NATURE AND BOOKS, 35 



in which modern scholarship professes to describe ancient 

 philosophy. I prefer the imperfect original records. 

 Neither can I read the ponderous volumes of modern 

 history, which are nothing but words. I prefer the in- 

 complete and shattered chronicles themselves, where the 

 swords shine and the armour rings, and all is life though 

 but a broken frieze. Next came Plato (it took me a long 

 time to read Plato, and I have had to unlearn much of 

 liim) and Xenophon. Socrates' dialectic method taught 

 me how to write, or rather how to put ideas in sequence. 

 Sophocles, too ; and last, that wonderful encyclopaedia 

 of curious things, Athenaeus. So that I found, when the 

 idea of the hundred best books came out, that between 

 seventy and eighty of them had been my companions 

 almost from boyhood, those lacking to complete the 

 number being chiefly ecclesiastical or Continental. In- 

 deed, some years before the hundred books were talked 

 of, the idea had occurred to me of making up a cata- 

 logue of books that could be bought for ten pounds. 

 In an article in the * Pall Mall Gazette' on 'The 

 Pigeons at the British Museum ' I said, ' It seems as if all 

 the books in the world — really books-— can be bought 

 for 10/. Man's whole thought is purchasable at that 

 small price — for the value of a watch, of a good dog.' 

 The idea of making a 10/. catalogue was in my mind — 

 I did make a rough pencil one — and I still think that a 

 10/. library is worth the notice of the publishing world. 

 My rough list did not contain a hundred. These old 

 books of nature and nature's mind ought to be chained 

 up, free for every man to read in every parish. These 

 are the only books I do not wish to unlearn, one item 

 only excepted, which I shall not here discuss. It is 

 curious, too, that the Greek philosophers, in the more 

 rigid sense of science, anticipated most of the drift of 



