Various

“ There are books well deserving to be read in the original which are much less worth reading in translations.
However, I give you some additions to and criticisms on Sir John Lubbock's list which occur to me. I have not seen the remarks of your other correspondents, except Mr. Ruskin's. In Greek poetry Pindar ought to be substituted for Hesiod. In Greek philosophy Aristotle's Rhetoric and Poetic ought not to be omitted. Of Cicero it would be much better to have some Orations than the Offices or Old Age. St. Augustine's "De Civitate Dei" is indispensable. ”

“ The reader who does not keep up a sound digestion will be apt to find good books disagree with him, and will only help to illustrate what is already sufficiently proved, that it is much easier to make a pedant, a prig, or a blatherskite than it is to make a scholar.—I am. ”

“ Taking that as a foundation were I to put my own inclination in the place of his better judgment, I should venture to increase it in general literature by the essays of Bacon, Johnson, Sterne, John Wilson, Carlyle, and Washington Irving, and the greater speeches of Webster. In poetry, by Chaucer, Dryden, Goldsmith, Gray, Coleridge, Burns, Byron, and Bryant. In fiction, by Cervantes and Le Sage, and all of Thackeray and Dickens that Sir John omits. ”