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Chaucer's Canterbury Tales (perhaps in Morris's edition; or, if expurgated, in C. Clarke's, or Mrs. Haweis's)

Shakespeare

Milton's Paradise Lost, Lycidas, Comus, and the

shorter poems

Dante's Divina Commedia

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Spenser's Fairie Queen

Dryden's Poems

Scott's Poems

Wordsworth (Mr. Arnold's selection)

Pope's Essay on Criticism

Burns

Essay on Man

Rape of the Lock

Byron's Childe Harold

Gray

Tennyson

Herodotus

Xenophon's Anabasis and Memorabilia

Thucydides

Tacitus's Germania

Livy

Gibbon's Decline and Fall

Hume's History of England

Grote's History of Greece
Carlyle's French Revolution

Green's Short History of England

Lewes's History of Philosophy

Arabian Nights

Swift's Gulliver's Travels

Defoe's Robinson Crusoe

Goldsmith's Vicar of Wakefield

Cervantes's Don Quixote

Boswell's Life of Johnson

Molière

Schiller's William Tell

Sheridan's The Critic, School for Scandal, and

The Rivals

Carlyle's Past and Present

Bacon's Novum Organum

Smith's Wealth of Nations (part of)

Mill's Political Economy

Cook's Voyages

Humboldt's Travels

White's Natural History of Selborne

Darwin's Origin of Species

Naturalist's Voyage

Mill's Logic

Bacon's Essays

Montaigne's Essays

Hume's Essays

Macaulay's Essays

Addison's Essays

Emerson's Essays

Burke's Select Works

Smiles's Self-Help

Voltaire's Zadig and Micromegas
Goethe's Faust, and Autobiography
Thackeray's Vanity Fair
Pendennis

Dickens's Pickwick

David Copperfield

Lytton's Last Days of Pompeii
George Eliot's Adam Bede

Kingsley's Westward Ho !

Scott's Novels

CHAPTER V

THE BLESSING OF FRIENDS1

"They seem to take away the sun from the world who withdraw friendship from life; for we have received nothing better from the Immortal Gods, nothing more delightful."CICERO.

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Most of those who have written in praise of books have thought they could say nothing more conclusive than to compare them to friends.

All men, said Socrates, have their different objects of ambition-horses, dogs, money, honour, as the case may be; but for his own part he would rather have a good friend than all these

1 The substance of this was delivered at the London Working Men's College.

put together. And again, men know "the number of their other possessions, although they might be very numerous, but of their friends, though but few, they were not only ignorant of the number, but even when they attempted to reckon it to such as asked them, they set aside again some that they had previously counted among their friends; so little did they allow their friends to

Occupy their thoughts. Yet in comparison with what possession, of all others, would not a good friend appear far more valuable ?"

"As to the value of other things," says Cicero, "most men differ; concerning friendship all have the same opinion. What can be more foolish than, when men are possessed of great influence by their wealth, power, and resources, to procure other things which are bought by money-horses, slaves, rich apparel, costly vases-and not to procure friends, the most valuable and fairest furniture of

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