like irony, the earnest hope expressed by Scott in conclusion, that Southey neither has parted with, nor means to part with the copyright.

Complimenting (notwithstanding Scott's disavowal) an author by telling him how many times you have read his last book, is quite of the Chester- . field type of politeness. That noble earl, for instance, writes to Monsieur de Voltaire at Berlin, to thank him for the pleasure and instruction his lordship had received from the Histoire du Siècle de Louis XIV. True, my lord has only read it four times at present, but that is only because he wants to forget it a little before the fifth reading—which, however, he finds, after all, to be impossible. "Je ne l'ai lu encore que quatre fois, c'est que je voudrois l'oublier un peu avant la cinquième, mais je vois que cela m'est impossible." Not that Chesterfield was white-lying. He had read the book four times, and tells his son so,-though in a letter that was probably meant to meet Voltaire's eye. "I have lately read over all his works that are published, though I have read them more than once before. I was induced to this by his Siècle de Louis XIV., which I have yet read but four times. In reading over all his works, with more attention, I suppose, than before, my former admiration of him is, I own, turned into astonishment." Horace Walpole is another of the astonished admirers and re-perusing students of Voltaire. "I have been reading again, as I have often done, Voltaire's Universal History," he tells the Countess of Orrery. "I admire it more than

ever, though I always thought it his chef-d'œuvre. It is a marvellous mass both of genius and sagacity, and the quintessence of political wisdom as well as of history. . . . I wish you would read it again, Madam; there are twenty passages that look as if written within these six months," though Walpole was writing in 1789. He liked to recommend his own meritorious practice of re-perusals. Thus, to Mason he says in 1775, "Let me tell you, you have no more taste than Dr. Kenwick, if you do not like Madame de Sévigné's Letters. Read them again; they are one of the very few books that, like Gray's Life, improve upon one every time one reads them." If any indirect persuasive could induce Mason to comply, that dexterous compliment "like Gray's Life" ought to have done so.

Walpole's panegyric on the quintessential wealth of Voltaire's History, reminds us of what on raconte of Sièyes and M. de Tracy,—namely, that they "lisaient perpétuellement Voltaire; quand la lecture était finie, ils recommençaient; ils disaient l'un et l'autre que tous les principaux résultats étaient là.” Jean Paul, who for the re-perusal of Lichtenberg, professes to have commonly waited but one year, for the re-perusal of Voltaire waited a clear ten.

Bayle, who read everything, preferred reading Plutarch and Montaigne over and over again. This was the case with him at nineteen; and in him, as in Father Prout, was exemplified the durableness of first attachments, as regards the liaisons of literature. The odes of Horace were Father Prout's earliest mis

tresses in poetry, we read; and as they took his fancy in youth, so their fascinations haunted his L'on revient toujours à ses Goethe declared in his eighty"Vicar of Wakefield" was his

memory in old age. premières amours. first year, that the

delight at the age of twenty, and that he had recently read it again from beginning to end-with renewed delight, and with a grateful sense of the boon it had been to him in early and in middle life.

It has been said to be very hard to preserve a relish for poetry after middle life has begun. Fortunately, however, as the same observer has shown, almost all persons read good poetry at first much too quickly, and therefore, by taking a far larger time to study it, they can see meanings in it which escaped them in their younger days. A dull time in the country enables and disposes them to do this. "There is plenty of time at a deplorable little seaside village to think what the poet meant;" and "thus we get an after-harvest of youthful impressions, and although the second harvest has little of the pleasure of the first, it is much better than having no crop at all, and acquiescing contentedly in the decay of all poetical excitement.”

Lord Lytton, in one of his essays, prescribes it as a great preservative to a high standard in taste and achievements, to take every year some one great book as an especial study, not only to be read, but to be conned, studied, brooded over; to go into the country with it, travel with it, be devotedly faithful to it, be without any other book for the time; com

pelling oneself thus to read it again and again. "Who can be dull enough to pass long days in the intimate, close, familiar intercourse with some transcendent mind, and not feel the benefit of it when he returns to the common world?"

There are some books, observes M. de SainteBeuve, que les cœurs oisifs et cultivés aiment tous les ans à relire une fois, et qu'ils veulent sentir refleurir dans leur mémoire comme le lilas ou l'aubepine en sa saison. Among books thus to be read once a year, by readers so qualified, he accounts the 'Edouard" of Madame de Duras: which very few readers now living, on this side the Channel at any rate, have read once in their lifetime even.

Huet was a si fervent adorateur of Theocritus, that, in his earlier days at least, he made a point of reading through the Sicilian poet once every year, appropriately selecting the Spring quarter for that purpose.

Sainte-Beuve adverts to this pretty practice in the closing paragraph of his essay on Mdme. de Staal-de-Launay. "Huet (l'Evêque d'Avranches) nous dit qu'il avait coutume, chaque printemps, de relire Théocrite sous l'ombrage renaissant des bois, au bord d'un ruisseau et au chant du rossignol. Il me semble que les Mémoires de Mdme. de Staal pourraient se relire à l'entrée de chaque hiver, à l'extrême fin d'automne, sous les arbres de Novembre, au bruit des feuilles déjà séchées."

Boswell professes himself to have been not satisfied if a year passed without his reading Rasselas

VOL. I.

3

through; and at every perusal, his admiration of the mind which produced it was, he affirms, so highly raised that he could scarcely believe he had the honour of enjoying the intimacy of such a man.

Charles Nodier is said to have made a practice of relisant (or at least of refeuilletant) the "Mascarat" of Gabriel Naudé once every year at the least a book which a leading French critic describes as still remaining the delight of not a few érudits friands. So Henri Beyle (De Stendhal) relisait sans cesse the French grands prosateurs of the seventeenth century.

Sir Walter Scott at one time of his life made it a practice to read through the "Orlando" of Boiardo and the "Orlando" of Ariosto once every year. Lord Macaulay did the same with "Gil Blas." John Galt's biographer, in his panegyric on that author's "Entail," hails the "curious coincidence" that it is known to have been thrice read through by Lord Byron and by Sir Walter Scott. Of what book could the same be said? asks Delta. Professor Aytoun professed to read all Scott's novels once a year.

Worthy of being prison-companion to M. Dumas's wonderful Monte Cristo in the Château d'If, is that wonderful Abbé Faria, who, having had five thousand volumes in his library at Rome, discovered, by dint of reading and re-reading them, that a student may learn all that is necessary for man to know, by carefully perusing about a hundred and fifty wellselected works. "I devoted three years," says the Abbé, "to reading these one hundred and fifty