Herodotus.
Horace.
Juvenal.
Thucydides.
Xenophon.
Plutarch.
Evelyn's Diary.
Pepys's Diary.
Gibbon's Decline and Fall.
The Koran.
The Talmud.
Johnson's Lives of Poets.
Gil Blas.
Don Quixote.
Arabian Nights.
Hudibras.
Homer's Iliad.
Homer's Odyssey.
Virgil's Æneid.
Shakspear.
Milton.
Byron.
Scott.
Moore.
Pope.
Thomson.
Longfellow.
Tennyson.
Cowper.
Faery Queen.
Selections Old English Dramatists.
Dicks's English Plays.
Boswell's Johnson.
Selections from Ruskin.
Roscoe's German, Italian, and Spanish Novelists.
Scott's Ivanhoe, Talisman, Guy Mannering, Quentin Durward.
Bronté's Jane Eyre.
Dickens's Mutual Friend.
Dickens's David Copperfield.
Thackeray's Esmond.
Hawthorne's Transformation.
George Eliot's Middlemarch.
Irving's Columbus.
Irving's Conquest of Granada.
Prescott's Conquest of Mexico.
John Halifax, Gentleman.
Whyte Melville's Gladiator.
Lytton's Rienzi.
Lytton's Last of the Barons.
Lytton's Harold.
Lytton's Caxtons.
Sterne's Tristram Shandy.
Kingsley's Hypatia.
Kingsley's Hereward the Wake.
After the march, unless there was any fighting, or observations for position to take, one of these books was sure to be taken up and occupied the afternoon and then evening until 9 P.M., when what with fatigue, reading, and a necessity to be up at 5 A.M., I would soon be asleep. Many of these books are still in Africa, along the line of march, and will be kept as fetishes until some African antiquarian will pick some of them up a century hence, and wonder how on earth "Jane Eyre," printed in 1870, came to be in Iturn, or Thackeray's "Esmond," Dickens, and Scott came to be preserved among the Iubari of Gambaragara.
VISCOUNT GENERAL WOLSELEY.
Dear Sir,—Press of work must be my excuse for having failed to answer your letter before. I have very great pleasure in sending you the enclosed list. A General has but very little time for reading—at least I never can find time when in the field. During the Mutiny and China war I carried a Testament, two volumes of Shakspeare that contained his best plays; and since then, when in the field, I have always carried—
Book of Common Prayer, Thomas à Kempis, Soldier's Pocket Book—
depending on a well-organized postal service to supply e weekly with plenty of newspapers.
The book that I like reading at odd moments is "The Meditations of Marcus Aurelius."
When I am going on any distant expedition for a lengthened time, I should add to those I have mentioned above the following books:—
|
History. Creasy's "Decisive Battles." |
Fiction. Macaulay's "History of England" and his Essays. |
X.—The "Prison Test."
THERE can be nothing like a campaign for finding out the faults of books ; no one would go a second time into action with anything but what he thought the very best. At the other end of the scale, there is nothing like enforced solitude for discovering a book's merits. Lamb might have relented even towards "scientific treatises, almanacs, and Statutes at Large," had he "done" six months in gaol or been stranded on a desert island. On the other hand that there are books which have withstood even this strain is known to all readers of Macaulay's Life, An officer had been committed, says Mr. Trevelyan, for knocking down a policeman. The authorities intercepted the prisoner's French novels, but allowed him to have the Bible and Macaulay's history. He preferred picking oakum to reading about the Revolution of 1688. This story, as Mr. Trevelyan adds, avenged Guicciardini for the anecdote told by Macaulay in the second paragraph of his essay on Burleigh:—"There was, it is said, a criminal in Italy who was suffered to make his choice between Guicciardini and the galleys. He chose the history. But the war of Pisa was too much for him. He changed his mind and went to the oar." Remembering these tales, we were naturally anxious, in order to make our researches complete, to apply the "prison test." It so happened that a friend of ours of literary tastes was recently enjoying her Majesty's hospitality in certain northern latitudes, and we seized the opportunity, therefore, to send him Sir John Lubbock's list. Here is his answer:—
I am so overwhelmed by the number of Sir John Lubbock's Hundred Books, which I have never even opened, that I have sent the list to the chaplain, who is the librarian of the State institution in which I have at present the honour to reside, with a request to furnish me at once with as many of the Hundred as are in stock, in order that I may at once attempt to make up for lost time. The chaplain informs me that the prison library, which numbers over 2,000 volumes on its shelves, only contains ten—namely:—
Butler's "Analogy."
Keble's "Christian Year."
Bunyan's "Pilgrim's Progress."
Smith's "Wealth of Nations."
Locke's "Conduct of the Understanding."
Cook's Voyages.
Milton.
Goldsmith's"Vicar of Wakefield"
Defoe's "Robinson Crusoe."
Macaulay's Essays.
With a levity which seemed to us highly unbecoming in prisoner, and which we cannot too severely deprecate,
