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on his last effort, Leonard felt that there, at length, spoke forth the Poet."

The mortifying thing, it has been said, is when your own taste and judgment say worse of your former productions than could be said by the most unfriendly critic; and the dreadful thought occurs, that if you yourself to-day think so badly of what you wrote ten years since, it is probable enough that on this day ten years hence (if you live to see it) you may think as badly of what you are writing to-day.

Cowper says he had this peculiarity belonging to him as a rhymester-or rhymist, as he phrases itthat, although charmed to a great degree with his own work while it was on the anvil, he could seldom bear to look at it when once finished. The more he contemplated it, the more it lost its value, till he became at length disgusted with it. He then threw it by, took it up again, perhaps ten years after, and was as much delighted with it as at the first.

Montaigne tells us that his works were so far from pleasing him, that when re-tasted they disgusted him. Like Ovid

Cum relego, scripsisse pudet; quia plurima cerno,
Me quoque, qui feci, judice, digna lini.

Francis Horner journalises a holocaust of his literary offspring on this wise. "This morning a bundle of my own works fell into my hands, essays on imagination, the dramatic unities, the marvellous, imitation, national character, the opposition party in

parliament, &c., the offspring of former labours, the nurslings of former self-applause; but I was SO mortified with them, that I committed them without mercy to the flames." More tenderly does T. Lovell Beddoes discuss his first-fruits on a re-perusal. "I know not what the creator of a planet may think of his first efforts, when he looks into the cavernous recesses which contain the first sketches of organised beings;—but it is strange enough to see the fossilised faces of one's forgotten literary creatures, years after the vein of feeling in which they were formed has remained closed and unexplored."

With a few miscellaneous addenda on re-perusals in general, let this chapter of instances come to a lingering end. Fontenelle records with some complacency his having accomplished a fourth reading of the masterpiece of Madame de la Fayette: "Je sors présentement d'une quatrième lecture de la Princesse de Clèves, et c'est le seul ouvrage de cette nature que j'aie pu lire quatre fois." M. Cuvillier Fleury, in the same tone, records his having thrice read Madame d'Arbouville's novel, entitled "Une Maison Hollandaise," and his quasi-intention of emulating Fontenelle, by reading it for a fourth time. Happy the author, happy the readers, of a book which can claim de jure the epigraph of one of Henry Stephens's—

De moi auras profit sitôt que me liras ;

Grand profit, grand plaisir, quand tu me reliras.

The same Henry Estienne, by the way, in dedicating

a second edition of his Thucydides to Frederick, Count Palatine of the Rhine, invites him, in a preliminary epistle, to read this historian as many times as Demosthenes had transcribed him with his own hand.

Madame de Sévigné, like the sensible woman she was—whether as regards sense or sensibility-often counsels her daughter to follow her example in reperusing a work of merit. Thus of the Morale of Nicole. If you have not read it yet, read it at once, she advises; and if you have, then read it again, with new interest and attention. Nicole is again on the tapis a month later: "Devinez ce que je fais, je recommence ce traité; je voudrais bien en faire un bouillon et l'avaler." Some twenty years afterwards we have madame rejoicing in the fact that her son delights to read a second time, and a third, whatever he thinks really fine in literature. "Il le goûte, il y entre davantage, il le sait par cœur, cela s'incorpore; il croit avoir fait ce qu'il lit ainsi pour la troisième fois." She can enter into his taste for these second and third readings, and cordially joins him in them: "Je relis même avec mon fils de certaines choses que j'avais lues en cousant, à Paris, et qui me paraissent toutes nouvelles. Nous relisons aussi, au travers de nos grandes lectures, des rogatons que nous trouvons sous la main," &c. And ever as they come upon some familiar beauty in their favourite classics, il ne faut point dire, Oh! cela est vieux; non, cela n'est point vieux, cela est divin. Madame almost breaks out into pæans of

thanksgiving, which she may be said to sing with the spirit, and with the understanding also. As indeed she reads; for her re-perusals are not of the sterile sort satirised by Tristram Shandy, where he says: "You must read Longinus,-read away :If you are not a jot the wiser by reading him the first time over, never fear, read him again. Avicenna and Licetus read Aristotle's metaphysics forty times through apiece, and never understood a single word."

It is but the smaller number of books, as Mr. Carlyle observes, that become more instructive by a second perusal; the great majority being as perfectly plain as perfect triteness can make them. Yet, he adds, if time is precious, no book that will not improve by repeated readings deserves to be read at all. A profound thinker of our time has said: “Je ne lis plus, je relis." Quoting which mot, M. Nisard professes for his part, "Je suis de cette humeur-là. Le plaisir qu'on goûte à lire les chefs-d'œuvre, n'est-ce pas celui de l'absent qui rentre chez soi? On relit pour se retrouver. Et le cercle n'est pas si étroit qu'il paraît être." A man may read "Lear," says Mr. Roscoe, ten, twenty, and a hundred times; and if his mind be awake, he will every time find something fresh, something he did not before know was there said or implied, or hinted at. "Pour la centième fois," writes Béranger in his autobiography, "je me mis donc à relire mes auteurs favoris.” And such centenarianism may be said often to pay cent per cent.

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M. de Sacy tells his readers in the Preface to his collected essays and reviews, that having never had time enough to read as much as he would, he made a point of reading only des livres excellents. "Je les ai relu sans cesse," he adds. His essays themselves repeat the avowal, again and again. “Je l'ai relu avec tant de plaisir!" he exclaims, of a favourite passage he transcribes from Bossuet. And on an after page, asserting his discovery, in mature age, of new beauties in the same author, he adds "Vieillir est donc bon à quelque chose!" Even the best writers of the second class he pronounces it sufficient to have read once with care. "Si on les lit deux fois, c'est beaucoup; trois fois c'est trop." In an article on M. Saint-Marc Girardin, he has a gentle hit at that critic as a traveller, who sees much and sees rapidly, a reader who devours an immensity of volumes, and seldom indulges in a second reading. M. de Sacy refers in various other essays, now to his delighted re-perusal of Plato (the Laws), in the bad times of 1848;-now to his re-iterated studies of La Bruyère; "Combien de fois je l'ai lu, et que de fois encore je le relirai s'il plaît à Dieu de me laisser vivre !"-now to Barante's Tableau de la littérature Française, of which he says, "Je l'ai relu bien des fois; je l'aime comme on aime ses meilleurs souvenirs de jeunesse ;"—and now to Burigny's Life of Erasmus: "J'ai lu ce livre bien des fois ; je le relirai encore." So again his best compliment to M. Jules Janin, on his history of dramatic literature, is, with regard to Plautus, that he gives you a longing

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