Chapter C: Tennyson Turner

'TO THE PURE ALL THINGS ARE PURE'

'To the pure all things are pure'; not only meats and drinks, but all kind of knowledge, whether of good or evil; the knowledge cannot defile, nor consequently the books, if the will and conscience be not defiled. For books are as meats and viands are, some of good, some of evil substance; and yet God, in that unapocryphal vision, said without exception, 'Rise, Peter, kill and eat'; leaving the choice to each man's discretion. Wholesome meats to a vitiated stomach differ little or nothing from unwholesome; and best books to a naughty mind are not unapplicable to occasions of evil. Bad meats will scarce breed good nourishment in the healthiest concoction; but herein the difference is of bad books, that they to a discreet and judicious reader serve in many respects to discover, to confute, to forewarn, and to illustrate.... If it be true that a wise man, like a good refiner, can gather gold out of the drossiest volume, and that a fool will be a fool with the best book, yea, or without book, there is no reason that we should deprive a wise man of any advantage to his wisdom, while we seek to restrain from a fool that which being restrained will be no hindrance to his folly.--J. MILTON. _Areopagitica._

LIBERTY AND BAD BOOKS

The men who died to buy us liberty knew that it was better to let in a thousand bad books than shut out one good one. We cannot, then, silence evil books, but we can turn away our eyes from them; we can take care that what we read, and what we let others read, should be good and wholesome.--C. KINGSLEY. _Village Sermons: On Books._

BAD BOOKS AND DEBAUCHED MINDS

Books will perhaps be found, in a less degree than is commonly imagined, the corrupters of the morals of mankind. They form an effective subsidiary to events and the contagion of vicious society: but, taken by themselves, they rarely produce vice and profligacy where virtue existed before. Everything depends upon the spirit in which they are read. He that would extract poison from them, must for the most part come to them with a mind already debauched. The power of books in generating virtue is probably much greater than in generating vice.--W. GODWIN. _The Inquirer: Of Choice in Reading._

VIRGINIBUS PUERISQUE

To read my book, the virgin shy
May blush, while Brutus standeth by:
But when he's gone, read through what's writ,
And never stain a cheek for it.

R. HERRICK. _Hesperides._

A WHIMSICAL SURPRISE

I should not care to be caught in the serious avenues of some cathedral alone, and reading _Candide_.

I do not remember a more whimsical surprise than having been once detected--by a familiar damsel--reclined at my ease upon the grass, on Primrose Hill (her Cythera), reading--_Pamela_. There was nothing in the book to make a man seriously ashamed at the exposure; but as she seated herself down by me, and seemed determined to read in company, I could have wished it had been--any other book. We read on very sociably for a few pages; and, not finding the author much to her taste, she got up, and--went away. Gentle casuist, I leave it to thee to conjecture, whether the blush (for there was one between us) was the property of the nymph or the swain in this dilemma. From me you shall never get the secret.--C. LAMB. _Detached Thoughts on Books and Reading._

ROMANCES ARE PERNICIOUS

Make careful choice of the books which you read. Let the Holy Scriptures ever have the pre-eminence, and next them, the solid, lively, heavenly treatises which best expound and apply the Scriptures: and next those, the credible histories, especially of the Church, and tractates upon inferior sciences and arts: but take heed of the poison of the writings of false teachers, which would corrupt your understandings: and of vain romances, play-books, and false stories, which may bewitch your fantasies and corrupt your hearts.

To a very judicious able reader, who is fit to censure all he reads, there is no great danger in the reading of the Books of any seducers: it doth but show him how little and thin a cloak is used to cover a bad cause. But alas, young soldiers, not used to such wars, are startled at a very sophism, or at a terrible threatening of damnation to dissenters (which every censorious sect can use) or at every confident triumphant boast, or at everything that hath a fair pretence of truth or godliness.... Meddle not therefore with poison, till you better know how to use it, and may do it with less danger; as long as you have no need.

As for play-books, and romances, and idle tales, I have already showed, in my _Book of Self-denial_, how pernicious they are, especially to youth, and to frothy, empty, idle wits, that know not _what a man is_, nor what he hath to do in the world. They are powerful baits of the Devil, to keep more necessary things out of their minds, and better books out of their hands, and to poison the mind so much the more dangerously, as they are read with more delight and pleasure.--R. BAXTER. _Christian Directory._

WHETHER 'TIS LAWFUL TO READ ROMANCES

Though we think then that the reading these Books may be lawful, and have some Convenience too, as to forming the Minds of Persons of Quality; yet we think 'em not all convenient for the Vulgar, because they give 'em extravagant Ideas of Practice, and before they have Judgement to bias their Fancies, and generally make 'em think themselves some King or Queen or other:--One Fool must be Mazares, t'other Artamen; and so for the Women, no less than Queens or Empresses will serve 'em, the Inconveniences of which are afterwards oftentimes sooner observed than remedied. Add to this, the softening of the Mind by Love, which are the greatest subject of these sort of Books, and the fooling away so many Hours and Days and Years, which might be much better employed, and which must be repented of: And upon the whole, we think Young People would do better, either not to read 'em at all, or to use 'em more sparingly than they generally do, when once they set about 'em.--From the _Athenian Mercury_ (1691-7).

THE DANGER OF POETS AND ROMANCES

It is impossible for me, by any words that I can use, to express, to the extent of my thoughts, the danger of suffering young people to form their opinions from the writings of poets and romances. Nine times out of ten, the morality they teach is bad, and must have a bad tendency. Their wit is employed to _ridicule virtue_, as you will almost always find, if you examine the matter to the bottom. The world owes a very large part of its sufferings to tyrants; but what tyrant was there amongst the ancients, whom the poets did not place _amongst the gods_? Can you open an English poet without, in some part or other of his works, finding the grossest flatteries of royal and noble persons? How are young people not to think that the praises bestowed on these persons are just? Dryden, Parnell, Gay, Thomson, in short, what poet have we had, or have we, Pope only excepted, who was not, or is not, a pensioner, or a sinecure placeman, or the wretched dependant of some part of the Aristocracy? Of the extent of the power of writers in producing mischief to a nation, we have two most striking instances in the cases of Dr. Johnson and Burke.... It is, therefore, the duty of every father, when he puts a book into the hands of his son or daughter, to give the reader a true account of _who_ and _what_ the writer of the book was, or is.--W. COBBETT. _Advice to Young Men and (incidentally) to Young Women in the Middle and Higher Ranks of Life._

A DAUGHTER'S FAVOURITE NOVELS

I could make neither head nor tail of it; it was neither fish, flesh, nor good red herring: it was all about my Lord, and Sir Harry, and the Captain.... The people talk such wild gibberish as no folks in their sober senses ever did talk; and the things that happen to them are not like the things that ever happen to me or any of my acquaintance. They are at home one minute, and beyond the sea the next; beggars to-day, and lords to-morrow; waiting-maids in the morning, and duchesses at night.... One would think every man in these books had the bank of England in his escritoire.... In these books (except here and there one, whom they make worse than Satan himself), every man and woman's child of them, are all wise, and witty, and generous, and rich, and handsome, and genteel, and all to the last degree. Nobody is middling, or good in one thing and bad in another, like my live acquaintance; but it is all up to the skies, or down to the dirt. I had rather read _Tom Hickathrift_, or _Jack the Giant Killer_, a thousand times.--HANNAH MORE. _The Two Wealthy Farmers._

'ONLY A NOVEL'

'What are you reading, Miss----?' 'Oh! it's only a novel!' replies the young lady; while she lays down her book with affected indifference, or momentary shame. 'It is only _Cecilia_, or _Camilla_, or _Belinda_'; or, in short, only some work in which the greatest powers of the mind are displayed; in which the most thorough knowledge of human nature, the happiest delineation of its varieties, the liveliest effusions of wit or humour, are conveyed to the world in the best chosen language.--JANE AUSTEN. _Northanger Abbey._

NOVELS AS ENGINES OF CIVILIZATION

The listlessness and want of sympathy with which most of the works written expressly for circulation among the labouring classes are read by them, if read at all, arises mainly from this--that the story told, or the lively or friendly style assumed, is _manifestly_ and _palpably_ only a cloak for the instruction intended to be conveyed--a sort of gilding of what they cannot well help fancying must be a pill, when they see so much and such obvious pains taken to wrap it up.... You will find that in the higher and better class of works of fiction and imagination duly circulated, you possess all that you require to strike your grappling-iron into their souls, and chain them, willing followers, to the car of civilization.... The novel, in its best form, I regard as one of the most powerful engines of civilization ever invented.--SIR J. HERSCHEL. _Address to the Subscribers to the Windsor Public Library._

A NOVEL OF HIGH LIFE

Lord Harry has written a novel,
A story of elegant life;
No stuff about love in a hovel,
No sketch of a commoner's wife:
No trash, such as pathos and passion,
Fine feelings, expression, and wit;
But all about people of fashion,
Come look at his caps--how they fit!

O Radcliffe! thou once wert the charmer
Of girls who sat reading all night;
Thy heroes were striplings in armour,
Thy heroines damsels in white.
But past are thy terrible touches,
Our lips in derision we curl,
Unless we are told how a Duchess
Conversed with her cousin the Earl.

We now have each dialogue quite full
Of titles--'I give you my word,
My lady, you're looking delightful';
'O dear, do you think so, my lord!'
'You've heard of the marquis's marriage,
The bride with her jewels new set,
Four horses, new travelling carriage,
And _déjeuner à la fourchette_?'

_Haut Ton_ finds her privacy broken,
We trace all her ins and her outs;
The very small talk that is spoken
By very great people at routs.
At Tenby Miss Jinks asks the loan of
The book from the innkeeper's wife,
And reads till she dreams she is one of
The leaders of elegant life.

T. H. BAYLY.

LADY CONSTANCE ... guanoed her mind by reading French novels.--B. DISRAELI, EARL OF BEACONSFIELD. _Tancred._

NOVELS ARE SWEETS

Novels are sweets. All people with healthy literary appetites love them--almost all women;--a vast number of clever, hard-headed men. Why, one of the most learned physicians in England said to me only yesterday, 'I have just read _So-and-So_ for the second time' (naming one of Jones's exquisite fictions). Judges, bishops, chancellors, mathematicians, are notorious novel-readers; as well as young boys and sweet girls, and their kind, tender mothers.--W. M. THACKERAY. _Roundabout Papers: On a Lazy Idle Boy._

EVERY MAN HIS DUE

As a good housewife out of divers fleeces weaves one piece of cloth, a bee gathers wax and honey out of many flowers, and makes a new bundle of all,

_Floriferis ut apes in saltibus omnia libant_,

I have laboriously collected this cento out of various authors, and that _sine injuria_: I have wronged no authors, but given every man his own; which Hierom so much commends in Nepotian; he stole not whole verses, pages, tracts, as some do nowadays, concealing their authors' names; but still said this was Cyprian's, that Lactantius, that Hilarius, so said Minutius Felix, so Victorinus, thus far Arnobius: I cite and quote mine authors (which, howsoever some illiterate scribblers account pedantical, as a cloak of ignorance, and opposite to their affected fine style, I must and will use) _sumpsi, non surripui_; and what Varro, lib. 6 de re rust., speaks of bees, _minime maleficae, nullius opus vellicantes faciunt deterius_, I can say of myself. Whom have I injured? The matter is theirs most part and yet mine: _apparet unde sumptum sit_ (which Seneca approves); _aliud tamen, quam unde sumptum sit, apparet_; which nature doth with the aliment of our bodies, incorporate, digest, assimilate, I do _concoquere quod hausi_, dispose of what I take: I make them pay tribute, to set out this my Macaronican: the method only is mine own. I must usurp that of _Wecker e Ter. nihil dictum quod non dictum prius: methodus sola artificem ostendit_: we can say nothing but what hath been said, the composition and method is ours only, and shows a scholar. Oribasius, Aëtius, Avicenna, have all out of Galen, but to their own method, _diverso stylo, non diversa fide_. Our poets steal from Homer; he spews, saith Aelian, they lick it up. Divines use Austin's words _verbatim_ still, and our story-dressers do as much; he that comes last is commonly best,

--donec quid grandius aetas
Postera, sorsque ferat melior.

R. BURTON. _The Anatomy of Melancholy._

PLAGIARIE

He [King Charles I, in his _Eikon Basilike_] borrows David's Psalmes, as he charges the Assembly of Divines in his twentieth Discourse, _To have set forth old Catechisms and confessions of faith new drest_. Had he borrowed David's heart, it had been much the holier theft. For such kind of borrowing as this, if it be not bettered by the borrower, among good Authors is accounted Plagiarie. However, this was more tolerable than Pamela's prayer, stolen out of Sir Philip.--J. MILTON. _Eikonoklastes._

TRANSPLANTATION

I number not my borrowings, but I weigh them. And if I would have made their number to prevail, I would have had twice as many. They are all, or almost all, of so famous and ancient names, that methinks they sufficiently name themselves without me. If in reasons, comparisons, and arguments, I transplant any into my soil, or confound them with mine own, I purposely conceal the author, thereby to bridle the rashness of these hasty censures that are so headlong cast upon all manner of compositions, namely, young writings of men yet living.... I will have them to give Plutarch a bob upon mine own lips, and vex themselves in wronging Seneca in me.--MONTAIGNE.

BOOK-MAKERS AND PLAGIARISTS

Some that turn over all books, and are equally searching in all papers; that write out of what they presently find or meet, without choice; by which means it happens that what they have discredited and impugned in one work, they have before or after extolled the same in another. Such are all the Essayists, even their master Montaigne. These in all they write confess still what books they have read last, and therein their own folly so much that they bring it to the stake raw and undigested; not that the place did need it neither, but that they thought themselves furnished and would vent it.

Some again, who, after they have got authority, or, which is less, opinion, by their writings, to have read much, dare presently to feign whole books and authors, and lie safely. For what never was will not easily be found, not by the most curious.

And some, by a cunning protestation against all reading, and false venditation of their own naturals, think to divert the sagacity of their readers from themselves, and cool the scent of their fox-like thefts, when yet they are so rank as a man may find whole pages together usurped from one author.--BEN JONSON. _Timber._

A LEARNED PLAGIARY

The greatest man of the last age, Ben Jonson, was willing to give place to the classics in all things: he was not only a professed imitator of Horace, but a learned plagiary of all the others; you track him everywhere in their snow. If Horace, Lucan, Petronius Arbiter, Seneca, and Juvenal had their own from him, there are few serious thoughts which are new in him.... But he has done his robberies so openly, that one may see he fears not to be taxed by any law. He invades authors like a monarch; and what would be theft in other poets, is only victory in him.--J. DRYDEN. _Essay of Dramatic Poesy._

Steal! to be sure they will, and, egad! serve your best thoughts as gipsies do stolen children--disfigure them to make them pass for their own.--R. B. SHERIDAN. _The Critic._

HIDDEN TREASURE

Writers ... are apter to be beholding to books than to men, not only as the first are more in their possession, being more constant companions than dearest friends, but because they commonly make such use of treasure found in books as of other treasure belonging to the dead and hidden under ground; for they dispose of both with great secrecy, defacing the shape or images of the one as much as of the other, through fear of having the original of their stealth or abundance discovered. And the next cause why writers are more in libraries than in company is that books are easily opened, and learned men are usually shut up by a froward or envious humour of retention, or else unfold themselves so as we may read more of their weakness and vanity than wisdom, imitating the holiday-custom in great cities, where the shops of chandlery and slight wares are familiarly open, but those of solid and staple merchandise are proudly locked up.--SIR W. DAVENANT. _Gondibert._

LITERARY COOKERY

We have been reading a treatise on the morality of Shakespeare; it is a happy and easy way of filling a book, that the present race of authors have arrived at--that of criticizing the works of some eminent poet: with monstrous extracts and short remarks. It is a species of cookery I begin to grow tired of; they cut up their authors into chops, and by adding a little crumbled bread of their own, and tossing it up a little, they present it as a fresh dish; you are to dine upon the poet;--the critic supplies the garnish; yet has the credit, as well as profit, of the whole entertainment.--HANNAH MORE. _Memoirs._

THE MANUFACTORY OF BOOKS

To a veteran like myself, who have watched the books of forty seasons, there is nothing so old as a new book. An astonishing sameness and want of individuality pervades modern books. The ideas they contain do not seem to have passed through the mind of the writer. They have not even that originality--the only originality which John Mill in his modesty would claim for himself--'which every thoughtful mind gives to its own mode of conceiving and expressing truths which are common property'--(_Autobiography_). When you are in London step into the reading-room of the British Museum. There is the great manufactory out of which we turn the books of the season. It was so before there was any British Museum. It was so in Chaucer's time--

For out of the old fields, as men saith,
Cometh all this new corn from year to year,
And out of old books in good faith
Cometh all this new science that men lere.

It continued to be so in Cervantes' day. 'There are,' says he in _Don Quixote_, 'men who will make you books and turn them loose in the world with as much dispatch as they would do a dish of fritters.'

It is not, then, any wonder that De Quincy should account it 'one of the misfortunes of life that one must read thousands of books only to discover that one need not have read them'.... And I cannot doubt that Bishop Butler had observed the same phenomenon when he wrote, in 1729: 'The great number of books of amusement which daily come in one's way, have in part occasioned this idle way of considering things. By this means time, even in solitude, is happily got rid of without the pain of attention; neither is any part of it more put to the account of idleness, one can scarce forbear saying is spent with less thought, than great part of that which is spent in reading.'--MARK PATTISON. _Fortnightly Review: Books and Critics._

HOW VOLUMES SWELL

The muse shall tell
How science dwindles, and how volumes swell;
How commentators each dark passage shun,
And hold their farthing candles to the sun;
How tortured texts to speak our sense are made,
And every vice is to the scripture laid.

E. YOUNG. _Love of Fame._

RECIPE FOR AN ANTHOLOGY

Our modern wits are not to reckon upon the infinity of matter for a constant supply. What remains, therefore, but that our last recourse must be had to large indexes and little compendiums? Quotations must be plentifully gathered, and booked in alphabet; to this end, though authors need to be little consulted, yet critics, and commentators, and lexicons carefully must. But, above all, those judicious collectors of bright parts, and flowers, and _observandas_, are to be nicely dwelt on; by some called the sieves and coulters of learning, though it is left undetermined whether they dealt in pearls or meal, and consequently, whether we are more to value that which passed through, or what stayed behind. By these methods, in a few weeks, there starts up many a writer capable of managing the profoundest and most universal subjects. For what though his head be empty, provided his commonplace book be full? And if you will bate him but the circumstances of method, and style, and grammar, and invention; allow him but the common privileges of transcribing from others, and digressing from himself, as often as he shall see occasion; he will desire no more ingredients towards fitting up a treatise that shall make a very comely figure on a bookseller's shelf; there to be preserved neat and clean for a long eternity, adorned with the heraldry of its title fairly inscribed on a label; never to be thumbed or greased by students, nor bound to everlasting chains of darkness in a library.--J. SWIFT. _A Tale of a Tub._

His Invention is no more than the finding out of his papers, and his few gleanings there, and his disposition of them is just as the book-binder's, a setting or glueing of them together.--J. EARLE. _Microcosmographie._

Good God! how many dungboats full of fruitless works do they yearly foist on his Majesty's subjects; how many hundred reams of foolish, profane, and senseless ballads do they quarterly disperse abroad.--G. WITHER (1632).

TO LEIGH HUNT, ON AN OMISSION IN HIS 'FEAST OF THE POETS'

Leigh Hunt! thou stingy man, Leigh Hunt!
May Charon swamp thee in his punt,
For having, in thy list, forgotten
So many poets scarce half rotten,
Who did expect of thee at least
A few cheese-parings from thy _Feast_.
Hast thou no pity on the men
Who suck (as babes their tongues) the pen,
Until it leaves no traces where
It lighted, and seems dipped in air?
At last be generous, Hunt! and prithee
Refresh (and gratis too) in Lethe
Yonder sick Muse, surcharged with poppies
And heavier presentation-copies.
She _must_ grow livelier, and the river
More potent in effect than ever.

W. S. LANDOR.

OUR MASTER, MELEAGER

Our master, Meleager, he who framed
The first Anthology and daintiest,
Mated each minstrel with a flower, and named
For each the blossom that beseemed him best.
'Twas then as now; garlands were somewhat rare,
Candidates many: one in doleful strain
Lamented thus, 'This is a sad affair;
How shall I face my publisher again?
Lacking some emblem suitable for me,
My book's undone; I shall not sell a copy.'
'Take courage, son,' quoth Phoebus, 'there must be
Somewhere or other certainly a poppy.'

R. GARNETT.

'Tis pleasant, sure, to see one's name in print;
A book's a book, although there's nothing in't.

LORD BYRON.

THAT INVENTION OF THE ENEMY--AN ABRIDGEMENT

All my life long I have delighted in voluminous works; in other words, I have delighted in that sort of detail which permits so intimate a familiarity with the subjects of which it treats.... Even in this world of Beauties, and of Extracts, I do not believe myself quite alone in my love of the elaborate and the minute; and yet I doubt if many people contemplate very long very big books with the sense of coming enjoyment which such a prospect gives me; and few shrink, as I do, with aversion and horror from that invention of the enemy--an Abridgement. I never shall forget the shock I experienced in seeing Bruce, that opprobrium of an unbelieving age, that great and graphic traveller, whose eight or nine goodly volumes took such possession of me, that I named a whole colony of Bantams after his Abyssinian princes and princesses, calling a little golden strutter of a cock after that arch-tyrant the Ras Michael; and a speckled hen, the beauty of the poultry-yard, Ozoro Ester, in honour of the Ras's favourite wife--I never felt greater disgust than at seeing this magnificent work cut down to a thick, dumpy volume, seven inches by five; except, perhaps, when I happened to light upon another pet book--Drinkwater's _Siege of Gibraltar_, where I had first learned to tremble at the grim realities of war, had watched day by day the firing of the red-hot balls, had groped my way through the galleries, and taken refuge in the casemates,--degraded from the fair proportions of a goodly quarto into the thin and meagre pamphlet of a lending library, losing a portion of its lifelike truth with every page that was cut away.--M. R. MITFORD. _Recollections of a Literary Life._

ORIGINAL EDITIONS

We love, we own, to read the great productions of the human mind as they were written. We have this feeling even about scientific treatises; though we know that the sciences are always in a state of progression, and that the alterations made by a modern editor in an old book on any branch of natural or political philosophy are likely to be improvements. Some errors have been detected by writers of this generation in the speculations of Adam Smith. A short cut has been made to much knowledge at which Sir Isaac Newton arrived through arduous and circuitous paths. Yet we still look with peculiar veneration on the _Wealth of Nations_ and on the _Principia_, and should regret to see either of those great works garbled even by the ablest hands. But in works which owe much of their interest to the character and situation of the writers the case is infinitely stronger. What man of taste and feeling can endure _rifacimenti_, harmonies, abridgements, expurgated editions? Who ever reads a stage-copy of a play when he can procure the original? Who ever cut open Mrs. Siddons's _Milton_? Who ever got through ten pages of Mr. Gilpin's translation of John Bunyan's _Pilgrim_ into modern English? Who would lose, in the confusion of a _Diatessaron_, the peculiar charm which belongs to the narrative of the disciple whom Jesus loved? The feeling of a reader who has become intimate with any great original work is that which Adam expressed towards his bride:

'Should God create another Eve, and I
Another rib afford, yet loss of thee
Would never from my heart.'

No substitute, however exquisitely formed, will fill the void left by the original. The second beauty may be equal or superior to the first; but still it is not she.--LORD MACAULAY. _Boswell's Life of Johnson._

DEDICATIONS

Above all the rest, the gross and palpable flattery whereunto many not unlearned have abased and abused their wits and pens, turning (as Du Bartas saith) Hecuba into Helena, and Faustina into Lucretia, hath most diminished the price and estimation of learning. Neither is the modern dedication of books and writings, as to patrons, to be commended: for that books (such as are worthy the name of books) ought to have no patrons but truth and reason.--F. BACON, LORD VERULAM. _Of the Advancement of Learning._

PRESENTATION COPIES

I want to read you some new passages from an interleaved copy of my book. You haven't read the printed part yet. I gave you a copy of it, but nobody reads a book that is given to him. Of course not. Nobody but a fool expects him to. He reads a little in it here and there, perhaps, and he cuts all the leaves if he cares enough about the writer, who will be sure to call on him some day, and if he is left alone in his library for five minutes will have hunted every corner of it until he has found the book he sent,--if it is to be found at all, which doesn't always happen, if there's a penal colony anywhere in a garret or closet for typographical offenders and vagrants.--O. W. HOLMES. _The Poet at the Breakfast-Table._

POETS AND THEIR BIBLIOGRAPHIES

Old poets fostered under friendlier skies,
Old Virgil who would write ten lines, they say,
At dawn, and lavish all the golden day
To make them wealthier in his readers' eyes;
And you, old popular Horace, you the wise
Adviser of the nine-years-pondered lay,
And you, that wear a wreath of sweeter bay,
Catullus, whose dead songster never dies;
If glancing downward on the kindly sphere
That once had rolled you round and round the Sun,
You see your Art still shrined in human shelves,
You should be jubilant that you flourished here
Before the Love of Letters, overdone,
Had swampt the sacred poets with themselves.

ALFRED, LORD TENNYSON.

MEN IN THEIR NIGHTGOWNS

Writing of Lives is very profitable, both to the memory of the party, and to posterity. They do better lance into secret humours, and present men in their nightgowns, when they are truly themselves. A general may be more perfectly discovered on his pallet, than when he appears in the head of an army.--JOHN HALL. _Horae Vacivae._

BIOGRAPHY

Oh, that mine enemy had written a book!--and that it were my life; unless indeed it provoked my friend to write another.

It has always appeared to me a strong argument for the non-existence of spirits that these friendly microscopic biographers are not haunted by the ghosts of the unfortunate men whom they persist in holding up to public contempt.--SIR A. HELPS. _Thoughts in the Cloister._

BIOGRAPHY PREFERRED TO HISTORY

Read French authors. Read Rochefoucauld. The French writers are the finest in the world, for they clear our heads of all ridiculous ideas....

Read no history, nothing but biography, for that is life without theory.--B. DISRAELI, EARL OF BEACONSFIELD. _Contarini Fleming._

ON READING TRANSLATIONS

The respectable and sometimes excellent translations of Bohn's Library have done for literature what railroads have done for internal intercourse. I do not hesitate to read all the books I have named, and all good books, in translations. What is really best in any book is translatable,--any real insight or broad human sentiment. Nay, I observe that, in our Bible, and other books of lofty moral tone, it seems easy and inevitable to render the rhythm and music of the original into phrases of equal melody. The Italians have a fling at translators,--_i traditori traduttori_; but I thank them. I rarely read any Latin, Greek, German, Italian, sometimes not a French book in the original, which I can procure in a good version. I like to be beholden to the great metropolitan English speech, the sea which receives tributaries from every region under heaven. I should as soon think of swimming across the Charles River when I wish to go to Boston, as of reading all my books in originals, when I have them rendered for me in my mother-tongue.--R. W. EMERSON. _Books._

ON FIRST LOOKING INTO CHAPMAN'S HOMER

Much have I travelled in the realms of gold,
And many goodly states and kingdoms seen;
Round many western islands have I been
Which bards in fealty to Apollo hold.
Oft of one wide expanse had I been told
That deep-browed Homer ruled as his demesne;
Yet did I never breathe its pure serene
Till I heard Chapman speak out loud and bold:
Then felt I like some watcher of the skies
When a new planet swims into his ken;
Or like stout Cortez when with eagle eyes
He stared at the Pacific--and all his men
Looked at each other with a wild surmise--
Silent, upon a peak in Darien.

J. KEATS.

TRANSLATIONS FROM THE CLASSICS

Others again here livèd in my days
That have of us deservèd no less praise
For their translations than the daintiest wit
That on Parnassus thinks he highest doth sit.
And for a chair may 'mongst the Muses call
As the most curious maker of them all:
As reverent Chapman, who hath brought to us
Musaeus, Homer, and Herodotus
Out of the Greek, and by his skill hath reared
Them to that height and to our tongue endeared
That, were those poets at this day alive
To see their books thus with us to survive,
They would think, having neglected them so long,
They had been written in the English tongue.