Nations" series, are excellent brief histories.

Motley's Rise of the Dutch Republic and his United Netherlands are highly important and well written historical works.

The annals of the ancient world are elaborately and ably set forth in Grote's History of Greece, Merivale's Rome, and Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.

Another class of books closely allied to biography and history, is the correspondence of public men, and men of letters, with friends and contemporaries. These familiar letters frequently give us views of social, public, and professional life which are of absorbing interest. Among the best letters of this class may be reckoned the correspondence of Horace Walpole, Madame de Sévigné, the poets Gray and Cowper, Lord Macaulay, Lord Byron, and Charles Dickens. Written for the most part with unstudied ease and unreserve, they entertain the reader with constant variety of incident and character, while at the same time they throw innumerable side-lights upon the society and the history of the time.

Next, we may come to the master-pieces of the essay-writers. You will often find that the best treatise on any subject is the briefest, because the writer is put upon condensation and pointed statement, by the very form and limitations of the essay, or the review or magazine article. Book-writers are apt to be diffuse and episodical, having so extensive a canvas to cover with their literary designs. Among the finest of the essayists are Montaigne, Lord Bacon, Addison, Goldsmith, Macaulay, Sir James Stephen, Cardinal Newman, De Quincey, Charles Lamb, Washington Irving, Emerson, Froude, Lowell, and Oliver Wendell Holmes. You may spend many a delightful hour in the perusal of any one of these authors.

We come now to poetry, which some people consider very unsubstantial pabulum, but which forms one of the most precious and inspiring portions of the literature of the world. In all ages, the true poet has exercised an influence upon men's minds that is unsurpassed by that of any other class of writers. And the reason is not far to seek. Poetry deals with the highest thoughts, in the most expressive language. It gives utterance to all the sentiments and passions of humanity in rhythmic and harmonious verse. The poet's lines are remembered long after the finest compositions of the writers of prose are forgotten. They fasten themselves in the memory by the very flow and cadence of the verse, and they minister to that sense of melody that dwells in every human brain. What the world owes to its great poets can never be fully measured. But some faint idea of it may be gained from the wondrous stimulus given through them to the imaginative power, and from the fact that those sentiments of human sympathy, justice, virtue, and freedom, which inspire the best poetry of all nations, become sooner or later incarnated in their institutions. This is the real significance of the oft-quoted saying of Andrew Fletcher, that stout Scotch republican of two centuries ago, that if one were permitted to make all the ballads of a nation, he need not care who should make the laws.

In the best poetry, the felicity of its expressions of thought, joined with their rhythmical form, makes it easy for the reader to lay up almost unconsciously a store in the memory of the noblest poetic sentiments, to comfort or to divert him in many a weary or troubled hour. Hence time is well spent in reading over and over again the great poems of the world. Far better and wiser is this, than to waste it upon the newest trash that captivates the popular fancy, for the last will only tickle the intellectual palate for an hour, or a day, and be then forgotten, while the former will make one better and wiser for all time.

Nor need one seek to read the works of very many writers in order to fill his mind with images of truth and beauty which will dwell with him forever. The really great poets in the English tongue may be counted upon the fingers. Shakespeare fitly heads the list—a world's classic, unsurpassed for reach of imagination, variety of scenes and characters, profound insight, ideal power, lofty eloquence, moral purpose, the most moving pathos, alternating with the finest humor, and diction unequalled for strength and beauty of expression. Milton, too, in his minor poems, has given us some of the noblest verse in the language. There is poetry enough in his L'Allegro and Il Penseroso to furnish forth a whole galaxy of poets.

Spenser and Pope, Gray and Campbell, Goldsmith and Burns, Wordsworth and the Brownings, Tennyson and Longfellow,—these are among the other foremost names in the catalogue of poets which none can afford to neglect. Add to these the best translations of Homer, Virgil, Horace, Dante, and Goethe, and one need not want for intellectual company and solace in youth or age.

Among the books which combine entertainment with information, the best narratives of travellers and voyagers hold an eminent place. In them the reader enlarges the bounds of his horizon, and travels in companionship with his author all over the globe. While many, if not the most, of the books of modern travellers are filled with petty incidents and personal observations of no importance, there are some wonderfully good books of this attractive class. Such are Kinglake's "Eothen, or traces of travel in the East," Helen Hunt Jackson's "Bits of Travel," a volume of keen and amusing sketches of German and French experiences, the books of De Amicus on Holland, Constantinople, and Paris, those on England by Emerson, Hawthorne, William Winter, and Richard Grant White, Curtis's Nile Notes, Howell's "Venetian Life," and Taine's "Italy, Rome and Naples."

The wide domain of science can be but cursorily touched upon. Many readers get so thorough a distaste for science in early life—mainly from the fearfully and wonderfully dry text-books in which our schools and colleges have abounded—that they never open a scientific book in later years. This is a profound mistake, since no one can afford to remain ignorant of the world in which we live, with its myriad wonders, its inexhaustible beauties, and its unsolved problems. And there are now works produced in every department of scientific research which give in a popular and often in a fascinating style, the revelations of nature which have come through the study and investigation of man. Such books are "The Stars and the Earth," Kingsley's "Glaucus, or Wonders of the Shore," Clodd's "Story of Creation," (a clear account of the evolution theory) Figuier's "Vegetable World," and Professor Langley's "New Astronomy." There are wise specialists whose published labors have illuminated for the uninformed reader every nook and province of the mysteries of creation, from the wing of a beetle to the orbits of the planetary worlds. There are few pursuits more fascinating than those that bring us acquainted with the secrets of nature, whether dragged up from the depths of the sea, or demonstrated in the substance and garniture of the green earth, or wrung from the far-off worlds in the shining heavens.

A word only can be spared to the wide and attractive realm of fiction. In this field, those are the best books which have longest kept their hold upon the public mind. It is a wise plan to neglect the novels of the year, and to read (or to re-read in many cases) the master-pieces which have stood the test of time, and criticism, and changing fashions, by the sure verdict of a call for continually new editions. Ouida and Trilby may endure for a day, but Thackeray and Walter Scott are perennial. It is better to read a fine old book through three times, than to read three new books through once.

Of books more especially devoted to the history of literature, in times ancient and modern, and in various nations, the name is legion. I count up, of histories of