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 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 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 Dickens's Pickwick David Copperfield Lytton's Last Days of Pompeii 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. - 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 |