“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 
him) and Xenophon. Socrates’ dialectic method taught 
me how to write, or rather how to put ideas in sequence. 
Sophocles, too; and last, that wonderful encyclopedia 
of curious things, Athenzeus. 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 asif 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 
102 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 
—I2 
