The little volumes

feared.

Magical influence of books.

once asked Voltaire.

"Twenty volumes folio will never cause a revolution; it is the little portable volumes of thirty sous that are to be feared." The completed Chinese Encyclopædia comprises five thousand and twenty volumes; price seven thousand five hundred dollars. "The crystallized thoughts of the wisest and best of all time, the recorded experiences of men, and the accumulated knowledge of the world, are mighty instruments for living men. One cannot learn everything, but a perfect library must have all the things which books can teach to all men." "By my books," a scholar has said, "I can conjure up to vivid existence before me all the great and good men of antiquity; and for my individual satisfaction I can make them act over again the most renowned of their exploits. The orators declaim for me; the historians recite; the poets sing; in a word, from the equator to the pole, and from the beginning of time until now, by my books, I can fly whither I please." In a letter to Vittori, after giving a humorous description of the manner in which he passed his time in his country-housesnaring thrushes, cutting wood, and playing at cricca and tric-trac with a butcher,

resorts of

a miller, and two kiln-men, Machiavelli says: But when evening comes I return home, and shut myself up in my study. Before I make my appearance in it, I take off my rustic garb, soiled with mud and dirt, and put on a dress adapted for courts or cities. Thus fitly habited I enter the The antique antique resorts of the ancients; where, the ancients. being received, I feed on that food which alone is mine, and for which I was born. For an interval of four hours I feel no annoyance; I forget every grief, I neither fear poverty nor death, but am totally immersed." Lady Mary Wortley Montagu at the age of sixty-two wrote to her daughter: "I give you thanks for your care of my books. I yet retain, and carefully cherish, my taste for reading. If relays of eyes were to be hired like posthorses, I would never admit any but silent companions; they afford a constant vari- A constant ety of entertainment, which is almost the entertainonly one pleasing in the enjoyment, and inoffensive in the consequence." At sixtyeight she wrote also to her daughter, "The active scenes are over at my age. I indulge, with all the art I can, my taste for reading. If I would confine it to valuable books, they are almost as scarce as valu

variety of

ment.

second child

able men.

I must be content with what I can find. As I approach a second childPleasures of hood, I endeavor to enter into the pleashood. ures of it. Your youngest son is, perhaps, at this very moment, riding on a poker, with delight, not at all regretting that it is not a gold one, and much less wishing it an Arabian horse, which he could not know how to manage. I am reading an idle tale, not expecting wit or truth in it, and am glad it is not metaphysics to puzzle my judgment, or history to mislead my opinion. He fortifies his health by exercise; I calm my cares by oblivion. The methods may appear low to busy people; but if he improves his strength, and I forget my infirmities, we both attain very desirable ends." That remarkable passage in one of Dickens' stories, in which Harriet Carker is described reading to Alice Brown - who could forget it? She read to the The Eternal poor woman "the Eternal Book for all the

Book.

weary and the heavy-laden; for all the wretched, fallen, and neglected of this earth read the blessed history, in which the blind, lame, palsied beggar, the criminal, the woman stained with shame, the shunned of all our dainty clay, has each a portion, that no human pride, indifference,

or sophistry through all the ages that this world shall last, can take away, or by the thousandth atom of a grain reduce― read the ministry of Him, who, through the round of human life, and all its hopes and griefs, from birth to death, from infancy to age, had sweet compassion for, and interest in, its every scene and stage, its every suffering and sorrow."

Talleyrand said of Châteaubriand that VANITY. he became deaf when people ceased talking about him. It is well for us, some one has remarked, that we are born babies in intellect. Could we understand half what most mothers say and do to their infants, we should be filled with a conceit of our own importance, which would render us insupportable through life. It was told of a distinguished Englishman of the last generation that, on leaving the university, he was thus addressed by the head of his college: "Mr. Blank, the tutors think highly of you your fellow-students think highly of you: I think highly of you; but nobody thinks so highly of you as you Self-conceit. think of yourself." Recalling the story of the senior wrangler fresh from his triumph, who, entering a theatre at the same

Richelieu's vanity.

time with royalty, fancied that the audience were standing up to do him honor. Richelieu is said to have valued himself much on his personal activity, for his vanity was as universal as his ambition. A nobleman at the house of Grammont one day found him employed in jumping, and with all the ease and tact of a Frenchman and a courtier, offered to jump against him. He suffered the Cardinal to jump higher, and soon after found himself rewarded by an appointment. Carlyle tells an incident. Rousseau's. that recalls Rousseau's vanity. He consented to accompany Madame de Genlis to the theatre, stipulating strict incognito; "he would not be seen there for the world." The pit, however, recognized him, but did not cheer him; and this philosopher hurried indignantly from the scene, not because he was discovered, but because he was not applauded. Thackeray was the opposite. "Even when I am reading my lectures," he said, "I often think to myself, 'What a humbug you are,' and I wonder the people don't find it out." He thought the best antidote for self-conceit was for a man to live where he could meet his betters, intellectual and social. But why cure anything so grateful and gra

Thackeray the opposite.