volumes over and over again, so that when I was arrested I knew them almost by heart. With a very slight effort of memory I can beguile my prison hours by recalling them nearly word for word."

Gibbon

But to recur to the prescription or the practice (c'est différent) of re-perusals once a year. Voisenon places the "Mémoires de Grammont" at the head of those works that ought to be regularly re-perused once a year. "Cet ouvrage est à la tête de ceux qu'il faut regulièrement relire tous les ans." in his autobiography quotes the Provincial Letters of Pascal as a work "which almost every year I have perused with new pleasure." Further on again he says: "According to the wise maxim, Multum legere potius quam multa, I reviewed, again and again, the immortal works of the French and English, the Latin and Italian classics." Not but what Gibbon read multa as well as multum. Few men were ever so capable of doing both.

In a fly-leaf of one of the volumes of a copy of Lessing's works, which belonged to Coleridge, the latter entered this record: "Year after year I have made a point of re-perusing the Kleine Schriften as masterpieces of style and argument." Napoleon seems to have read "Werther " almost oftener than once a year. At any rate, he told Goethe that he had read it seven times, at the time of their meeting at Erfurt, and that he took it to Egypt with him. Werther and Ossian-strange predilections on the part of Napoleon the First.

The late Lord Abinger drew up a list of books for

a law-student, at the head of which stands "Cicero de Officiis, once, twice, thrice; once a year." How often, M. de Sacy tells us of himself, has he, on a fine day in Spring or Autumn, when all was smiling, youth, health, the present and the future, read over again, in his walks, this same treatise De Officiis, that most perfect code de l'honnêteté, written in a style as clear and brilliant as the sky at its purest!

Saint Evremond declares that he could read "Don Quixote" all his life, without being disgusted one single moment; and that his favourite Latin authors he could read a thousand times over without being cloyed. He declined making indiscriminate acquaintanceship with untried authors, and preferred tying himself up, as he styled it, to certain books in which he was sure of meeting satisfaction. In much the same tone the late Lord Dudley, in his letter to Dr. Coplestone, tells the Bishop how he differs from him in taste for new publications. "I read them unwillingly. You abstain from them with difficulty, and as a matter of duty and self-denial. Their novelty has very little attraction for me; and in literature I am fond of confining myself to the best company, which consists chiefly of my old acquaintance, with whom I am desirous of becoming more intimate; and I suspect that nine times out of ten it is more profitable, if not more agreeable, to read an old book over again, than to read a new one for the first time." If his lordship heard of a new poem, for instance-and those were the days in which

Scott and Byron, Wordsworth and Southey, were bringing out so prolonged a series of new poems,— he asked himself first, whether it was superior to Homer, Shakespeare, Ariosto, Virgil, or Racine; and, in the next place, whether he already had all these authors completely at his fingers' ends. And when both questions were answered in the negative, he inferred that it was better (and, to him, it was avowedly pleasanter) to give such time as he had to bestow on the reading of poetry to Homer and his peers, and so of other things.

The re-perusal of one's own productions ought not to be forgotten in a retrospective review like the present. When a king of old displayed his wealth and magnificence before a philosopher, the philosopher's exclamation was, "How many things are here which I do not want!" Does not the same reflection, asks Petrarch in Landor's Pentameron, come upon us, when we have laid aside our compositions for a time, and look into them again more leisurely? Do we not wonder at our own profusion, and say, like the philosopher, "How many things are here which I do not want!" It may happen, he adds, that we pull up flowers with weeds; but better this than rankness. We must bear to see our first-born despatched before our eyes, and give them up quietly." When Byron read over again his "English Bards and Scotch Reviewers," nine years after publication, he wrote on the first leaf of the copy now in Mr. Murray's possession, "Nothing but the

consideration of its being the property of another, prevents me from consigning this miserable record of misplaced anger and indiscriminate acrimony to the flames." Napoleon, in the height of his power, happening one day to mention his having written a prize essay while at Valence, Talleyrand made search for the forgotten manuscript among the archives of the Academy of Lyons (which had adjudged the prize), and presented it to the author. But Napoleon, after reading a few pages of it, threw it into the fire. "Every one," says Mr. J. S. Mill, “whose mind is progressive, or even whose opinions keep up with the changing facts that surround him, must necessarily, in looking back to his own writings during a series of years, find many things which, if they were to be written again, he would write differently, and some, even, which he has altogether ceased to think true." Dr. Boyd apostrophises " you clever young student of eighteen years old when you wrote your prize essay,"-and goes on, "But now, at five-and-thirty, find out the yellow manuscript, and read it carefully over,”—and “ you will feel now little sympathy even with the literary style of that early composition; you will see extravagance and bombast where once you saw only eloquence and graphic power," &c., &c. But these reperusals have in some cases their complacent aspect too. Sir Walter Scott, indeed, five years after "Rokeby," writes to Miss Edgeworth that he has not read one of his poems since they were printed, excepting last year (1817) the "Lady of the Lake,"

which, he owns, "I liked better than I expected, but not well enough to induce me to go through the rest-so I may truly say with Macbeth

I am afraid to think of what I've done―
Look on 't again I dare not.”

But of more importance alike to himself and to the world was Scott's casual re-perusal of the Ashestiel fragment of "Waverley," which his eye chanced to light on when looking into an old cabinet for fishingtackle: "He read over those introductory chapters -thought they had been undervalued—and determined to finish the story." Hence the Waverley Novels.

Thomas Moore, in 1827, journalises himself, one wretchedly wet" day, as employed in correcting some sheets of a new edition of "Lallah Rookh," and remarks: "The first time I have read it since it was published; accordingly, it came quite fresh to me, and more than one passage in the story of Zelica filled my eyes with tears."

Lord Lytton makes a study of Leonard Fairfield looking over his manuscripts,-lingering over a collection of verses, that were as a diary of his heart and his fancy. "And those first desultory grapplings with the fugitive airy images that flit through the dim chambers of the brain, had become with each effort more sustained and vigorous, till the phantoms were spelled, the flying ones arrested, the Immaterial seized, and clothed with Form. Gazing