BOOKS AND AUTHORS FOR ADULTS:

Nathaniel Hawthorne, Scott, Dickens, Thackeray, Lytton, Wilkie Collins, Trollope, Irving, Eliot, Charles Kingsley, Adderley, Ware, Warner, Blackmore, Macdonald, Bellamy, Besant, Weyman, Whiteing, Ford, Reade, Wells, Wyckoff, Robinson, Roe, Miss Mary Johnston, Crawford; "Les Miserables," by Victor Hugo; "Ben Hur," by Lew Wallace, and "Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde," by R. L. Stevenson.

Here you have a list of authors whose books will do you good and set you thinking on right lines. They will improve and tone and whet your literary taste and appetite. They will divert your fancy and solace your heart and entire intellectual being. This, to be sure, is but a conveniently improvised list of novel sources and channels that we have submitted.

But the library of any ordinarily intelligent and tolerably well circumstanced adult would be grievously wanting were it destitute of the principal works of the following list of authors of pure prose literature:

SERIOUS WRITERS AND WORKS:

Gibbon's "Rome;" Motley's "Histories; " Macaulay's Essays and History; Washington Irving's "Rip Van Winkle," "Mahomet," and "Washington;" Bulwer Lytton's "England and the English;" Ruskin's complete works; Carlyle's, also; Ralph Waldo Emerson's Essays; the works of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Anthony Froude, Andrew Lang, Augustine Birrell, and Walter Savage Landor Goethe's "Faust" and "Wilhelm Meister;" William Morris's entire works; Nathaniel Hawthorne's "Mosses from an Old Manse" and "Marble Faun;" Mungo Park's "Travels;" Henry George's "Progress and Poverty; " Edward Bellamy's "Looking Backward;" Prof. Riis's books on social questions, and Prof. Spohr's on industrial problems. Of course these books do not represent, nor is their selection in.

tended to convey an impression that their possession would imply, a comprehensive or entirely satisfactory provision of genuine literary matter such as a man of pronounced culture would be content with in a library of his own selecting. Nevertheless, they comprise a list that, with but few exceptions, no well-ordered and cultivated mind, nor any man of literary pretensions, would be without. Moreover, they are books, for the most part, which no man of professed intelligence should neglect to read or to be more or less familiar with in respect to their purport and essential principles.

But it is not by the number of books a man or woman reads that his or her intelligence is to be consistently gauged and estimated, but by the thorough mastery of them which he or she has attained. A man may read but few books, yet, providing they are good books, that is, true ones, and he has read them rightly and to good purpose, he may become thereby constituted, at once, a man of excellent literary taste and sound judgment, and one to be characterized as such. So much, then, for the adult!

Now let us consider, in accordance with pre-laid plans and outlined intention, the kind of fictional diet which is to be properly regarded as most suitable and advantageous for young people's reading. By "young people," be it affirmed, we mean girls and boys between the ages of ten and seventeen-whose tastes and habits, characters and inclinations, require to be rightly molded and directed, both for their own good and in the interests of humanity. We therefore presume to submit the following list of books and authors as a distinctly desirable one for them to become to some extent familiar with:

BOOKS AND AUTHORS OF NOTE FOR YOUNG FOLKS:

Charles Dickens; Miss Alcott; Maria Edgeworth; Charles Kingsley's "Westward Ho" and "Hereward;" Bulwer Lytton's "Harold" and "The Caxtons;" Miss M. E. Coleridge's complete works; Charles Reade; "Dr. Jolliffe's

Boys," by Lewis Hough; Samuel Smiles's "Self Help;" Mrs. J. F. Willing's books; E. P. Roe; Walter Besant; Charlotte M. Yonge; Mrs. Oliphant; Thomas Hughes's "Tom Brown's Schooldays; " Rudyard Kipling's "Plain Tales from the Hills" and "Wee Willie Winkie; "Uncle Tom's Cabin;' Fenimore Cooper's books; Ainsworth's stories; H. Cockton; Frank Smedley; Samuel Lover; Charles Lever; Captain Marryat; "St. Cuthbert's Tower," by E. Werner; "The Wide, Wide World" and "Queechy," by "Edith Wetherall;" Stanley Weyman; "The Scottish Chiefs" and "Thaddeus of Warsaw," by Jane Porter; "The Life and Travels of Mungo Park;" G. A. Henty; "Vice Versa," by F. Anstey; F. W. Robinson; "John Halifax," by Miss Muloch; Jane Austen's books; "Trifan Trixy," by John Habberton; "Robinson Crusoe;" George Manville Fenn's stories; Ascot R. Hope's; Mrs. E. R. Pitman's; "Jack O' Lanthorn," by Henry Frith; "Miss Fenwick's Failures," by Esmé Stuart; "The Mill on the Floss" and "Middlemarch," by "George Eliot;" "Ten Thousand a Year," by Samuel Warren; "Tales of the Border," by Wilson; R. D. Blackmore's works; Sir Walter Scott; Nathaniel Hawthorne-but these latter, only when the readers are sufficiently advanced; William Black; Helen Candee's "Guides and Business Openings for Girls," and Sally Joy White's books in like relation.

This list will surely be found sufficiently embracive; and parents cannot go astray in turning their boys and girls loose in a library of this nature and variety. There are authors, in plenty, to whose names and books we have not referred in this selection, but those alluded to will amply serve the purpose we had in view at the outset.

It is now in order to submit yet one more list of authors, whose books would seem best adapted to the needs and requirements of those little ones who are just beginning to drink in and feast at the banquet of fictional providings

and from the fountain sources of literary productiveness and originality. Nor can parents do better than to provide themselves with such beneficent sources and mediums of moral and intellectual advantage for their children as the rare creative and ingenious talents and virtues of the authors to whom we now propose to refer may afford them, and whose particular books we choose to favorably entertain and mention. Let parents by all means buy, not borrow, at least a goodly number of the books of these authors. It will be to their own interest to do so; while it will be of incalculable advantage to their children to be thus initiated in the beautiful mysteries of genuine romantic literature.

BOOKS FOR THE LITTLE ONES:

"Grandfather's Chair," by Nathaniel Hawthorne; "Water Babies," by Charles Kingsley; "Little Men” and “Little Women" and "Flower Fables," by Miss Alcott; "Moral Tales for Youth," by Maria Edgeworth; "Alice in Wonderland" and "Through the Looking Glass," Lewis Carroll ; Hans Christian Andersen's "Fairy Tales;" "Stories from Froissart's Chronicles," by Henry Newbolt; Rev. Thos. James's edition of " Æsop's Fables;" "Swiss Family Robinson; "Robinson Crusoe;" "Kenneth" and "Countess Kate," by Charlotte M. Yonge; "Wee Willie Winkie," by Rudyard Kipling; "Cheep and Chatter," by Alice Banks; "Hetty Gray," by Rosa Mulholland; Miss Ewing's stories for children; Maurice Hervey's books; "Greek Fairy Tales," by Canon Kingsley; "Uncle Tom's Cabin ;” “The Tower of London," by Ainsworth; "Two Little Pilgrims' Progress," by Frances Hodgson Burnett; Mrs. Molesworth's tales for children; Grimm's" Fairy Tales;" "Mother Goose's Rhymes, Jingles and Fairy Tales," Altemus edition; "Helen's Babies."

The books and authors mentioned in the foregoing list. will be found sufficiently suggestive and serviceable, we think, in as far as the convenience and requirements of such par

ents as are not familiar with their names are to be considered. A judicious selection of books for their children can be expected only of those who have cultivated, not abused, their own minds and moral sentiments, who have been accustomed to wholesome reading on their own part and are accordingly competent to distinguish the good from the bad and sense from nonsense in their readings. So if parents are really ignorant in such respect and are yet desirous that their children shall start out aright, they cannot do better than to take counsel from the experience of others. We are, indeed, the slaves and victims of our environment, or else the favored children of happier and more auspicious circumstances and influences. Hence the lamentable proneness of the multitude to bow meekly and to submit servilely at the beck and dictum of every pretentious puffer and blower of shoddy wares and pretentious writers who, in the guise of critic or reviewer, proclaims them to be of genuine quality and worth. What we really stand in deep need of at this moment is a juster appreciation of what is best left unread. We need to set more restraint upon ourselves and upon our vagrant fancies and illusions.

In conclusion, we might observe that another paper will be devoted in some measure to the evils and abuses of the free circulating library-evils and abuses which threaten to entirely subvert, if not absolutely nullify, those very purposes and principles to which we are indebted for its organization and establishment, and which it was intended to subserve and promote.