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are chastized with the simplicity and innocence of her thoughts." Or he may take A Century of Essays, as a key to the whole roomful of the English Essayists, from Bacon to Addison, Elia to Augustine Birrell. These are the golden gossips of literature, the writers who have learnt the delightful art of talking on paper. Or again, the reader who has the right spirit and looks on all literature as a great adventure may dive back into the classics, and in Plato's Ph&drus read how every soul is divided into three parts (like Caesar's Gaul). The poets next, and we may turn to the finest critic of Victorian times, Matthew Arnold, as their showman, and find in his essay on Maurice de Guerin a clue to the "magical power of poetry/' as in Shakespeare, with his
daffodils
That come before the swallow dares, and take The winds of March with beauty.
William Hazlitt's "Table Talk" may help again to show the relationship of one author to another, which is another form of the Friendship of Books. His incomparable essay, "On Going a Journey/' forms a capital prelude to Coleridge's "BiographiaLiteraria;" and so throughout the long labyrinth of the Library shelves, one can follow the magic clue in prose or verse that leads to the hidden treasury. In that way every reader becomes his own critic and Doctor of Letters. In the same way one may turn to the Byron review in Macaulay's Essays as a prelude to the three volumes of Byron's own poems, remembering that the poet whom Europe loved more than Eng- land did was as Macaulay said : "the beginning, the middle and the end of all his own poetry." This brings us to the provoking reflection that it is the obvious authors and the books most easy to reprint which have been the signal successes out of the many hundreds in the series, for Everyman is distinctly proverbial in
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