVaughan lent it to me.”
“Oh! I hate the 'Essay on Man.' I had to learn it at
school :
"Awake, my St. John.'
'
“I can spout it now.”
“But see, it is not 'St. John.' Here it is 'Lælius,' and
Pope's theology changed after this. He says here that the
9
THE CHOICE OF BOOKS.
69
world is a 'maze without a plan.' But when you learned it he
said it was 'not without a plan.'
“That's queer. Did you find what he said about the old
Duchess of Marlborough ?”
Yes, but first look here. See this about Chesterfield. I
remembered
you
had Chesterfield on your list.”
“Oh yes, and the letters seem very droll—look here, and
look here."
“But has anybody found · Brown's Estimate ?'
and so on, till they must begin to read.
Do you not see that a very few weeks of such experience
will really transfer all three of them into the spirit of the
times in which William Pitt was born and grew up? And be-
fore they have finished that single essay of Macaulay's they
will have learned “How to Read,” better than I can teach

and so on,
them:
Of course it may happen that a person must read alone.
He will have to use more pluck because he has less sympathy.
In suggesting that three people shall read together, I have
only meant to say that I think that is the most enlivening
way.

IX.
HOW TO MAKE DULL BOYS READ.
BY JOSEPH Cook.
The problem is diferente in counter andere le of the foun-
HE problem is different in country and city. The coun-
try presents by far the more difficult side of the theme.
In the first place, the pulpit ought to be awakened to the duty
of directing the reading of the young. The pastor in his visits
may ascertain very easily what the boys are reading, and a
little attention to family libraries ought, I think, to be a part of
pastoral activity. It is to me a very interesting memory that a
venerated preacher in my native town, the brother of Treasurer
Herrick, of Yale College-Henry Herrick, who was lately liv-
ing in Connecticut-came into my father's house when I was,
perhaps, ten years old, and looked at my library. His com-
mendation of certain books interested me. Although he was
not officious he was efficient in directing my reading. Two
districts had been united near my father's residence and a
70
HOW TO MAKE DULL BOYS READ.
71
library was to be sold at auction. My father furnished me
with money enough to buy pretty nearly the whole of this col-
lection, and I thus came into possession of many of the books
issued by the Harpers for school libraries. The selection was
made by Chancellor Walworth, assisted by such men as Ed-
ward Everett and Jared Sparks, and was a really good one,
containing such volumes as “The Pursuit of Knowledge Un-
der Difficulties,” Paley's “Natural Theology,” and Benjamin
Franklin's autobiography. It fascinated me at that time, and
I shall never forget how proud I was of my first library, which
was hardly more than three feet square.
But to incite a dull boy to read you must not rely on clerical
influence as much as on parental ; and, therefore, attention
must be given to the reading of the older members of the com-
munity. If the heads of the family have a love for reading,
the taste almost invariably descends to the children. The for-
mation of town libraries in places with populations of three to
five thousand inhabitants ought to be encouraged. The school-
teacher in every Union school or academy should be furnished
with the means of inciting a taste for reading in his pupils by
the aid of a library belonging to the institution.
The sluggish circulation of books in our rural districts should
be quickened in all ways, and especially through cheap editions
of great authors. It appears to me one of the hopeful signs of


72
JOSEPH COOK,
the times that scientific primers are now being widely put into
circulation. Of course there is no royal road to knowledge,
but it is better that elementary instruction, prepared in primers
by experts, should be sunk into the minds of the population
than that the common people should go back even to the rever-
ence which they had in early New England days for scholars
speaking ex cathedra. We are a nation of smatterers, but hope
to be something better in time. The fear of superficial learn-
ing through the distribution of science in an elementary form
is not unnatural on the part of some, yet it should be remem-
bered that these primers are usually written by experts, and
that the names of several of the foremost men in science have
been placed upon the title-pages of elementary works for the
people. Let a boy have these and he will be incited by them
to the study of the greater works, which ought to be classics
even in libraries intended for young people.
Make a dull boy feel that the dime novel is vulgar. I re-
member that, in “ Telemachus,” Ulysses tried to convince a
man who had become one of a herd of swine that it was shame-
ful to be a pig; but he did not succeed. The flooding of the
land with dime novels and with infamous periodicals of the
cheaper and coarser kind acts like Circe's enchantment on wide
circles of youth. No doubt it is a frequent incitement to crime,
and, on the whole, is one of the most monstrous of the undis-
HOW TO MAKE DULL BOYS KEAD.
73
Satanic press.
guised evils in the modern days of cheap printing. Let a boy
learn that some publications are not fit to be handled with the
tongs. Let parents exclude from the family mansion the frogs
and vipers that swarm forth from the oozy marshes of the
Let the dull boy make the acquaintance of
Cooper, Scott, Defoe and “ Pilgrim's Progress ”—a book by no
means outgrown. Personally I must confess great indebted-
ness to the “Rollo” books, the “ Jonas” books and. “The
Young Christian,” by the late revered father of the editor of
The Christian Union. Richter, in his “Titan,"represents one of
his characters at the age of twenty-five as making a collection
of all the books he had read while young, including the vol-
umes he had studied at school as well as the fiction which
had'interested him in early days. Let a dull boy be incited by
his parents, his school teachers, his Sunday-school instructors,
and especially by his pastor, to dip deeply into the classics for
youth. After the best works of historical fiction become fas-
cinating to him, history will interest and biography will attract
him. When a boy has once acquired a keen interest in bio-
graphical and historical reading he cannot thereafter be wholly
vulgar in his taste for literature.
As to the bright boy in the country little need be said, for
he will take care of himself. He will have the best books, or
a few of them at least, and they will be his chief treasures.


74
JOSEPH COOK.
erature.
My impression is that such a boy ought not to think the city
necessary for a thorough acquaintance with the masters of lit-
There are only about one thousand really first-class
books in the English language-certainly not over a thou-
sand that deserve reading three times through. Of the great-
est books there are not over a hundred in the mother-tongue
in which any man is born. If teacher and parent will help the
boys to select these, and make up a library for them out of the
volumes that deserve to be absorbed, the taste of a bright boy
will very soon guide itself. He cannot go amiss in the list of
books which time has approved. My opinion is that the taste
of youth should be formed by literature of standard reputation
far more than by ephemeral novelties, however brilliant. We
should early become thoroughly familiar with the hundred best
books in our language, for these will be with us through life,
and be the chief solace of our declining years.
I can put into
a bookcase five feet square the volumes which, in my opinion,
contain the chief weight of English literature. We are to
weigh books, not measure them, and I would do this even for
youth.
As to both dull boys and bright boys in cities, their oppor-
tunities of information are so abundant that only two pieces of
advice need be given :
Carlyle's exclamation, “Here are books ; fall to !"
HOW TO MAKE DULL BOYS READ.
75
9
And Wellington's at Waterloo, “Up and at 'em!”
The chief difficulty of bright boys in the city will be in the
abundance of books; and I think it important to insist rigor-
ously, especially for the keenest, that their library shelves
should not be collections but selections. They will have the
family library, the city library, and perhaps three or four other
libraries within reach, besides the bookstores; which last are
by no means to be neglected, for reading a book with the fin-
gers at a bookseller's stall is an art that should be taught early
to youth.
The dull city boy is in the midst of more temptation than the
dull country boy, and nothing but the most earnest training on
the part of his parents or instructors will prevent him from
forming a taste for coarse amusements, and so neglecting the
deluge of opportunity about him. The dull city boy is in a
position not to be envied by the dull country boy, for probably
of all circumstances that tempt the youth of a somewhat tor-
pid intellect those of the great city are the worst sorceries and
likely to cause him to become the most degraded. The dull
boy in the city, therefore, should be brought into clubs of
young people and made ashamed of himself, if he neglects the
opportunities for reading afforded by such societies as bring
out social ambition in connection with literary taste.
I have at no time forgotten the efforts making in the United


76
JOSEPH COOK.
States for the promotion of home reading, and they apply to
the country as well as to the city, but afford particular advan-
tages to the populations of large villages. The Boston “Society
for the Promotion of Home Reading” furnishes a list of volumes
on special topics, carries on correspondence as to authori-
ties in science, prints circulars, and has an annual reunion of
such readers as choose to participate in it. I believe also that
essays are sent in for examination by some readers at a dis-
tance. The celebrated Chautauqua plan for the promotion of
home reading has application both to the city and the country,
but especially to the latter, and appears to me to deserve the
weighty commendation it received from William Cullen Bryant.
Some fifteen thousand persons have paid a small fee to secure
the assistance of the Central Secretary, Dr. Vincent, of Plain-
field, New Jersey, who executes the Chautauqua plan. The
text books are many of them written by experts expressly for
preparatory courses, and are strongly to be recommended for
popular reading. A close oversight of the work of the readers
is kept by the secretary; certain reunions occur—or will take
place—but the plan is yet in its infancy. The object of the
enterprise is to give the average citizen a college student's out-
look. Let boys be brought into such plans as the Boston and
Chautauqua reading enterprises exemplify, and let the dull
youth be harnessed with the bright one and so keep himself
out of the places of temptation in cities.
HOW TO MAKE DULL BOYS READ.
77
Over every library-case should stand the words : “ Avoid
rubbish.” A second-rate book, however good, is a mischief if
it occupies the time we ought to devote to a first-rate.
In re-
gard to reading, as well as to much else, there is deep wisdom
in a German proverb which asserts that the better is a great
enemy of the best.


X.
HOW TO PRESERVE THE RESULTS OF READING,
BY JOSEPH COOK.
S
AMUEL JOHNSON says that “interest is the mother
of attention ;
but attention is the mother of memory.
To secure memory, therefore, secure its mother and grand-
mother. It is a very common and fatal error to neglect this
grandparent. When one is absorbingly interested in a theme
the mind becomes strangely receptive, and draws to itself, as a
magnet gathers up iron filings, all information within its reach
as to the topic in hand. The best rule for the acquisition and
the preservation of information is to make the mind magnetic
by acquiring profound interest in a theme. Possibly your in.
tellectual enthusiasm may limit itself to one topic for a long
while. A specialist may become lynx-eyed, and yet, by reason
of exclusive attention to a single subject, also remain wall-eyed.
Endeavor, therefore, to excite in yourself two enthusiasms, in
78
HOW TO PRESERVE THE RESULTS OF READING.
79
order that there may be both a north and a south pole in the
magnet of your intellect. Two subjects will be likely to draw
into connection with themselves a range of reading which will
be something like what the Jordan is in the northern half of
the Dead Sea-a current of perfectly fresh water in the midst
of bitter waves. You may have, as Ruskin says, , 'a little
island of your own with a grove and spring in it, sweet and
good,” while the waste, howling ocean of the world's useless
information rolls around you.
Personally, I have learned to rely on the margins of the
books that I read as being themselves my best note-books. Of
course I am speaking now only of the volumes which are my
own property. These I am perhaps scandalously free in mark-
ing, and so every ordinary volume that I have in my library
becomes a note-book. If one indicates the important and
more important and most important passages in a book, even
if it be only by one or two or three lines in the margin, and if
one then makes it an inflexible rule to commit to memory from
every one of the volumes thus marked all the three line passages, he
will very soon find that his annotated volumes are in his head.
In committing to memory the three-line passages I should ad-
vise everyone, as I do myself, to oblige himself to review and
and pretty nearly commit to memory the two-line and the one-
These may not be numerous in some volumes,

line passages.

80
JOSEPH COOK.
and yet in works that are only to be read with the fingers they
are worth memorizing.
It is said that Carlyle reads on the average a dozen books a
day. Of course he examines them chiefly with his fingers, and
after long practice is able to find at once the jugular vein and
carotid artery
of
any author. John Quincy Adams was said to
have “a carnivorous instinct for the jugular vein ” of an argu-
ment. In discussing the secret of memory, we first have inter-
est inducing attention, and then the skill given by experience
in finding the jugular vein. My habit is to mark on the inner
margin all the passages with which I disagree, and thus many
volumes which I am obliged to read are transformed into thorn-
bushes full of spurs to debate. The shelf of my library on
which I have collected the chief infidel writers' works of the
last hundred years holds volumes plentifully marked in this
way.
The three-line passages I ha
I have committed to memory as
being enormous and most mischievous errors. This plan of
marking volumes can be made very elaborate, and every reader
must invent his marks for himself. My enthusiasm led me to
have altogether too elaborate a system of marking ; but at pres-
ent I am convinced that for myself I need only six marks-
those for important, more important, and most important pas-
sages, which I mark on the outside margin, and those for er-
ror, and more and most important errors, which I mark on the
HOW TO PRESERVE THE RESULTS OF READING.
81
own.
inside. I turn down the leaf at the top of the page for the
first-class passages that are to be memorized, and at the bot-
tom for the second-rate passages.
Standard books I like to
buy in portable and compact and yet cheap editions, on which
I can use a pencil without sacrilege. I always go through the
book fastening in mind the places marked, when I have finished
the first journey.
A word now as to note-books, and volumes that you do not
Of course a borrowed book cannot be marked, and
probably in that case Channing's method is the best one—to
read with slips of paper between the leaves. In his pigeon-
holes these slips of paper, on which he made notes as he read,
were arranged according to the subjects and as they accumula-
ted from year to year; and when he was engaged upon any
particular topic they accumulated with great rapidity. I am
obliged to read extensively in libraries not my own, and my
plan is to make notes on common paper with a margin turned
down at the left-hand side. I never put more than one subject
on one piece or paper ; and every week or fortnight the slips
thus obtained are filed or pinned together according to the sub-
jects. Thus my note-book thickens; but if convenience re-
quires, can be unstitched and rearranged. It appears to me to
be foolishness to keep ordinary note-books in thick, bound
manuscript volumes which cannot be taken before a public as-


82
JOSEPH COOK.
sembly, or used in separate parts. I am obliged to carry note-
books with me on the railways, and am always provided with
the simplest form of note paper.
Of course these leaves can
be easily put into the form of note-books which can be rear-
ranged if necessary; and I find it best never to bind them. I
wish often to unbind them. A passage which I think I shall
quote in print from any book I am accustomed to write length-
wise of the paper—that is, from the bottom to the top ; a pas-
sage I think I shall not quote I write the other way. All slips
written from bottom to top are first-class matter; and I can
easily take them out of my note-books and put them into man-
uscripts intended for the press. I am obliged to do this some-
times in great haste, and find it important to have my note-
books unbound. If I had to keep notes in bound volumes the
infelicity of tearing out leaves would be unavoidable, as there
would be no time for copying.
But the results of reading are best preserved by communi-
cating them to others. Let young men be taught to keep
commonplace books, and especially to converse concerning
what they read. I am not a friend of very large attention to
debating societies by young men advanced to the higher stages
of college training ; but in the academic period—the years of
preparation for college and especially in the days of the
country academy-it appears to me that a youth with any
HOW TO PRESERVE THE RESULTS OF READING.
83
tendency toward public speaking should be encouraged to
enter school debates and the best lyceums, in order that he
may communicate to others the results of his reading. No
one is so likely to remember what he reads as he who reads
with a purpose of advancing some good cause by communi-
cating his information, If a young man intends to enter the
profession of law, or theology, or to become a lecturer, or
author, or editor, he has before him such a career that he
should begin early to imitate Edmund Burke in constantly
working out trains of thought. Let him make notes, early, in
his commonplace books, and he will find that years before he
can face the public he will have accumulated many suggestions
likely to be of great service in his professional career. Mr.
Emerson's essays are gathered from his journals.
So were
Goethe's and Montaigne's. So were Thoreau's. In a railway
train at one sitting I once read through three of Mr. Emer-
son's essays backward. The paragraphs are selected from his
journals, and are often arranged in no logical connection.
Mr. Alcott says that he once found Emerson in his study en-
gaged in shuffling a set of manuscript extracts from his jour-
nals in order that he might determine the order of the para-
graphs in an essay which afterward became celebrated. It is a
Concord theory that the very finest writing must be grown in
the orchards of journals. The preservation of the results of


84
JOSEPH COOK,
reading in journals is to be commended to young men of liter-
ary taste, and yet journal-writing may easily be made to minis-
ter to vanity, self-consciousness and individualism of a mis-
chievous species, and if carried far enough may mislead even
a powerful man into ego-theism. But I am now speaking of a
journal much like a commonplace book, and can recommend,
as one good means of securing the results of reading, a daily
or weekly expression of one's thoughts as to the subjects ex-
amined, and the collection from those entries of the best
passages into essays, after Mr. Emerson's method.
XI.

HINTS FOR PEOPLE THAT DO NOT READ,
BY LYMAN ABBOTT.
YOUR
UR time is limited ; your books are few. There is
work in the kitchen, in the parlor, in the office demand-
ing your attention ; clients to be pacified or provoked, pa-
tients to be cured or killed, goods to be bought and sold, chil-
dren to be tended, furniture to be dusted, table to be set and
table to be cleared away again ; and for a library the family
Bible, Webster's Dictionary, the well-thumbed and oft-read
books in the sitting room, and the genteel and gilt-edged poetry
in the parlor, with a limited purse from which to replenish the
exhausted library, and limited time with which to use it if it
were replenished. This is no fancy sketch, but a photograph
of many an American life. How find time, how find means
for study in such circumstances, is the problem of many a
would-be student who lays down his intellectual life in despair;
85

86
LYMAN ABBOTT.
who in the first twenty years of his life gets an appetite for
learning and in the other forty starves to death. Especially is
this true of wives and mothers. How shall a would-be student
so situated pursue systematic reading and study ?
I. America gives a library to almost every home, in the pe-
riodical publications—the daily journal, the weekly paper and
the monthly magazine. Two copies of the New York Tribune
cost eight cents. Two copies of The Christian Union cost twelve
cents; the two copies of either paper contain nearly or quite
as much matter as is contained in an ordinary dollar book.
Either the daily or the weekly newspaper furnishes in quantity
abundant material for study, and material in quality well worth
study. The modern newspaper gives a history of human life.
In it you may read the record of God's work in our own age ;
and in no age has his work been grander or human progress
more rapid. In France, an empire transformed into a republic,
and religious liberty which had been exiled two hundred years
ago summoned back to the home of the Huguenots ; in Spain,
the Bourbon queen driven from her disgraced throne and a
constitutional government borrowed from England for the land
of Philip II, a noble revenge for the Spanish Armada of the
sixteenth century; Italy, which has given law to Christendom,
once more clad with law; and Rome, mother of republics, once
more made Republican in all but name; the crescent turning
HINTS FOR PEOPLE THAT DO NOT READ.
87
back upon its path and setting in the East in a stormy sky,
while out of a people long lying prostrate at the foot of the
“unspeakable Turk” emerges the germ of a nation possibly to
rival the glory of ancient Macedon, these are some of the
events which have taken place within the last cycle. Of them
no book will tell you. For them you must go to the news-
paper. What in interest and importance to us are the Gallic
campaigns of Cæsar and the strifes between plebeian and aris-
tocrat in Rome compared with this history, in which we live
and of which we form a part ? Study the newspaper ;
if
pos-
sible, study it with cyclopædia, with atlas, with gazetteer ; but
study it.
No literature is worthier your study. Waste no time
on the shameful scandals, the bitter political controversies, the
ecclesiastical broadsword exercises and the idle paragraph gos-
sip. A war of words is no more dignified in a journal than on,
the street ; gossip is no worthier your attention because printed
by the daily tattler than when whispered by a daily tattler.
Who was married and what she wore can be safely dismissed
in a casual reading, perhaps better with none at all. But how
God is evoking a new continent out of Africa, by the labor of
a Livingstone and a Stanley; how he is laying the foundation
of a new free commonwealth in Bulgaria ; how he is redeeming
France from the curse she brought upon herself by the cruelties
first of a religion without humanity, and then of a humanita-


88
LYMAN ABBOTT.
rianism without religion,—these are themes worthy of study;
and the newspaper is the library in which to study them.
There is no more fascinating intellectual occupation than
watching the course of contemporaneous history. The de
nouements of Wilkie Collins and Charles Reade are nothing to
those of life's actual drama. The romance of fiction is inane
by the side of the romance of facts,
II. In this study the monthly perodical will aid you. The
American magazine is rightly named. “A magazine,” says
Webster, “is a storehouse, a granary, a cellar ; a warehouse in
which anything is stored or deposited.” The world has never
known such storehouses of well-selected mental food as are fur-
nished by our American publishers—by "Scribner's," " Harp-
er's," "Lippincott's” and the “ Atlantic." The ablest writers
of America are laid under contribution. The ablest artists are
called on to add both the attractions and illuminations of the
pencil. The highest prices are paid to both, The magazine
skims the cream from many a pen and gives it to its readers.
The weekly paper churns the cream into butter. The art of
skilled condensation can go no farther than we carry it in
America.
III. But to the journal—weekly or daily—and the magazine
you will want to add some study of books. Periodical reading
may become desultory reading. It need not, but there is always
HINTS FOR PEOPLE THAT DO NOT READ.
89
danger. In the periodical you buy your worsteds of all colors
mixed together. You must afterward do your own sorting or
the product of your needles will be of a very heterogeneous pat-
tern, But it does not require a great deal of money to add a
study of excellent books to the study of periodicals. The
Harper's Half Hour Series includes a good assortment of
English classics ; and they are sold at twenty-five cents each.
The Chautauqua primers are excellent guides to study, and
they cost from ten to twenty cents, I am in favor of interna-
tional copyright; but when I perceive that the English edition
of Justin McCarthy's "History of Our Own Times" costs
nine dollars, and an American pamphlet edition is produced
for a quarter of a dollar, I hope that the copyright, when it
comes, will not leave American readers at the mercy of Eng-
lish prices.
For courses of study in books observe three rules :
1. Begin with what is congenial. Choose not what you
ought to know but what you want to know. Therefore let
no one else choose for you. It is a rare mind that can
keep itself to a course of distasteful study. It is not safe
for any one to assume, without proof, that he has a rare
mind.
2. Begin with a short course. Do not lay out, for history,
Hume, Macaulay and Miss Martineau, with the idea that when


go
LYMAN ABBOTT.
you have finished these fifteen volumes you will be well versed
in English history. That is very true; but you will never
finish them. Read Jacob Abbott's life of Charles I or II,
or Macaulay's Lord Chatham or Temple, or Thomas Hughes'
Alfred the Great. One thing at a time; and that thing short
and simple. Putting the word done opposite a purpose is a
wonderful incentive to a large achievement in the next at-
tempt.
3. Buy a dictionary, an atlas, and, if possible, a cyclopædia.
If you have not the money make over an old bonnet. No
harm will be done if it cultivates a habit of making over
old bonnets. If a gentleman, dispense with cigars for a year.
No harm will be done if this cultivates a habit of dispensing
with cigars. If this does not supply the increasing demand for
increasing facilities try some other economies. I visited not
long since the home of one of the most eminent of America's
youngest astronomers. He lived in a little box of a house, in
an out-of-the-way street, with not an easy chair in the house.
But his wife had a fine piano, and he a microscope that cost
him $300. Equipped with dictionary and atlas, never pass a
word the meaning of which you do not know; the name of a
place the location of which you have not fixed; or reference
to an event which you do not comprehend. In invading a new
territory never leave an unconquered garrison behind you.
HINTS TOR PEOPLE THAT DO NOT READ.
91
after supper.
Theme and tools selected, it still remains to secure time.
For the best advantage this should be regular, systematic, un-
interrupted. The early hours are the best ; when the brain is
fresh and the mind alert. To the mind and body trained for
it, half an hour before breakfast is worth an hour and a half
. But this requires an opportunity to shut out in-
trusion which perhaps the housekeeper cannot secure ; facil-
ity to shut out the more subtle intrusion of thick on-coming
crowd of cares, which only a stalwart power of concentration
can secure. Some cannot lock the door of the library ; oth-
ers cannot lock the door of the mind. But if time cannot be
taken at one hour seize it from another; if it cannot be
taken with regularity take ito when chance offers. The black-
smith's forge is not a convenient desk ; but it was at the
blacksmith's forge, blowing the bellows with one hand and
holding a book with the other, that Elihu Burritt learned his
first languages. The nursery is not the place one would
choose for astronomical calculations; but it was in the
nursery, beset by her children, whom she never neglected,
and interrupted by callers whom she rarely refused, that Mary
Somerville wrought out her Mechanism of the Heavens,"
which elected her an honorary member of the Royal Astro-
nomical Society, and put her in the first rank of the scientists
of her day. A cue at the post-office is not the ideal place for


92
LYMAN ABBOTT.
study ; but it was as an errand boy at Amsterdam, standing in
the long line of boys at the post-office, often in the rain, book
in hand, that Dr. Schliemann laid the foundation of his future
career as the great Greek explorer of the century. Where
there is a will there is a way. He or she that can find no time
for study has little real heart for it,
XII.
.
A SYMPOSIUM.

BY MANY CONTRIBUTORS.
W"book'is composed had drawn to its close, the edi-
HEN the original series of articles from which this
book is composed had drawn to its close, the edi-
tors of The Christian Union invited the readers generally to
send brief hints evolved out of their own experience in the use
of books. A great number of replies to the six questions sug-
gested were received, from which the following hints are se-
lected.
In making the selection we have culled from many letters
and postal cards various hints, often repeating each other,
which we have reported as nearly as possible in the words of
one or another of our correspondents and classified under the
six questions editorially presented in The Christian Union.
When there were inconsistent suggestions from the different
quarters we have reported them both, leaving our readers to
choose between them.
93

94
BY MANY CONTRIBUTORS.
1. How TO SELECT BOOKS :
Rummage the book-stores and the libraries.
Read the book notices in the best literary papers-such as
The Christian Union, New York T'ribune, Springfield Republi-
can, Literary World, the New York Nation, and the London
Spectator.
Choose books that can be held without tiring the hands or
wrists.
Cheerful bindings but plain. Gilt grows tawdry.
For home reading begin with books to please and instruct
children.
Get what you want, when you want it.
Get the judgment of a friend who knows your character and
literary tastes and aspirations.
2. How TO TAKE CARE OF BOOKS :
Get good editions well bound.
Cover them with strong brown paper ; for large and fine
books linen, neatly sewed on, is still better.
Have book-shelves for them ; a place for every book and
every book in its place.
Do not have doors to your cases; they are in the way.
Doors are essential to protect the books from dust. Should
be wood, or lined if made of glass. The sun fades the
bindings.

A SYMPOSIUM.
95
Be careful to whom you lend.
Use carefully.
Read frequently. Neglect is the great despoiler. Better
wear out than rust out.
3. WHAT TO READ :
Masterpieces only.
By subjects always.
That which you are deficient in and most need.
What you are most interested in.
What you have recently heard about and want to know about,
A variety. Do not weary yourself over one kind of books ;
mingle biography, travels, history, fiction, etc.
Never read a book that is not worth reading twice.
Read books that furnish mental food and mental stimulus.
4. HOW AND WHEN TO READ :
Systematically. Do not run from one subject to another.
Slowly. Never give more time to reading a book than to
reflecting upon its contents.
Never try to read when it is laborious; the memory will not
retain it. One hour when fresh is worth three when tired.
Solid reading, for instruction, when fresh; light reading
for entertainment, slowly, easily, lazily, when tired.
In the early morning hours, say from five to eight-premising
that you go to bed at half-past nine.

96
BY MANY CONTRIBUTORS,
Whenever you can get a chance—except at night when you
ought to be asleep.
In the evenings: get your husband to read to you.
I read at any time : when waiting for the pot to boil ; when
waiting for the lords of creation to come to dinner.
Always read with an atlas and dictionary.
Have books about you : employ the spare moments. You
will be surprised how much can be accomplished in odd
moments usually thrown away.
Persevere. Tenacity and application are almost omnipo-
tent.
your author.
5. How TO PRESERVE THE RESULTS OF READING.
Reflect on your reading. Read thoughtfully.
Write as you read. Make-abstracts of
Read with a pencil in hand ; mark all important passages
and index them by reference on the fly-leaf at the end. Then
re-read the marked passages :- Joseph Cook's way.
Keep a book of choice extracts : copy into it choice marked
extracts.
Re-read.
Fasten your knowledge by frequent geographical, historical
and biographical references.
Read no more at a time than you can hold.
Discuss your reading or criticise it with others who have
A SYMPOSIUM,
97
read the same.
If a person after reading a book lays it down
without comment, it does not amount to much.
Rigorously compel yourself to give an analysis of what you
read ; not by pen, but by mental process,
6. How TO INTEREST CHILDREN IN GOOD BOOKS.
Put before them only good books; keep bad and indifferent
books away.
Watch for and encourage their own good selections. Tell
them stories and then send them to the books where the

stories are to be found.
Read with them.
Have good books about the house and no others. Read them
yourself and talk them over.
Give your children at first simple and interesting books,
then something better.
READING CLUBS.
It has been truly said, “The art of reading consists in know-
ing what to leave out.” How shall we learn this art ? My
eight-year-old boy said to me the other day, with a short sigh,
Mamma, I think I have too many books; you had better put
some away." I saw he had begun the conflict which all of us
who like books have experienced. With all who read intelli-
gently, each book suggests many others. The field of vision
enlarges till it passes the bonds of our horizon and a numb

98
BY MANY CONTRIBUTORS.
feeling of despair comes over us. For women, who have lives
full of interruption, what is left to do? Nothing but to take all
crumbs that fall, eagerly feeding the hunger within upon the
best one may obtain. Papers, magazines, books that may be
snatched
up and dropped again, filling passing moments of
time, are nearly all a housekeeper and mother can hope for,
unless she has the good fortune to have a husband who will
read aloud.
Then, there are organizations. For two years or more seven
or eight of these busy woman of us have met for two hours on
one morning of each week for reading in French. It is diffi-
cult to brush aside the complications around us, but profitable.
We read important books, not light novels. We think we owe
this to ourselves and to our children, and if we did not do it,
undoubtedly we would lose all we ever knew of French. Out
of this grew an evening Shakespeare club limited in number
to about twenty-four members, reading in parts aloud. This,
in its third winter, is vigorous and lively, increasing in interest
with original essays, selections and historical facts bearing
upon
the play of the evening. Small organizations are a great
help in inspiring, suggesting and selecting reading.
HOW A BUSY MAN READS.
Being engaged in "keeping store,” both day and evening,
I have but little time for reading; yet I have surprised
A SYMPOSIUM,
99
myself by using spare moments at home. A few moments
in the morning, at noon, at supper time, and in the even-
ing before bedtime, will do wonders when made subservient
to a will and a passion for literature.
I have used with much profit Professor Porter's “Books
and Reading,” Putnam's “Best Reading” (with Fred. Per-
kins' excellent hints), and Emerson's essay on “Books.”
Porter's book should be in the hands of every true lover of
books. I find the “American Bookseller,” published semi-
monthly by the American News Co., a very valuable guide
to current literature. A good feature of the “Bookseller "
is that it permits its subscribers to advertise free for books
wanted, thus enabling one to find books “out of print,”
and often works at yery low prices.
The “Publishers' Weekly," published by F. Leypoldt, in
New York, gives very full information about all matters in
the book-world, and the “Library Companion," issued quarterly
by the publishers of this volume, gives, at the nominal price
of 50 cents a year, priced and classified lists of the most im-
portant English and American publications of each quarter, to
which are added brief characterizations or descriptions of the
books mentioned. The “Library Companion” forms a quar-
terly and annual supplement to Putnam's “Best Reading.” The
Putnams also publish “The Literary News,” which is issued


I00
BY MANY CONTRIBUTORS.
monthly, and which contains full lists of the publications of
each month, and reviews and descriptions of the more im-
portant.
I use Putnam's "World's Progress,” Hadyn's “Dictionary
of Dates,” Webster's Unabridged, Chambers's Encyclopædia,
Hale and Wheeler's “Brief Biographies,” a geography, and
Bartlett's “Familiar Quotations.” I am indebted to Fred.
Perkins for my discovery of a number of these valuable
reference books.
In the book I am reading I keep note paper, where I jot
down everything I do not understand—even words about
whose pronunciation I am uncertain. This seems tedious
and painstaking, but I know it pays. I refer these words,
terms, names or phrases to reference books or to some his-
tory where I may be likely to find them. For instance: I
did not know all about the Ohio Company spoken of in
Bancroft's “United States," whereupon I turned to Dillon's
"Indiana” and found the desired information.
I find it a splendid practice to illuminate any historical
period I have been passing over with a good historical
novel. Thus, Scott's “Woodstock" for Cromwell's time;
Kenilworth for the days of Elizabeth, Raleigh, Shakes-
peare, and for alchemy and astrology. What historical novel
can match, Thackeray's “Virginians” for a fine picture of
1
A SYMPOSIUM.
IOI
the days just previous to our Independence, or for the vices
of court, state and church in England prior to Wesley.
I index my books with pencil on the fly-leaves. What-
ever strikes me as noteworthy I index. I find I have in-
dexed. Scott's and Thackeray's novels almost as fully as I
have Bancroft or Rawlinson or Wilkinson.
From books that I cannot afford to buy I copy what I
need—that is, if the books are obtainable from our excel-
lent Public Library.
I put away ten cents a day for books ! This allowance is
beggarly when compared with expenditures by a vast majority
of young men for worthless and transient pleasures. As I
am in a position to buy books at wholesale I find this al-
lowance increases my library rapidly.
Keeping a commonplace book for opinions of your books
is a profitable practice; or, it is a good idea, I find, to
write one's opinion of a volume on the fly-leaves at end of
volume.
ED. ILIFF.
RICHMOND, Ind., Feb. 10, 1880.

A MOTHER'S EXPERIENCE.
I give my children plenty of good reading, and they utterly
refuse bad when offered by companions. My oldest—a boy of
fourteen-is hungry for history, biography and natural history.
I believe it is because I read such things with him when he

IO2
BY MANY CONTRIBUTORS.
was no more than eight, and from that time on, using a map
and dictionary a great deal, and letting him see me using a cy-
clopædia and explaining the reason why I used it. Abbott's
(Jacob) juvenile books hold a large place in the children's
library. I read the best things in the newspapers aloud and
we talk about them, and they thus learn to discriminate for
themselves. When a child has history referred to in a geogra-
phy lesson we get the history and read more about it.
MATER.
READING UNDER DIFFICULTIES.
I am a printer by occupation ; am twenty-three years
of
age ;
and just grown into the hungry period of my life—knowledge-
hungry. Have little time to read but in evening. Love to
read history of any and all kinds, from Goodrich's “ History of
all Nations,” down to historical scraps of noted men, and bio-
graphical anecdotes and characteristics in the newspapers.
Of
course I keep a strict watch on politics the while. Dickens
sandwiches in between delightfully. By constant proximity of
dictionary and Pierce's “ Cottage Cyclopedia of History and
Biography" I am gaining a good knowledge of words and the
characters of history.
CHARLES C. ROOSA.
BUFFALO, Feb. 8, 1880.
A FAMILY READING CLUB,
Ours was a family of nine. At least three evenings each
A SYMPOSIUM.
IO3
week all (or nearly all) were gathered in a room to read and
listen, taking turns in reading, first, such reading as was adapt-
ed to the younger members, consisting of stories, travel, the
best publications for the young, the various “Young Folks"
columns in our newspapers—say one hour given to them ; the
next, works of fiction, science, biography ; secular and religious
papers ; the several “ monthlies ;” reviews of books and ser-
No one was allowed to read to wearisomeness.
Frequently an interruption and explanation and discussion were
had. Any word not fully understood was looked up in “Web-
ster” by one not reading.
H. W. GILBERT.
FULTON, N. Y., Feb. 7, 1880.

mons, etc.
TO GET CHILDREN TO READ,
“To get children to read good books," I put them into
the infant Sunday-school at four years ; read to them the
little papers and cards they get there ; read or relate to
them Bible stories and others, as being contained in books
where they can find many more, I tell them, as soon as they
have learned to read. This begets a desire to learn how to
read. Then I teach them (that is, my “better-half” does) to
read the Bible before they are sent to school. I find that
then, after school, with a Bible always in the sitting-room, as
the book they have first learned to read in, they will pick it up
as a playmate and read its stories for amusement. A little

104
BY MANY CONTRIBUTORS.
later, I give them free range through those "yarns" so broad
there is no danger of their believing them—"Crusoe,” “ Ara-
bian Nights” and “Gulliver's Travels.” I then find no trou-
ble in engaging children, of nine to twelve years, in history,
travel and biography written for them, especially if I talk, or
rather get them to talk about the contents and let them teach
me some new facts. A boy of ten years who cannot be in-
duced to sit down and eat up Dickens' “Child's History of
England,” Abbott's volumes of early American history, etc.,
has one or two parents at fault. I keep them clear of bad
books and supplied with good ones ; I use a public library.
and make their selections—books in which they take such in-
terest that they put faith in my choice. They never see a
“Dime Novel,” “ Ledger,” etc., and, so far as possible, I keep
them from children likely to read trash.” Familiar science I
read to them in mild doses. I read to a boy of eight, parts of
Winchell's “Sketches of Creation,” with running comments,
and he had so much to tell his playmates that they thought
him a prodigy; but almost any child would feed on the same,
At ten that boy has read all the books here favorably men-
tioned for children ; and, among others, Taylor's “Boys of
Other Countries,” Bonner's, Coffin's and Higginson's United
States history books, “Swiss Family Robinson,” “Tales from
Shakespeare," some of Abbott's “American Pioneers,” Stan-
A SYMPOSIUM.
105
ley's "Dark Continent," etc., etc. ; his sister of fourteen, much
more in that line, and on into the affectionate reading of
Rolfe's edition of Shakespeare's plays, And from these I
select some of their school declamations. I calculate that in
their taste for good literature these children are grounded safe.
EVANSTON, Ill.
J. C. AMBROSE.
SHAKESPEARE FOR CHILDREN.
Arrange the evening readings around the library table with
more reference to the special needs of children. There are
certain grounds in literature on which parent and child can
meet in common. Take, for instance, certain 'portions of
Bancroft's “ United States”—those parts which describe the
early settlement and exploration of our country; you will
find that they hold alike the attention of young and old. Try,
also, bits of Parkman's series,“ Pioneers of France in the
New World,” “The Jesuits in North America in the Seven-
teenth Century,” “The Discovery of the Great West,” “The
Old Régime in Canada,” and then go on to anecdotes of later
American history. Supplement the outlines of English history
with striking fragments from Walter Scott's novels; they will
serve better than anything else to fix certain historical facts on
the childish memory. These are but hints; it is easy to go on
when one has once begun.
In reading for young children never forget that you are to


106
BY MANY CONTRIBUTORS.
act as interpreter between them and an author. Simplify as
you go along, substituting an easy word for a hard one, a short
one for a long one, and omitting at discretion, but always
trying for the best word you can muster at such short notice,
and striving always to keep the writer's style as unmutilated
as possible. In this way there is but little good reading
which you cannot bring within grasp of the childish under-
standing.
There is Shakespeare! the greatest name in all literature.
At first thought his writings seem a great way removed from
the youthful comprehension ; and yet my own experience has
proved that it is possible so to interpret him that even a little
child may appropriate him.
Take, for instance, “ The Tempest,” which is nothing more
nor less than one of the most bewitching fairy tales ever writ-
ten, quite as wonderful as anything of Hans Christian Ander-
sen's, or of the brothers Grimm, or in the Arabian Nights."
Here you will find a witch, a sorceress, a magician with his
wand, a deformed monster, a cruel and treacherous king, fair-
ies of the woods and sea, a powerful spirit of the air, a beauti-
ful princess, a brave and handsome prince. It only needs a
little ingenuity to make this fairy tale of Shakespeare's a prime
favorite with the children. I know from experience, for I have
tried it myself, writing it out in prose in the “once-upon-a-time"
A SYMPOSIUM,
107
style. It is the one story which my little seven-year old boy
never tires of hearing over and over. It is the one story
for which my child-friends ask again and again, I should
like to try it with some of the bright young readers of The
Christian Union if it were only possible ; I am sure they would
want to know more about this wonderful Shakespeare and
his writings.
By all means read Irving with the children. Among Amer-
ican writers he is the one who takes strongest hold on the
childish imagination. His clear, limpid style is good training
for the young ear, and one will be amazed at the quick appre-
ciation these little ones show of his quaint humor. Did you
ever see the child that could resist the charms of his “Rip
Van Winkle,” or “Legend of Sleepy Hollow ?” They are the
best of fairy tales.
A child's love of the marvelous and exciting is like his crav-
ing for candy and sweetmeats; it is a taste that cannot be
ignored. You must indulge it wisely. Cater to it with some
of Irving's “Tales of a Traveller,” or selections from his
Sketch Book," and with wholesome stories of travel and ad-
venture. Then, as an offset to this stimulating reading, make
them familiar with such exquisite, tender sketches as “Rab
and his Friends” and “Marjorie Fleming." It only needs a
trial of them to prove their fitness for this work.


108
BY MANY CONTRIBUTORS,
It is easy to get children to read good books. It only needs
a little ingenuity, a little painstaking, a little giving up of time
and pleasure on the part of us who are parents.
Truly yours,
EMMA H. DEMERIT.
NEW CANAAN, Fairfield Co., Conn.
SUGGESTIONS
FOR

HOUSEHOLD LIBRARIES
BY
GEORGE PALMER PUTNAM
REVISED AND ENLARGED
Together with priced lists of suggested selections of 500, 1,000 and 2,000
volumes of the most desirable and important books.

SIA 2000 noox
GOOD BOOK
66
IS THE PRECIOUS LIFE-
BLOOD OF A MASTER SPIRIT,
EMBALMED AND TREASURED UP ON
PURPOSE TO A LIFE BEYOND LIFE.”—Milton.
SOME BOOKS ARE TO BE TASTED,
OTHERS TO BE SWALLOWED, AND
SOME FEW TO BE CHEWED
AND DIGESTED.”-
Bacon.
SUGGESTIONS
FOR

HOUSEHOLD LIBRARIES.
E
VERY head of a family, it may be presumed, in this
period of general intelligence, is desirous to possess
for his wife, his children, and for himself, a certain number of
well-selected books. A book-case is, in fact, an indispensable
article of furniture. All have books of some kind or other.
How shall they be best chosen, and purchased to the best ad-
vantage ?
The ordinary condition under which the books in a house are
brought together, may be described as a chance-medley. They
are selected on no system, and, consequently, when the imme-
diate occasion of their perusal has gone by, have very little
value. A few old novels which have had their hour, a book of
sermons of the preacher in vogue, a broken set of a magazine, a
few waifs and strays picked up in charity from itinerants, or from
fairs, with, perhaps, a half-dozen leathery old heirlooms, from
which the best of housekeepers cannot keep the dust ; these, for
III

II2
SUGGESTIONS FOR HOUSEHOLD LIBRARIES.
the most part, in many families, fill the household book-shelf.
What a different story is told in a glance at the well-constructed
book-case of a gentleman or lady, who has given a little of the
attention to the choice of its contents which would be bestowed
upon the selections of the pattern of a window-curtain or a sofa !
Yet books are the most telling furniture which can be placed
in a room. Every visitor of intelligence is immediately, irre-
sistibly attracted to the perusal of their titles ; and an opinion
is formed at once, from them, of the taste and cultivation of
the family. Pictures and engravings are becoming generally
appreciated, and next to a picture on a wall, in point of interest
and effect, is the book on the centre-table or the shelf. How
deplorable and chilling a dull collection ! The reader may re-
call the anecdote of Dr. Johnson at the house of the eminent
virtuoso, Mr. Cambridge. He was there one day, in company
with Sir Joshua Reynolds, and had no sooner, says Boswell,
made his bow, than he ran eagerly to one side of the room to
inspect the books on the shelves. “ He runs to the books,” said
the artist, as I do to the pictures." There he was gratified,
for his host was a man of exquisite taste. How cheerful and
inviting the friendly names of good authors and long established
favorities, the Walter Scotts, Maria Edgeworths, Washington
Irvings, and Macaulays, reviving a hundred pleasing recol-
lections of past enjoyment, as you approach them ! A man,
says the old proverb, is known by his companions.
How true
is this of the companions of our better hours of ease and re-
tirement, the volumes which we keep at hand, the solace and
amusement of our cares, the impulses of our noble actions !
SUGGESTIONS FOR HOUSEHOLD LIBRARIES.
113
All
persons, we have no doubt, would have a choice collection
of books in preference to a comparatively indifferent and val-
ueless one. But all have not the time or opportunity to make
the selection. It is not an easy thing to make a tasteful gath-
ering of any objects—the plants for your garden, the china for
your table, the clothing for yourself or your children—in fine, of
whatever is thrust before us in heaps, the common and worthless
of course preponderating. There is money enough spent an-
nually in the country upon tasteless and absolutely offensive
things to purchase articles of the highest taste and value.
It is not the cost of the good article which is so much the
difficulty, as the not knowing how to procure it.
The attempt has here been made to present in three lists,
the first comprising 500, the second an additional 500, and the
third 1,000 volumes, the titles of those books which are con-
sidered, on the whole, the most essential and desirable for the
family library and for the use of the student of general litera-
ture,
It is not likely that the opinions of any one of our readers
will be fully in accord with our own as to all the works speci-
fied in these lists. Some will criticise the proportion of space
allotted to the respective divisions of History, Biography,
Fiction, Poetry, etc. Others will complain that some favorite
work, which in their opinion certainly belonged in the first list,
has been relegated to the second or third, or, horribile dictu,
has been omitted altogether.
We can only say that our lists are suggestions, not dictations,
and that we admit frankly it would be both absurd and use-


II4
SUGGESTIONS FOR HOUSEHOLD LIBRARIES,
less to attempt to present any selection from the vast mass of
English literature that would be either perfect in itself, or
which would be accepted as perfect by any two readers. We
claim merely that these three selections have been prepared
with care and judgment, and the two thousand volumes com-
prised in them are believed to include the most essential and
desirable works in general literature.
Theological works, scientific books for specialists, and chil-
dren's books have not been included.
The first list specifies 500 volumes of books deemed most
desirable, on the whole, for a collection limited to that extent,
It is intended to suggest those that are most comprehensive
and useful, and most accessible in their several spheres. Thus
books of reference covering the whole range of human knowl-
edge are first mentioned. Then the most essential works on
general and local history and in representative biography,
such as occupy the most important ground, and are the most
desirable in case the collection remains unenlarged. Then the
list mentions such books in general literature as would usually
be selected by persons of good taste and sound judgment.
Of course such a list is arbitrary and subject to change
according to varied tastes or previous acquisitions; but we
only aim to indicate an outline plan, with reference to propor-
tion, fitness and availability—leaving details to be adjusted
according to circumstances.
The second list contains a similar proportion of essential
titles in the several departments, as they are deemed most de-
sirable to supplement the selection first given, while in the
SUGGESTIONS FOR HOUSEHOLD LIBRARIES.
115
third list of one thousand volumes it is planned to supple-
ment the first two lists, and to present with them a collection
of two thousand volumes fairly complete as well in works
of fact and information as in those of imagination and recre-
ation.
Neither one or all of these lists would provide for all the
requirements of a literary or other professional man; the pres-
ent suggestions simply refer to such volumes as are adapted
for family reading and reference, or for social or village
libraries.
It is claimed that these lists have been prepared with strict
impartiality, so far as the interests of any publishers or au.
thors are concerned. They aim to present works that would
be selected by a person of taste, untrammelled by any special
interests.
The publishers' retail prices are given as nearly as practica-
ble, and while in a few cases where a portion only of an au-
thor's works are recommended, these prices may not be exact
per volume, they will be found to be fairly correct for any
given number of works.
A collection of fifty volumes of useful and desirable books,
in economical and compact editions, is given at the close of
the main lists.
In selling books by quantities, and in selling books to libra-
ries, a reduction is made by all booksellers from these retail
prices, and the publishers of this volume have for many years
made a specialty of the business of purchasing books for
public and private libraries at such special reductions,

116
SUGGESTIONS FOR HOUSEHOLD LIBRARIES.

Fuller priced and classified lists of English and American
publications will be found in the manual published by them,
entitled “The Best Reading," and in the quarterly supplement
to this, “The Library Companion,” (see advertisement on
cover.)
SUGGESTIONS FOR
HOUSEHOLD LIBRARIES

FIRST LIST
I
8°
I
I
12°
2
2
9 00
2
70 00,
A library of 500 volumes of the most essential books in the best inex-
pensive editions. (Exclusive of Religious works, books for specialists and
books for children.)
Works of Reference, Cyclopædias, etc.
Anthon Classical Dictionary.
5 50
Bartlett. Familiar Quotations.
8°
3 00
Best Reading, The, a Classified Bibliography.
I 75
Chambers. Cyclopædia of English Literature.
8°
Duyckinck. Cyclopædia of American Literature.
4° 33 00
Johnson. Universal Cyclopædia.
8
or Appleton. American Cyclopædia. 16 vols., 8º $80 00
or Chambers. Cyclopædia, Edin. 10 vols., $25 oo
Lippincott. Pronouncing Gazetteer of the World, (edi-
tion of 1880)
8°
Library Atlas, The, Ancient, Historical and Modern.
8°
Putnam. World's Progress, or Cyclopædia of Historic
Facts.
8°
4 50
Smith. Condensed Dictionary of the Bible.
8°
4 50
(or further abridged) I vol., 8º $3 oo
Thomas. Dictionary of Biography.
8°
Webster Dictionary of the English Language,
revision of 1880
8°
or Worcester. Dict, of the Eng. Lang. I vol., 8º $10 00
I
IO 00
I
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I
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I
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12 00
117
118
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12°
6 00
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2 50
2
History
ANCIENT.
Duncker. History of Antiquity.
4
8°
Greece, Cox, General History of
History of, by Curtis.
5 12°
Rawlinson. Origin of Nations.
12°
Rome Ancient, History of, by Arnold.
8°
Roman Empire, Decline and Fall of, by Gibbon. 6 8°
The Jews, History of, by Milman,
MIDDLE AGES.
Europe during the Middle Ages, by Hallam.
3 12°
Freeman. General Sketch of European History
I 16°
ENGLAND.
England to 1688, by Hume. Best ed.
6
From 1688 to 1702, by Macaulay.
4
or better edition. 5 vols., 8° $10 00
Green, Shorter History of.
8°
A History of Our Own Times. McCarthy.
12°
FRANCE.
France, History of, by Guizot.
6 8°
Continuation by Martin, (brings it down to 1879.) 3
8°
The Revolution of 1789, by Michelet.
GERMANY.
Germany, History of, by Lewis.
I 8°
HOLLAND
The Rise of the Dutch Republic, by Motley.
3
8°
History of the United Netherlands, by Motley.
4
8°
UNITED STATES.
Tocqueville, de. Democracy in America.
8°
United States, History of, by Bryant and Gay.
4
8°
General Popular History of, by Lossing.
8°
History of American Civil War, by Draper.
3 8°
Biography.
GENERAL
Alfred the Great, by Hughes.
12°
Book of Golden Deeds. (Golden Treasury.)
I 16°
33 00
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3
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Creasy. Fifteen Decisive Battles of the World.
12°
Cromwell, by Carlyle. I vol., 16° gocts.
English Men of Letters. Edited by John Morley. Com-
prising Johnson, Gibbon, Scott, Shelley, Hume, Gold-
smith, Defoe, Burns, Spenser, Thackeray, Burke,
Milton.
12
Epochs of History Series.
16 16°
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Crusades; The Thirty Year's War 1618–1648; The Houses of
Lancaster and York with the Conquest and Loss of France ;
Edward III;
The Age of Elizabeth ; The Fall of the Stuarts
and Western Europe from 1678 to 1697 ; The First Two Stuarts
and the Puritan Revolution, 1603-1660 ; The War of American
Independence; The Early Plantagenets; The Age of Anne;
The Normans in Europe ; Frederick the Great and the Seven
Years War; The French Revolution and the Wars that came
of it, 1787-1815 ; The Beginning of the Middle Ages ; Charles
the Great and Alfred; the History of England in its connection
with that of Europe in the 9th century ; The Early Times of
Modern Europe to the Beginning of the Middle Ages.
Each volume sold separately.
Franklin. Autobiography.
3 12°
Johnson, by Boswell.
5 12°
Johnson. Lives of the Poets (abridged)
12°
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Comprising Lincoln, Coligny, Judas Maccabaeus, Joan
of Arc; Haroun al Raschid, Charlemagne, Victor
Emanuel, Sir Frances Drake, etc.
8 16°
Plutarch's Lives. ed. Clough.
I 8°
Smiles. Self Help.
12°
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or condensed edition. I vol., 12° $250
Travel and Description.
AMERICA.
Baldwin. Ancient America.
°
Dodge. The Plains of the Great West and their Inhabi-
tants.
I 8°

4 50
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I 25
9 00
King. Mountaineering in the Sierra Nevada.
12°
2 00
Parkman. Discovery of the Great West.
AFRICA AND THE EAST,
Kinglake. Eothen.
I 12°
Layard, Nineveh, abridged edition.
2 00
Speke. Sources of the Nile.
8°
Stanley. Sinai and Palestine.
8°
EUROPE.
Hawthorne. Our Old Home. (England.)
16°
I 50
Howells. Italian Journeys.
12°
Taylor. Views Afoot.
12°
I 50
Wallace. Russia.
8°
Warner's Saunterings.
16°
GENERAL.
Dana. Two Years Before the Mast.
I 12° I 50
General Literature.
Addison Works edited by Greene;
6 12°
or, Selections, edited by Habberton. 2 vols., 16° $2 25
Agassiz. Methods of Study in Natural History.
12°
I 75
Ancient Classics for English Readers, edited by Collins.
Comprising translations and studies of Homer, Hero-
dotus, Æschylus, Xenophon, Virgil, Sophocles, Cicero,
Cæsar, Euripides, Aristophanes, Horace and Juvenal,
Pliny, Ovid, Demosthenes, Aristotle, Plato and Tacitus. 10 12° 15 co
Bacon (Lord). Essays ;
16°
I 25
or with notes by Lewis Heard.
8°
2 25
Carlyle. Essays.
750
Clodd. Childhood of the World.
16°
Craik. History of English Literature.
2 8°
5 00
De Quincey. Works. (Part.) (See List II.)
6 12°
Disraeli. Curiosities of Literature.
7 00
Draper. Intellectual Development of Europe,
12°
3 00
Eggleston. How to Educate Yourself.
I
16°
50
Emerson. Prose works,
3
750
Epictetus.
8°
Froude. Short Studies on Great Subjects. (See List II.) 2 12°
3 oo
Goethe, Works,
8 12° II 25
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4 12°
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3
I
Goldsmith. Works edited by Prior.
4
Hallam. European Literature,
4
7-90
Hamerton. Intellectual Life.
2 bo
Hawthorne. Works. (Less volumes already given in
Travel.)
10 32° 12 50
Hood. Works.
2
or best edition. 7 vols., 12° $14 00
Holmes. Prose Works.
12° IO 00
Irving Works, (except Historical and Biographical given
under those Headings). (See also List II.)
13
16° 17 25
Lamb, Chas. Works.
7 50
Lewes. Biographical History of Philosophy.
8°
3 50
Longfellow. Prose Works.
3 16°
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Macaulay. Essays.
3
3 75
Maine. Early History of Institutions.
8°
3 50
Mill.
On Liberty, and Subjection of Women,
2 50
Principles of Political Economy.
8°
4 00
Representative Government.
12°
Montaigne. Essays.
7 50
Nordhoff. Politics for Young Americans.
12°
I 50
Pascal. Thoughts and Letters.
12°
4 50
Plato. Republic.
16°
Poe.
Works.
7 50
Richter. Fruit, Flower and Thorn Pieces.
16°
2 00
Ruskin. Modern Painters.
4 12° IO 00
Smiles. Character.
Stedman. Victorian Poets.
12°
2 50
Taylor, Bayard. German Literature.
I
12°
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Thackeray. Works.
12
12° 15 00
Tyler, M. C. American Literature.
8°
Youmans. Correlation of Forces.
12° 2 OO

I
I2°
2
I
2 50
f 12°
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2
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I 25
4 12°
2
I
12°
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2
6 00
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I 50
Fiction.
Arabian Nights.
Austen, Jane. Novels.
Bronte, Charlotte. Novels.
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IO
15 00
IO
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12 50
I 25
4 50
3
12°
12°
12°
12°
12°
16°
8°
12°
12°
12°
I
Bunyan. Pilgrim Progress.
Cervantes. Don Quixote.
Cooper. Novels. (Part.).
Curtis. Potiphar Papers.
Defoe. Robinson Crusoe.
Dickens. Novels.,
Edgeworth. Novels,
Eliot, George. Novels.
Foqué. Undine and Sintram.
Gaskell. Novels. (Part.) (See List II.)
Goldsmith. The Vicar of Wakefield,
• Hugo. Les Miserables.
Kingsley, Charles. Novels. (Part.)
(Part.) (See List II.)
Muloch. Novels. (Part.) (See List II.)
Oliphant. Novels. (Part.)
Reade, Charles. Novels. (Part.) (See List II.)
Saintine. Picciola.
Scott, Walter Novels.
Stowe. Uncle Tom's Cabin.
Taylor, Bayard. Novels. (Part.) (See List II.)
Tautphæus. Novels.
Thackeray, Miss. Novels. (Part.)
Ware. Zenobia. .
I 25
I
2 50
4
7 00
4
6 00
3
6
12°
I
4 50
7 50
I 25
25 00
I
25
5 I
I
2 CO
3
4
16°
12°
12°
12°
12°
12°
12°
4 50
7 00
3 75
3
I
2 00
6
9 00
2
4 oo
I
4 00
I
I
Poetry and Drama.
Browning, Robt. Earlier Works.
Browning, Mrs.
Bryant.
Burns,
Campbell.
Coleridge.
Cowper.
Dana. Household Book of Poetry.
Dante. Translated by Longfellow.
Emerson.
Gray.
Goethe's Faust. Translated by Taylor.
Goethe's Poems. Translated by Bowring.
I
I 75
I 50
I 50
150
12°
12°
8°
12°
12°
12°
12°
8°
8°
32°
16°
12°
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?
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2
4 50
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SUGGESTIONS FOR HOUSEHOLD LIBRARIES.
123
2
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4 50
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Herbert.
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Longfellow.
Lowell.
Milton.
Palgrave. Golden Treasury.
Parton. Collection of Humorous Poetry.
Pope.
Schiller. Translated by Bowring.
Scott.
Shakespeare. Complete. Edited by Hudson.
Spenser. Select Poems.
Tennyson.
Whittier.
Wordsworth.
3 oo
I
12°
I 12°
2 16°
I I 2°
I '12°
I
12°
I 16°
I 8°
I
12°
I
12°
I. 12°
12
12°
I 12°
12°
12°
I 12°
I 50
I 40
I 50
15 00
I 75
2 00
I I
I I
2
2 00
I 50
SECOND LIST
22 50
2
9 00
I
8
I
8°
6 00
21
Forming an additional library of 500, volumes, recommended as the next
most desirable aud important.
Cyclopædias, etc.
Allibone. Dictionary of Authors.
3
8°
Chambers. Book of Days.
8°
Clarke. Concordance to Shakespeare.
8°
7 50
Cruden. Concordance to the Bible.
3 00
Drake. Dictionary of American Biography.
8°
* Encyclopædia Britannica.
8° 105 00
Haydn. Dictionary of Dates, with American Supplement. I 8°
Smith Dictionary of Greek and Roman Biography and
Mythology.
3
24 00
Stearns. Shakespeare Treasury of Wit and Wisdom.
12°
Wood's Natural History.
3 8°
IS OO
Dictionaries.
Harper. Latin Lexicon, edited by Lewis.
Liddell and Scott. Greek Lexicon.
8°
4 75
* July, 1880. Of the ninth edition, ii volumes now ready.
9 00
I
I 75
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8°
9 00
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124
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Spier and Surenne. French Dictionary.
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8°
3 50
History.
ANCIENT.
Herodotus, edited by Rawlinson.
4
8°
(Or last revised English ed. of 1880, 4 vols., 8º $30 00)
Seven Great Monarchies of the Eastern World. Rawlinson. 5
8° 30 00
Ancient Egyptians. By Wilkinson.
3
8° 33 00
Greece. By Grote.
12°
18 00
(Or last revised English edition, Io vols., 8°, $40 00)
Rome, By Mommsen.
4
The Jews. By Josephus. Edited by Whiston.
4
ENGLAND.
Armitage. Childhood of the English Nation.
16°
I 25
Freeman. History of the Norman Conquest.
6 8°
20 00
Froude. History of England from the fall of Wolsey to
the death of Elizabeth.
I2 12°
15 00
Green History of the English People.
4
IO 00
Hallam. Constitutional History of England.
3
5 25
Strickland. Queens of England.
6 12° 12 00
EUROPE.
Dyer. History of Modern Europe.
4
8°
Robertson. View of Europe during the Middle Ages. 12° 2 00
FRANCE.
Carlyle. French Revolution, .
3
2 70
Crowe History of France.
5
40 00
Lamartine. History of the Girondists.
3
12°
4 50
GERMANY.
Bryce. The Holy Roman Empire.
12°
2.00
Gardner, Thirty Year's War.
I 16°
Gould (S. Baring.) Germany, Present and Past.
HOLLAND.
Motley. Life of John Barneveld.
2 8°
4 00
ITALY.
Ranke. History of the Popes.
3
12°
Sismondi. History of the Italian Republics.
12°
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8°
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I 00
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8 50
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14 oo
30 oo
I
12°
12°
12°
12°
12°
12°
I
UNITED STATES AND BRITISH AMERICA.
Bancroft. History of the United States.
6
Frothingham. Rise of the Republic.
Parkman's Historical Works.
8
Comprising: The Oregon Trail ; History of the Conspiracy of
Pontiac, 2 vols.; The Pioneers of France in the New World ;
The Jesuits in North America in the 17th Century; The Dis-
covery of the Great West; The Old Régime in Canada; Count
Frontenac and New France under Louis XIV.
Von Holst. Constitutional History of the United States. 2
GENERAL,
Creasy. Fifteen Decisive Battles of the World.
I
D'Aubigné. History of the Reformation.
13
Milman. History of Christianity to the Fall of Paganism. 3
-Latin Christianity.
8
Prescott. Historical Works.
15
Smith, Goldwin. On the Study of History.
Smyth. Lectures on Modern History.
Sybel. History and Literature of the Crusades.
White. Eighteen Christian Centuries.
Biography.
Angelo, Michael. By Grimm.
Audubon. Autobiography.
Bayard, The Story of the Chevalier.
Burke, By Prior.
Charles XII of Sweden. By Voltaire.
I
Charles V of Spain. By Robertson, Ed. Prescott
3
Charles, the Bold of Burgundy. By Kirk.
3
Cæsar. By Froude.
Evelyn. Diary.
Frederick the Great By Carlyle.
Goethe. By Lewes.
Autobiography, translated by Oxenford. (Bohn.)
Higginson's Brief Biographies of European Statesmen.
Irving, Washington. By P. M. Irving.
Macaulay. By Trevelyan.
Mahomet. By Irving.
Napoleon By Lanfrey.
4
I 50
I 40
4 25
2 00
2
I
2
5 00
I
2 00
I
I
8°
8°
16°
12°
12°
8°
8°
8°
12°
I 25
I 40
2 25
6 75
9 00
I
2 50
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I
2 00
IO
16°
9 00
I
I
8 00
8°
12°
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4 12°
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2
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6 00
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3 50
4 50
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2 50
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2
Nelson. By Southey.
I 16°
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Prescott, W. H. By Ticknor,
I 8°
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8°
Robertson, F. W. Life and Letters.
12°
Schiller. By Carlyle.
I
Scott. By Lockhart.
Smith, Goldwin. Three English Statesmen,
Voltaire. By Morley.
I 8°
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2 8°
Travel and Description.
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Burton. The Lake region of Africa.
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2 12°
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Escott. England.
8°
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I
12°
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I 12°
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12°
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Hamerton, Round My House.
I
12°
GERMANY.
De Stael. Germany.
I 12°
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De Stael. Corinne. .
I 12°
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І 12°
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12°
GENERAL.
Pumpelly. Across America and Asia.
8°
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I 8°
4 00
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IO
IO 00
7 00
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50
10 50
I
12°
I 50
2 50
4 00
SUMMARIES AND COLLECTED WORKS.
Becker. Charicles, or Ancient Greek Life.
8°
Gallus, or Ancient Roman Life.
British Essayists. A Selection.
6
British Essayists. Modern.
6 8°
Browne. Religio Medici.
Buckle. History of Civilization in England.
2 8°
Coleridge. Works. (Part.)
3
Cooper. Rural Hours.
12°
Foreign Classics for English Readers. (Biographical and
critical studies.) Edited by Mrs. Oliphant, comprising
Dante, Voltaire, Pascal, Petrarch, Goethe, Schiller,
Molière, Montaigne, Rabelais and Cervantes.
16°
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12°
Foster. Decision of Character.
12°
Freeman. Historical Essays.
3
8°
Froude. Short Studies. 3d series. (See List I.)
Great Truths from Great Authors.
I 12°
Helps. Friends in Council. (See List III.)
2
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Huxley. Works. (Part.) (See List III.)
5 17°
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6 16°
Landor. Imaginary Conversations.
5 12°
Mallock. Is Life Worth Living ?
8°
Marsh. Works on the English Language.
8°
Miller, Hugh. Works. (Part.) (See List III.)
6 12°
Müller, Max. Chips from a German Workshop.
Mitchell. Reveries of a Bachelor.
12°
Porter. Books and Reading.
12°
Ruskin. Stones of Venice. (See Lists I and III.) 3
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Seven Lamps.
12°
Spencer, Herbert. Works. (Part.)
Taine. History of English Literature.
2 8°
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Trench. Philological Works.
Tyndall. Works. (Part.) (See List III.)
3
Van Laun. History of French Literature.
3
8°
Warner, Dudley. Works. (Part.) (See List III.)
Whipple. Character and Characteristic Men.
12°

8 00
900
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6.00
2
IO 50
4 12°
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2 00
7 00
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5 12°
9 25
6 00
6 00
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سر می برم
7 50
5 00
4 16°
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128
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White. Classical Literature.
Wilson. Noctes Ambrosianæ.
12°
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Fiction.
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7 50
2
2 00
12°
12°
16°
12°
12°
12°
І
I
6
I
I 25
I 25
7 50
2 50
7 50
I
8°
2 00
I
I 25
14 oo
6 16°
I
12°
I
16°
7 12°
3 12°
3
12°
5 12°
6 12°
6 12°
I 12°
3
12°
Ол
Aldrich. Marjorie Daw. (See List III.)
Andersen, Hans. Works. (Part.)
Auerbach. On the Heights.
Black, Wm. Princess of Thule. (See List III.)
Blackmore, R. D. Lorna Doone. (See List III.)
Bulwer. Novels. (Part.) (See Lists I and III.)
Fenelon. Telemachus.
Gaskell, Mrs. Novels. (Part.) (See List I.)
Gesta Romanorum.
Hale, E. E. Sybaris. (See List III.)
Hood. Works. (See List I.)
Howells. Novels. (Part.) (See List III.)
Kennedy. Novels.
Kingsley, Chas. Novels. (Part.) (See List I.)
Lever, Chas. Novels. (Part.)
Marryatt. Novels. (Part.)
Mayo. Kaloolah.
Muloch. Novels. (Part.) (See List I.)
Oliphant, Mrs. Novels. (Part.) (See List I.)
Reade. Novels. (Part.) (See List I.)
Stowe. Novels. (Part.) (See List I.)
St. Pierre. Paul and Virginia.
Thackeray, Miss. (Part.) (See List I.)
Turgenieff. Fathers and Sons.
Warner, Miss. Novels. (Part.)
Whitney. Novels. (Part.)
Scientific and Miscellaneous.
Bacon. Novum Organum.
Blanqui. History of Political Economy.
Childs. Benedicite.
Darwin. Works. (See List I.)
De Vere, M. S. Works.
Fothergill. Maintenance of Health.
4 50
6 00
8 75
7 50
7 50
I 75
4 50
4 50
2
12°
3
6
9 00
4
8 00
I
I 20
3
12°
12°
16°
12°
16°
12°
12°
3 75
I 00
I
3
3
5 25
4 50
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2 00
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3 50
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12°
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8°
12°
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3
3 75
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SUGGESTIONS FOR HOUSEHOLD LIBRARIES,
129
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I 50
I 75
I 25
I 50
Galton. Hereditary Genius.
Guillemin. Forces of Nature,
Guyot. Earth and Man.
Whitney. On Language.
Poetry.
Alger. Poetry of the Orient.
Arnold, Matthew.
Byron.
Coleridge.
Collins.
Dryden.
Goldsmith
Gray.
Hunt, Leigh.
Hymns of the Ages.
Keats.
Locker.
Lockhart. Spanish Ballads.
Macaulay. Lays of Ancient Rome.
Meredith.
Moore.
Percy's Reliques of Early English Poetry.
Shelley.
Spenser.
Stedman.
Stoddard.
Taylor, Bayard.
Vers de Societé,
Wordsworth.
4 50
2 00
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I 12°
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3 12°
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SUGGESTIONS FOR HOUSEHOLD LIBRARIES.
THIRD LIST
Comprising about 1,000 volumes, which are recommended as the most
desirable and important after the works specified in the two previous
lists have been obtained.
I
I
ထ ထ ထ ထ
I
I
2
2
2 50
o
I
12 00
I
I
Works of Reference.
Allibone. Dictionary of Prose Quotations.
5 00
Dictionary of Poetical Quotations.
°
5 00
Arvine, Cyclopædia of Anecdotes.
4 00
Bartlett. Dictionary of Americanisms.
I
4 00
Brewer. The Reader's Handbook of Allusions, Refer-
ences, Stories, etc.
8
3 50
- Dictionary of Phrase and Fable.
8
3 50
Burton. Cyclopædia of Wit and Humor.
8°
7 00
Crabb. English Synonyms.
I
8°
Kitto. Bible Illustrations.
4
12°
7 00
Rand & McNally. Atlas of the United States.
4°
Roget. Thesaurus of English Words.
I 12° 2 00
Smith. English Synonyms.
8°
6 00
Dictionary of the Bible. (American revised edition.) 4 8° 26 oo
Wheeler. Dictionary of Noted Names of Fiction.
12°
2 50
Ancient.
GREECE.
Heeren. Politics of Ancient Greece.
I, 8°
I 75
Thucydides. Translated by Dale.
I
12°
Xenophon. Works. Translated.
3
8°
ROME.
Ihne. History of Rome. Vols. I-III.'
3
8° 36 00
Livy. History. Translated.
8 oo
Merivale. Rome under the Empire.
7 00
Michelet. Roman Republic.
12°
Sallust. Translated by Rose.
12°
Tacitus. Translated.
2 12°
4 00
Jews.
Ewald. History of the Jews.
5
8°
25 oo
„Strachey. Jewish History and Politics.
I 8°
2 00
6 00
4 12°
4 12°
I
I 40
I I
2 00
нол
6 00
SUGGESTIONS FOR HOUSEHOLD LIBRARIES.
131
2
2
2
5 00
3 12°
2
12 00
12°
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20
20 00
EGYPT.
Kenrick. Ancient Egypt.
8°
5 00
Sharpe. History of Egypt to Arab Conquest.
12°
4 00
PHENICIA.
Kenrick. History of Phoenicia,
12°
Mediæval, etc.
Condé. The Arabs in Spain.
4 20
Froissart. Chronicles of the Middle Ages.
8°
Michaud. History of the Crusades.
3
4 25
Miller. History of the Anglo-Saxons.
12°
I 40
EUROPE.
Alison. History of Europe.
12° 30 00
or Cheaper Edition. (Printed in double columns.)
4 vols., 8° $8 oo
Russell. History of Modern Europe.
4
8° 16 00
Schlosser. History of the Eighteenth Century.
8 8°
ITALY.
Machiavelli. Florence and Italy.
12°
I 40
Napier. Florentine History.
6 12°
7 50
Roscoe. Leo X.
Lorenzo de Medici.
I 40
Smedley. Venetian History.
18°
[ 50
ENGLAND.
Clarendon. History of the Rebellion (of 1689). With
life of author.
7 00
Guizot. English Revolution of 1640.
I 40
Jesse. Court of England under the Stuarts.
3
12°
Knight. Popular History of England.
8°
Lecky. History of England in the Eighteenth Century. 2 8°
Martineau. England during the Peace, 1815-1854. 4
8°
May. Constitutional History of England from the Acces-
sion of George III.
8°
3 50
Palgrave. History of the Anglo-Saxons.
12°
2 50
Pearson English History in the Fourteenth Century.
I 25
Stanhope. History of England, 1701-1713.
8°
7 00
1713-1783.
7 12° 14 00
Stubbs. Constitutional History of England.

ню он
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SUGGESTIONS FOR HOUSEHOLD LIBRARIES.
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4
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4 20
4 20
3 12°
FRANCE.
Adams. Democracy and Monarchy in France.
Commines. Memoirs of France and Burgundy.
D’Aumale. History of the Princes of Condé.
Guizot. Memoirs of My Own Time.
Lamartine. The French Revolution of 1848.
Ranke. Civil Wars in France in 19th and 17th Centuries. 2
Stephens. Lectures on the History of France.
Sully. Memoirs of Henry IV of France.
Sybel. The French Revolution.
4
(or Smyth. French Revolution. 2 vols. $3.50.)
Taine. The Old Régime.
Thiers. Life of. By Le Goff.
History of the French Revolution.
2
Voltaire. Age of Louis XIV.
GERMANY.
Coxe. History of the House of Austria.
3
Menzel. History of Germany.
or, Kohlrausch. History of Germany. I vol., 8º $3 50
Ranke. History of the House of Brandenburg.
3
Schiller. History of the Thirty Years' War.
UNITED STATES.
Adams, John. Works.
First Century of the Republic. A Review of American
Progress.
Frothingham. Rise of the Republic.
Greeley. History of the American Conflict. (More espe-
cially political.)
Hildreth. History of the U. S.
6
Johnson. History of American Politics.
Lossing. Field Book of the American Revolution.
Field Book of the War, 1812.
I-
May. Recollections of the Anti-Slavery Conflict.
McPherson. Political History of the U. S. during Recon-
struction.
Palfrey. History of New England.
4
8°
12°
14 50
I
I 40
IO
8° 30 00
I
8°
5 00
I
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3 50
2
9 00
I2 OO
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8°
16°
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75
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700
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SUGGESTIONS FOR HOUSEHOLD LIBRARIES.
133
2
2
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8°
8°
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7.00
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18 00
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12°
12°
12°
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12°
12°
8°
8°
8°
16°
8°
IO 00
9 5
12 50
I
9. 00
3 00
I
I
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I
3 50
Paris, Count de. History of the American Civil War,
(from a military standpoint.) Vols. I and II.
Stephens. History of the War between the States.
Sumner. Works.
15
Webster. Works.
6
MISCELLANEOUS.
Freeman. History of the Saracens.
The Ottoman Power in Europe.
Hungary and its Revolutions.
India. Descriptive and Historical.
Kelly. History of Russia.
Kitto. History of Palestine.
Mill. History of British India.
Napier. History of the Peninsular War.
5
Greece. By Wordsworth. Hist. and Discript.
Ottoman Empire. Creasy. History of.
Poland. Dunham. History of.
Scandinavia. Sinding. History of.
CHURCH HISTORY, ETC.
Baird. History of the Huguenots; (or, Smith. History
of the Huguenots. 2 vols. $4.00.)
Fisher. The Beginning of Christianity.
Hardwick. History of the Christian Church during the
Reformation.
Mosheim. Ecclesiastical History.
Neander. History of Christian Church.
6
First Planting of Christian Church.
Nicolini. History of Jesuits.
Ranke. History of the Reformation.
Seebohm. History of the Reformation.
Schaff. History of Christian Church.
Creeds of Christendom.
3
Smith. Mohammed and Mohammedanism.
Stanley. History of Jewish Church.
3
History of Eastern Church.
PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY, ETC.
Guizot. History of Civilization in Europe.

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SUGGESTIONS FOR HOUSEHOLD LIBRARIES.
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16°
5 oo
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6 00
I 25
I 25
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7 00
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75
I
3 oo
Hegel. Philosophy of History.
Schlegel. Philosophy of History.
Volney. Ruins or the Revolutions of Empires.
Biography.
Alfieri. Life. Edited by Howells.
Andersen, Hans. Story of My Life.
Arndt. By Seeley,
Arnold. By Stanley.
Bacon. By Spedding.
Besant. The French Humorists.
Blanc. Painters of All Nations.
Book of Worthies. By Miss Yonge.
Bronté, Charlotte. By Mrs. Gaskell.
Brougham, Men of Letters and Science of Time of
George III.
Statesmen of the Time of George III.
4
Burns. By Lockhart.
Byron. By Moore.
Calvin. By Dyer.
Campbell. Chief Justices of England.
4
Campbell. Lord Chancellors of England.
Cellini. By himself.
Cervantes. By Roscoe.
Chesney. Essays in Military Biography.
Christ. Life by Farrow.
Clarke, Mary and Charles. Recollections of Writers.
Clement. Artists of the 19th Century.
2
Painters, Sculptors.
Dante. By Botta.
Diderot, and the Encyclopædists. By Morley.
Edgar. Boyhood of Great Men.
Elizabeth. By Lucy Aikin.
Faraday, as a Discoverer. By Tyndall.
Foster, John. By Ryland.
Gibbon. Recollections.
Gladstone. By Smith.
Goethe. By Carlyle.
I
I 50
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8°
16°
8°
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I 25
2 00
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I
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12°
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SUGGESTIONS FOR HOUSEHOLD LIBRARIES.
135
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4 20
Great Artists, Biographies of. Illustrated.
Greeley. Recollections.
Hamerton. Modern Frenchmen.
Hampden and His Times. By Nugent, .
Herodotus. Life and Travel. By Wheeler.
Henry, Patrick. By Wirt.
Jackson, A. By Parton.
Jameson. Female Sovereigns.
Lives of Italian Painters..
Jefferson. By Parton.
Louis IX of France. By Joinville.
Louis XI of France. By Commines.
Louis XIV. By Miss Pardoe.
Luther. By Bunsen.
By Michelet.
Machiavelli. By Villari,
Marie Antoinette. By Yonge.
Marlborough. By Coxe.
Martineau. Biographical Sketches.
Mary, Queen of Scots. By Strickland,
Mill, J. S. Autobiography.
Milton. By Masson.
Montalembert. Monks of the West.
Motley. By Holmes.
Napoleon I. Memoirs. Las Casas.
Court of. By Mme de Remusat.
Newton, Sir I. By Brewster.
Palissy the Potter. By Morley.
Paul, the Apostle. Conybeare and Howson.
Parker, T. By Frothingham.
Parton. Famous Americans of Recent Times.
Pellico, Silvio, My Prisons.
Peter the Great By Schuyler.
Pitt. By Macaulay.
Plato and the Companions of Socrates. By Grote,
Pliny. Life and Letters.
Plutarch. Life. By Trench,
Raleigh. By Kingsley.
12°
12°
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250
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6
8° 33 00
5
8°
20 00
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2 12°
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I 16°
75
I 12°
3 25
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3 8°
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SUGGESTIONS FOR HOUSEHOLD LIBRARIES.
I 75
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90
3 50
I 56
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2 8°
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2 8°
I 8°
5 12°
I 8°
I 8°
I 12°
I 18°
I 50
I 50
I 50
2 50
I 50
8 00
6 00
Richter. By himself.
Savonarola, Life and Times.
Schiller. By Carlyle.
Sidney, Sir P. By Bourne.
Smiles. Brief Biographies.
Industrial Biography.
Lives of the Stevensons.
A Scotch Geologist.
Somerville, Mrs. Recollections.
St. Beuve. Celebrated Women,
Stein, Baron. By Seeley.
Sumner. Memoirs. Edited by Pierce.
Swift. By Forster.
By Forster. Continued by
Thorwaldsen. By Plon.
Ticknor, G. Life and Journals.
Turner. By Thornbury.
Vasari. Life of Painters and Sculptors.
Walton. Lives. Hooker, Taylor, etc.
Wesley. By Jackson.
Whitefield. By Harsha.
Wicliffe. By Le Bas.
Travel and Description.
AFRICA.
Anderssen. Southwestern Africa.
Baker, The Albert Nyanza.
Cameron, Across Africa.
Lepsius. Letters from Ethiopia.
Livingstone. Last Journals.
McCoan. Egypt.
Schweinfurth. Heart of Africa,
Stanley. Across the Dark Continent.
AMERICA.
Bishop. 1,000 Miles Across South America,
Bird. Lady's Life in Rocky Mountains.
Robinson. The Great Fur Land.
ASIA.
Bickmore. East Indian Archipelago.
4 00
4 oo
4 00
2 75
7 00
2 25
2 50
2 50
75
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8°
8°
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SUGGESTIONS FOR HOUSEHOLD LIBRARIES.
137
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Bird. Unbeaten Tracks in Japan.
Griffis. The Mikado's Empire,
Hunter. Rural Bengal.
Marco, Polo. Travels in the East.
Oppert. Voyages to the Corea.
Prime. Tent Life in Syria.
Wallace. Malay Archipelago.
Warner. In the Levant.
Wilson. The Abode of Snow.
EUROPE.
De Amicis. Constantinople.
Paris.
Holland.
Dyer. Pompeii.
Gautier. A Winter in Russia.
Grohman. Tyrolese Life.
Hare. Walks in Rome.
Hawthorne. English Note Books.
Hay. Castilian Days.
Hunt. Bits of Travel.
Jones. The Regular Swiss Round.
Rydberg. Roman Days.
Sergeant. New Greece.
Story. Roba di Roma.
Symonds. Sketches and Stories in Southern Europe.
Taine. Florence and Italy.
Rome and Naples.
Tuckerman. The Greeks of To-Day.
Wordsworth, Greece.
Greece. · Historical and Pictorical.
GENERAL.
Whymper. Rambles among the Alps.
Brassey. Around the World in the Yacht Sunbeam.
Dilke. Great Britain.
Dufferin. Letters from High Latitudes.
Field. Travels around the World
Heine. Pictures of Travel.
Mac Gregor. 1,000 Miles in the Rob-Roy.

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Prime. Around the World.
I 8°
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Smiles. A Boy's Journey Around the World.
12°
I 50
Taylor. Travels. Remainder of set. (See Lists I and II.) 4. 12°
General Literature, Essays, etc.
Adams. The Secret of Success, .
I
8°
Addison. History of the Knights Templar.
8°
2 50
Alger. History of Belief in Future Life.
I 8° 3 50
Aristotle. Philosophical Works.
6 00
Arnold, Matthew. Essays.
2 00
- Culture and Anarchy.
8°
3 00
Art Suggestions from the Masters. Edited by S. N.
Carter.
I 12°
I 25
Barham. Ingoldsby Legends.
12°
2 25
Bartlett. Dictionary of -Americanisms.
8°
Beaumont and Fletcher, Edited by Leigh Hunt.
12°
Beecher. Royal Truths.
12°
Bell. Anatomy of Expression.
2 00
Bohn. Handbook of Proverbs.
I 2°
2 00
Brande. Popular Antiquities.
Brinton. Myths of the New World.
8°
Brown, J. Spare Hours.
12°
3 oo
Browne, Sir Thos. Works. (See list II.)
Bulfinch. Mythology, etc.
3
8°
Buckle. Essays.
12° I 00
Burke. Works.
9 12° 13 50
Burroughs. Essays.
3 50
Burton Anatomy of Melancholy.
3
12°
Cicero. Oratory and Orators.
12°
2 00
- Works. Translated. A selection.
3 8°
Coleridge. Aids to Reflection.
12°
Combe. Constitution of Man.
I 12°
Cousin. Philosophy of the Beautiful.
I 8°
Couture. Art Conversations.
16°
Cox. Mythology of the Aryan Nations.
2
8°
Curtis. Prue and I. The Lotus Eaters.
2 12°
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Demosthenes. Orations.
12°
Disraeli, Benj. Works.
5
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Doran. Monarchs Retired from Business.
Queens of England.
Eggleston, G. C. A Rebel's Recollections.
Ennemoser. History of Magic.
Epictetus. Morals.
Fergusson. History of Architecture.
Fiske. Myths and Myth-Makers.
Foster, John. Essays.
Fuller. Good Thoughts in Bad Times.
Gladstone. Juventus Mundi.
Gosse. Studies in the Literature of Northern Europe.
Hare. Guesses at Truth.
Helps. Companions of My Solitude.
Heine. Sketches of Travel.
Wit, Wisdom and Pathos.
Higginson. Out of Door Papers.
Humboldt. Views of Nature.
Hunt, Leigh. The Seer, etc.
James. French Poets and Novelists.
Jesse. Anecdotes of Dogs.
Keightley. Fairy Mythology.
Mythology of Greece and Rome.
Knight. Half Hours with the Best Authors.
Knowledge is Power.
Landor. Pericles and Aspasia.
Lange. History of Materialism.
Lecky. History of Rationalism.
History of European Morals.
Lee. Canterbury Tales.
Lessing. Laocoon. Translated by Frothingham.
Locke. Philosophical Works.
Lubke. History of Art.
Mallock. The New Republic.
Marcus Aurelius Antoninus.
Mathews. Enchanted Moccasins.
Mathews. Getting On in the World.
Maurice. Friendship of Books.
Milton. Prose Works,

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I 75
8° 14 00
12°
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140
SUGGESTIONS FOR HOUSEHOLD LIBRARIES,
I 75
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2 25
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3 00
3 00
I2 00
12°
I 75
I 50
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12°
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2
Mitchell. Dream Life.
Dream Life. (See List II.)
I 12°
Morley. First Sketch of English Literature.
I 8°
Müller. Literature of Ancient Greece.
3
8°
Murray. Manual of Mythology.
I 8°
Pitman and Pabke. Wonder World. Legends of all
Nations.
12°
Plato. Philosophical Works. Translated by Cary. 6 12°
Prout, Father. Reliques of.
I
12°
Rabelais. Works.
I 8°
Ramage. Beautiful Thoughts from Greek, Latin, French,
German, Spanish and Italian Authors.
4 12°
Rawlinson. Historical Evidences of Truth of the Bible. I
Seeley. Lectures and Essays.
I 16°
Ecce Homo.
16°
Shairp. Culture and Literature.
Sheridan. Dramatic Works.
12°
Sidney, Sir P. Arcadia.
8°
Sismondi. Literature of the South of Europe.
12°
Southey. The Doctor.
8°
Stearns. Shakespeare Treasury, .
I 12°
Sterne. Works.
12°
Swift. Works. Selected.
12°
Symonds, Renaissance in Italy.
3
8°
Studies of the Greek Poets.
2
Taine. Art Ideal, etc.
Taylor, Bayard. Critical Essays.
Ticknor. History of Spanish Literature.
3
Value of Life, The. A Reply to Mallock.
I
Walton and Cotton. Angler.
Warton. History. English Poetry.
I
Whipple. Essays.
Science, Education, Politics, etc.
Agassiz. Geological Sketches.
16°
- Seaside Studies.
I 8°
Argyll. The Reign of Law.
Bagehot. Lombard Street.
12°
Physics and Politics.
12°
3 25
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16 80
16°
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2
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4 12°
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3 00
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3 50
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12°
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16°
12°
I 75
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6 25
5
IO
16 25
Bascom. The Science of Mind.
Beckmann. History of Inventions.
Bristed. Five Years in an English University.
Bernstein. Five Senses of Man.
Chapin. The Creation and Development of Mankind.
Clodd. Childhood of Religion.
Coulanges. The Ancient City.
Creasy. Rise and Progress of the English Constitution.
Croll. Climate and Time.
Dana. Corals.
Farrar. Essays on Liberal Education.
Farrer. Primitive Customs.
Figuier, Primitive Man.
Guillemin. The Applications of Physical Forces.
Hart. German Universities.
Hill. The True Order of Studies.
Huxley. Works. Remainder. (See I ist II.)
International Scientific Series. Edited by Youmans.
A Selection.
Le Duc, Viollet. Learning to Draw
Lockyer. Physical Forces.
Maudsley. Body and Mind.
Marsh. Earth as Modified by Human Action.
Mill. Dissertations and Discussions.
Mivart. Works.
Mulford, The Nation.
Peschel. Races of Men.
Pouchet. - The Universe.
Porter. American Colleges.
Prichard. Natural History of Man.
Quatrefages. Natural History of Man.
Reclus. The Earth.
The Ocean.
Ribot. Heredity.
Stephen. Liberty, Equality and Fraternity.
Spencer, Herbert. Works. (Part.) (See List II.)
Stickney. A True Republic,
Sturtevant. Economics,

I
I
2 50
12 50
I 50
I
12°
8°
8°
12°
8°
8°
8°
8°
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3 50
3
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3 00
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8°
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8 oo
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II 50
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2
I
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I
5 00
I
8°
12°
8°
16°
8°
8°
12°
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SUGGESTIONS FOR HOUSEHOLD LIBRARIES.
16°
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I
6
12°
IO 50
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2
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8°
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75
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16°
2
8°
IO 00
I
2 00
I
2
12°
8°
8°
12°
12°
8°
8°
8°
3 50
5 00
I 50
I
I
2 00
I
I
2 50
7 00
2 00
]
Thwing. American Colleges.
Tyndall. Works. Remainder. (See List II.)
Tylor. Primitive Culture.
--- Early History of Mankind, Vol. I.
Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation.
Wallace. Distribution of Animals.
Natural Selection.
Walker, The Wages Question.
Whewell. History of Inductive Sciences.
Whitney. On Language.
Winchell. Sketches of Creation.
Woolsey. International Law.
Political Science.
Youmans. Culture Demanded by Modern Life.
Fiction.
About. Novels. A part.
Aguilar.
Novels. A part.
Alcott. Stories. A part.
Alexander. The Wooing O't. and Two Others.
Aldrich. Novels A part. (See List I.)
Andersen. Works. Remainder. (See List II.)
Auerbach. Novels. Part. (See List II.)
Beckford. Vathek.
Björnsen. Novels.
Black. Novels. A part. (See List II.)
Blackmore. Novels. A part. (See List II.)
Blindpits.
Boccacio. Decameron.
Bolteö. Madame de Stael.
Boyesen. Tales.
Bremer, Novels.
Broughton. Novels. A part.
Bulwer. Novels.
A part. (See List II.)
Burnett. Lass of Lowrie's.
Burney. Evelina.
Carleton. Stories of the Irish Peasantry.
Chamisso. Peter Schlemilt
3 00
5 00
750
3 00
4 50
7 50
3 00
3 16°
5 12°
5 16°
3 16°
3
16°
I 12°
3 12°
I 16°
4 16°
6 12°
4 8°
I 12°
I 12°
12°
I 25
5 00
6 00
5 00
I 75
3 00
I
1 50
2 50
2
16°
A part.
7 00
I 50
9 00
4 12°
3 12°
6
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12°
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143
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2 16°
2
8°
6 12°
3 :20
2
12°
I 16°
6 12°
I 16°
3 16°
8°
4 8°
2 16°
3 12°
6 16°
4 8°
I 12°
2
12°
3 12°
I
16°
I 16°
2 16°
I 12°
I
16°
I 16°
I 16°
3
16°
I 16°
I
16°
4 75
750
2 00
A part.
Charles. Schönberg Cotta.
Clarke, C. Noblesse Oblige, and one other.
Clarke, M. C. Girlhood of Shakespeare's Heroines.
Collins, Wilkie. A part.
Davis, Mrs. R, H. Novels. A part.
De Forest. Novels. A part.
Dingelstedt. The Amazon,
Disraeli. Novels. A part.
Earnest Trifler.
Ebers. Uarda and Homo Sum.
Edwards, Amelia B. Novels.
Novels. A part.
Edwards, Annie. Novels. A part.
Edwards, M. Betham. Novels.
A part.
Eggleston, E. Novels. A part.
Erckmann-Chatrian. Novels. A part,
Farjeon. - Novels. A part.
Fenelon, Telemachus.
Feuillet. Novels.
Fielding. Novels.
Flemming. Cupid and the Sphinx.
Fouqué. Thiodolf the Icelander.
Fothergill. Probation, and one other.
Freytag. Debit and Credit.
Gautier. Captain Fracasse.
Green Leavenworth Case.
Hale, E. E. Ingham Papers. (See List II.)
Hardy. Madding Crowd, and two others.
Harte. Roaring Camp.
Heyse, Tales. Translated.
Howells. Novels. A part. (See List II.)
Hughes. Tom Brown at Rugby and Oxford.
James, H. Novels.
Jewett, Sarah. Deephaven, etc.
Johnson, Rasselas.
Lee. Canterbury Tales (from Chaucer).
Le Sage. Gil Blas.
Lever. Novels. A part.
Macdonald Novels. A part.

2
2 50
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3 75
I 25
I 25
2 00
I 50
I 25
I 25
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0
2
A part.
4 50
3 00
7 25
2 00
4
2
I
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12°
12°
16°
16°
12°
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4 50
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12°
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12°
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2 12°
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10°
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I 00
Maitland. Pilgrim and Shrine.
A Man's a Man for a' That.
Manzoni. The Betrothed.
Marlitt. Novels. “A part.
Mayo. The Berber. Never Again. (See List II.)
Mitford. Our Village.
Moore. The Epicurean.
More. Celebs in Search of a Wife.
Muloch, Miss. A part. (See List II.)
No Name Series. A part.
Noble. Uncle Jack's Executors.
Oliphant. Novels.
A part. (See List II.)
Parr, Louisa. Novels.
Novels. A part.
Peacock. Headlong Hall and Nightmare Abbey.
Phelps. Novels. A part.
Prentiss. Stepping Heavenward.
Reuter. In the Year 13.
Roberts. Noblesse Oblige, and one other.
Roe, E. P. Novels.
A part.
Ruffini. Doctor Antonio.
Rydberg. Last Athenian.
Sand, Geo Novels. A part.
Sate Holm. Stories.
Scott, Michael. . Tom Cringle's Log.
Sewell. Novels. A part.
Shelley, Mrs. Frankenstein.
Shunsui. The Loyal Ronins. A Japanese Romance.
Translated by Greey.
Sheppard. Counterparts.
Smedley. Frank Fairleigh.
Smollett. Novels.
Souvestre. Attic Philosopher.
Spielhagen. Problematic Characters.
Spofford. Amber Gods.
Stael, Mme de. Corinne.
Sterne.
Tristram Shandy.
Stowe, Mrs. Novels. Remainder.
Sue. The Wandering Jew.
2 00
3 50
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I 75
4 50
3 oo
I
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3 oo
I 25
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8°
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8°
12°
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16°
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SUGGESTIONS FOR HOUSEHOLD LIBRARIES.
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A part.
A part.
3
9 00
5 25
7 00
4
I 25
2
Tales from Blackwood.
Turgenieff. Novels.
(See List II.)
Tourgee. A Fool's Errand.
Trollope. Novels,
Tytler. Novels.
Verne. Romances.
Vigny. Cinq Mars.
Walford. Mr. Smith and Troublesome Daughters.
Walpole. Castle of Otranto.
Ware. Novels. (See List I.)
Warner. Novels. A part. (See List II.)
Warren. Ten Thousand a Year.
Werner. Good Luck
Whitney. Novels. A part. (See List II.)
Wintkrop. Works.
Yonge, Novels.

16°
12°
12°
12°
36°
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32°
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50
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16°
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16°
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Poetry and Drama.
Aldrich. Poems
I
Arnold, E. The Light of Asia.
Aytoun. Lays of the Scottish Cavaliers.
Bailey. Festus.
Brackett, Poetry for Home and School.
1
Butler. Hudibras.
Calverly. Fly Leaves.
Cary, Alice and Phoebe. Poems.
Chaucer. Edited by Gilman.
3
Clough. Poems.
1
Coates. The Fireside Encyclopædia of Poetry.
Crabbe. Poems.
Dobell. Poems.
Emerson. Parnassus.
Fields and Whipple. Family Library of British Poetry.
Gilbert. Bab Ballads.
Goethe. Hermann and Dorothea. . Translated by
Frothingham.
Goodale. Apple Blossoms.
Harte. Poems.
2
3 50
5 25
2 00
I
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16°
8°
16°
16°
5 00
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Hay. Poems.
I 12°
Heine. Poems and Ballads. Translated.
I
Horace. Odes. Translated by Martin.
16°
Howells, Poems.
I 16°
Ingelow. Poems.
12°
Johnson, R., Editor. Single Famous Poems.
I 16°
2 00
Leland. Breitmann Ballads.
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2 00
Lessing. Nathan the Wise. Translated.
I 16°
Longfellow. Editor, Poems of Places.
8
16°
Lytton. Lost Tales of Miletus.
I
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Meredith. Lucile.
I 16°
Mistral. Mireio. Translated by Preston.
I
12°
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Moliére. Translated by Wall.
3 12°
4 50
Morris. Poems. A part.
4 12°
Muloch. Poems. .
I
16°
Omar Khayyam. Rubaiyat.
I 16°
I 25
Preston. Troubadours and Trouvéres.
12°
2 00
Proctor, Adelaide, Poems.
I 16°
2 00
Quiet Hours.
I 16°
Reynard the Fox.
I 8°
Rogers. Poems.
I 12°
Rosetti, C. G. Poems.
1 16°
I 75
Rosetti, D. G. Poems.
1 16°
I 50
Saadi. Rose Garden of Persia.
I
16°
2 50
Sea and Shore (a collection of poems).
I
16°
25
Shakespeare. Songs and Sonnets. Edited by Palgrave. I
16°
I 25
Smith, H. and J. Poems.
I 12°
Southey. Poems.
I 8°
3 00
Swinburne. Atalanta in Calydon.
I 12°
Taylor, Bayard. Echo Club.
I 12°
Taylor, Sir H. Philip van Arteveld.
I 16°
Tegner. Frithiof's Saga.
1 16°
Thackeray. Ballads.
I 16° I 00
Thomson. Poems.
I 12°
2 00
Trowbridge. The Vagabond, etc.
I
16°
I 50
Vers de Societé.
I 16° I 00
Virgil. Translated by Conington,
I
12°
Whittier. Songs of Three Centuries.
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A Collection of 50 Volumes of useful and desirable books, in economical
and compact editions, is suggested as follows :
Bacon. Essays. Edited by Lewis.
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Bartlett. Dictionary of Quotations.
Book of Golden Deeds.
Browning. Men and Women.
I 50
Bryant's Poems.
I
2 00
Carlyle. Anthology.
I
Chambers. Cyclopædia.
IO
45 00
Dante. Translated by Cary.
2 00
Defoe. Robinson Crusoe,
I
I 50
Don Quixote.
I
2,00
Emerson. Essays.
2
3 00
Franklin. Autobiography.
Godwin. Cyclopædia of Biography.
Goethe. Faust. Translated by Taylor. Part I.
2 00
Great Truths from Great Authors.
2 25
Hawthorne. Scarlet Letter.
Higginson. Young Folks' History of the U. S.
1
I 50
Hood. Prose Works.
3 00
Irving. Life of Washington. Abridged.
I
2 50
Sketch Book and Knickerbocker.
2 50
Johnson. Chief Lives of the Poets.
2 00
Knight. Half Hours with the Best Authors.
3
5 25
Lamb. Essays of Elia.
I 75
Lowell. Poems.
I 75
Mill on Liberty. (With Subjection of Women.)
2 25
Milton. Poems.
I
I 50
Plato. Republic.
I 25
Plutarch. Lives.
I
Putnam. Best Reading.
I
I 75
Library Atlas.
World's Progress.
I
4 50
Ruskin. Works. Selection.
2 50
Scott. Poems.
I 50
Shakespeare.
Smiles. Self Help.
I
I 50
Trench. Study of Words.
I 25
Whittier. Poems.
I
2
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10 00
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2 00

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*
The Academic Atlas of Modern and Classical Geography.
Consisting of 32 Maps. Imperial quarto, with full Index, cloth
extra,
$250
The Student's Atlas of Modern and Classical Geography,
Consisting of 32 Maps of Modern Geography, 8 Maps of Classical
Geography, and full Index. Imperial octavo, cloth extra, $3 oo
Half morocco,
6 00
The Collegiate Atlas. A new, ceinprehensive, and useful Atlas of
Modern Geography for the Library and for ordinary reference, with
about 40 Maps, Imperial 8vo, cloth extra,
$350
The International Atlas, POLITICAL CLASSICAL AND HISTORICAL.
Consisting of 62 Maps--32 of Modern Geography, showing all the
latest Discoveries and changes of Boundaries, and 30 of Historical
and Classical Geography; with descriptive Letter-press of Historical
and Classical Geography. By WM. F. COLLIER, LL.D., and
LEONHARD SCHMITZ, - LL.D. With copious Indices. öva cloth
exlra,
$5 oo
Half morocco,
8 00
The INTERNATIONAL ATLAS * * is handskine and accurate, beauti-
fully engraved, and exquisitely colored.
of excrisonal completeness."
N. V. Evening Mail.
"The Maps are well executed, and the work is most convenient for reſerence."
N. Y. Tribune.
The Library Atlas of Modern, Historical, and Classical Ge.
ography. Second and revised edition, with 4 new Maps of the
United States, Consisting of 104 Maps, including 8 Railway Maps
and 4 Astronomical Charts, With full descriptive Letter-press of
Modern Geography by JAMES BRYCE, of Iistorical Geography by
WILLIAM F..COLLIER, and of Classical Geography by LEONHARD
SCHMITC, and copious Indices. Large octavo, cloth extra, $10 00
Half morocco neat,
Half morocco extra,
14 00
Full morocco extra,
20 00
The most thorough and comprehensive work of its kind ever published, giving
in convenient shape and at a low price information and statistics which hereuotore have
been obtainable only through the purchase of several bulky volumes.
New Mercantile Map of the World, on Mercator's Projec-
tion. For Merchants, Shippers, Ship-owner cie. Size, 55 inches
by go inches.
This Map gives, in addition to a clear represen n of all the States, King-
doms and Empires of the Worid, with the most recent ch us of Boundaries and the
atest Geograp. cal Discoveries, full specitica tions of a t recognized steam and
sailing routes, the principal Overland Telegraphs, Sulime Cabies, and lines of
Railways; and also a complete description of the Ocean -rrents, limits of ſcebergs
and Drifts, etc., etc. the whole forning a compendit usutui alike to the Librar; and
Counting-room,
Price, folded in cloth case, or mu, Rollers.
00
12 00