but PLUTARCH will not pass by us. He will come and chat familiarly to us, and tell us the quaint and pleasant story, and give to us the humorous or the profound reflection; he will make the awful men of Grecian or Roman days to move vigorous and life-like before us. Old MONTAIGNE will not pass us by: no, hale as ever, the hearty, loquacious, and wise old man will come and sit by our side, and penetrate our hearts with all the deep loveableness of wisdom and old THOMAS FULLER and SIR THOMAS BROWN will not pass us by; the one deep, condensed, and quaint, the other rapt, inspired, and wrought to the majesty of strange eloquence and curious learning; but both of them will come and cheerily bear us company. For us CHAUCER will make his Canterbury Pilgrims recite their famous tales: for us SPENSER will brighten or darken the forest-will make the chamber to give back the lights of beauty or glamoury, and lead before us

"The gentle Una, with the milk-white lamb."

And so with the moderns too, men to whom we never spoke, and whom we can never hope to see ; whose portraits and whose books we have looked upon, and whom we have learned to venerate from those books. Books break down the walls between the present and the past. Grote's "History of

Greece," and Macaulay's "Lays of Ancient Rome," bring before us vividly the old times, and antique ways and manners: they are a light, before which the dark hollow ground becomes illuminated with reality, and all the buried men and buried buildings are brought distinct before the eye. Books inflame our estimation of character; the good Biography transfuses the life of the departed into us; Arnold makes Hannibal present to our minds when we read the "History of Rome;" and his biographer, in turn, makes us feel that we are near to Arnold while reading his life. Good books, good histories, are really dramatic; "Carlyle's French Revolution," what a storm of a book is that? how immeasurably more important to us than the "Iliad" are its vivid narratives of events, and men, and things? Books translate us as they will, they carry us as in a magic car, hither and thither we roam, deep down in the clefts of the Himalays, where sunbeams never penetrated, far out of the sound of human voice or footfall; we tread amidst the charmed marble courts of Old Granada, our ears and our hearts are lulled by the sounds of waters from musical fountains. Give us a good book, and according as it touches us, thither we move, over continents, seas, mountains, and volcanoes; we can look into the homes and social assemblies of the men of all lands. If a magician is left in or on the world yet, that magician is a good

book. SIR JOHN HERSCHELL, in a lecture to the Eton Mechanics' Institute, once said, "If I were to pray for a taste which should stand by me instead under every variety of circumstances, and be a source of happiness and cheerfulness to me through life, and a shield against its ills, however things might go amiss, and the world frown upon me, it would be a taste for reading. I speak of it, of course, only as a worldly advantage, and not in the slightest degree derogating from the higher office and sure and stronger panoply of religious principles, but as a taste, an instrument, and a mode of pleasurable gratification. Give a man this taste, and the means of gratifying it, and you can hardly fail of making him a happy man, unless, indeed, you put into his hand a most perverse selection of books. You place him in contact with the best society in every period of history; with the wisest, the wittiest, with the tenderest, the bravest, and the purest characters who have adorned humanity. You make him a denizen of all nations, a cotemporary of all ages. The world has been created for him. It is hardly possible but the character should take a higher and better tone from the constant habit of associating in thought with a class of thinkers, to say the least of it, above the average of humanity. It is morally impossible but that the manners should take a tinge of good breeding and civilization, from having constantly

before our eyes the way in which the best-bred and best informed men have talked and conducted themselves in their intercourse with each other. There is a gentle, but perfectly irresistible coercion, in a habit of reading well-directed, over the whole tenor of a man's character and conduct, which is not the less effectual because it works insensibly, and because it is really the last thing he dreams of. It cannot be better summed up than in the words of the Latin poet-"Emollit mores, nec sinit esse feros." It civilizes the conduct of men, and suffers them not to remain barbarous. Nor can we resist the pleasure of transcribing the following beautiful sentences from the "Indicator" of Leigh Hunt:

"How pleasant it is to reflect, that all these lovers of books have themselves become books! What better metamorphosis could Pythagoras have desired! How Ovid and Horace exulted in anticipating theirs! And how the world have justified their exultation! They had a right to triumph over brass and marble. It is the only visible change which changes no farther; which generates, and yet is not destroyed. Consider: mines themselves are exhausted; cities perish; kingdoms are swept away, and man weeps with indignation to think that his own body is not immortal.

"Yet this little body of thought, that lies before me in the shape of a book, has existed thousands of years; nor, since the invention of the press, can

anything short of an universal convulsion of nature abolish it. To a shape like this, so small, yet so comprehensive, so light, yet so lasting, so significant, yet so venerable, turns the mighty activity of Homer, and so turning, is enabled to live and warm us for ever. To a shape like this turns the placid sage of Academus: to a shape like this, the grandeur of Milton, the exuberance of Spenser, the pungent elegance of Pope, and volatility of Prior. In one small room, like the compressed spirits of Milton, can be gathered together

"The assembled souls of all that men held wise."

May I hope to become the meanest of these existences? This is a question which every author, who is a lover of books, asks himself some time in his life; and which must be pardoned, because it cannot be helped. I know not. I cannot exclaim with the poet,

"Oh that my name were numbered among theirs,
Then gladly would I end my mortal days.'

For my mortal days, few and feeble as the rest of them may be, are of consequence to others. But I should like to remain visible in this shape. The little of myself that pleases myself, I could wish to be accounted worth pleasing others. I should like to survive so, were it only for the sake of those