frequently recommended are Thomas à Kempis's Imitation of Christ, Pascal's Pensées, Spinoza's Tractatus TheologicoPoliticus, Butler's Analogy of Religion, Jeremy Taylor's Holy Living and Dying, Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress, and last, not least, Keble's beautiful Christian Year.

Aristotle and Plato stand at the head of another class. The Politics of Aristotle, and Plato's Dialogues, if not the whole, at any rate the Phado, the Apology, and the Republic, will be of course read by all who wish to know anything of the history of human thought, though I am heretical enough to doubt whether the latter repays the minute and laborious study often devoted to it.

Aristotle being the father, if not the creator, of the modern scientific method, it has followed naturally-indeed, almost inevitably--that his principles have become part of our very intellectual being, so that they seem now almost self-evident,

while his actual observations, though very remarkable-as, for instance, when he observes that bees on one journey confine themselves to one kind of flower-still have been in many cases superseded by others, carried on under more favourable conditions. We must not be ungrateful to the great master, because his own lessons have taught us how to advance.

Plato, on the other hand, I say so with all respect, seems to me in some cases to play on words: his arguments are very able, very philosophical, often very noble ; but not always conclusive; in a language differently constructed they might sometimes tell in exactly the opposite sense. If this method has proved less fruitful, if in metaphysics we have made but little advance, that very fact in one point of view leaves the Dialogues of Socrates as instructive now as ever they were; while the problems with which they deal will always rouse our interest, as the calm and

lofty spirit which inspires them must command our admiration. Of the Apology and the Phado especially it would be impossible to speak too gratefully.

I would also mention Demosthenes's De Corond, which Lord Brougham pronounced the greatest oration of the greatest of orators; Lucretius, Plutarch's Lives, Horace, and at least the De Officiis, De Amicitia, and De Senectute of Cicero.

The great epics of the world have always constituted one of the most popular branches of literature. Yet how few, comparatively, ever read Homer or Virgil after leaving school.

The Nibelungenlied, our great AngloSaxon epic, is perhaps too much neglected, no doubt on account of its painful character. Brunhild and Kriemhild, indeed, are far from perfect, but we meet with few such "live" women in Greek or Roman literature. Nor must I omit to mention Sir T. Malory's Morte d'Arthur,

though I confess I do so mainly in deference to the judgment of others.

Among the Greek tragedians I include Eschylus, if not all his works, at any rate Prometheus, perhaps the sublimest poem in Greek literature, and the Trilogy (Mr. Symonds in his Greek Poets speaks of the "unrivalled majesty " of the Agamemnon, and Mark Pattison considered it "the grandest work of creative genius in the whole range of literature"); or, as Sir M. E. Grant Duff recommends, the Persa; Sophocles (Edipus Tyrannus), Euripides (Medea), and Aristophanes (The Knights and Clouds); unfortunately, as Schlegel says, probably even the greatest scholar does not understand half his jokes; and I think most modern readers will prefer our modern poets.

I should like, moreover, to say a word for Eastern poetry, such as portions of the Maha Bharata and Ramayana (too long probably to be read through, but of which

Talboys Wheeler has given a most interesting epitome in the first two volumes of his History of India); the Shah-nameh, the work of the great Persian poet Firdusi; Kalidasa's Sakuntala, and the Sheking, the classical collection of ancient Chinese odes. Many I know, will think I ought to have included Omar Khayyam.

In history we are beginning to feel that the vices and vicissitudes of kings and queens, the dates of battles and wars, are far less important than the development of human thought, the progress of art, of science, and of law, and the subject is on that very account even more interesting than ever. I will, however, only mention, and that rather from a literary than a historical point of view, Herodotus, Xenophon (the Anabasis), Thucydides, and Tacitus (Germania); and of modern historians, Gibbon's Decline and Fall ("the splendid bridge from the old world to the new "), Hume's History of