Fourth Edition. Revised and Enlarged. A. IRELAND AND CO., PRINTERS, MANCHESTER. [Entered at Stationers' Hall.] PREFACE. . ONE of the mottoes to this volume gives the key-note to its contents. "Infinite riches in a little room a line from Christopher Marlowe, the dramatistdescribes aptly what the reader will find in it. My object has been to present, in chronological order, the summed-up testimonies of the most notable BookLovers on the subject of Books, and the Habit and Love of Reading. The writers from whom I have made selections range from Solomon and Cicero to Carlyle, Emerson, and Ruskin. On this bead-roll of illustrious names Which down the steady breeze of honour sail, will be found those of Horace, Seneca, Plutarch, Richard de Bury, Petrarch, Chaucer, Erasmus, Machiavelli, Luther, Ascham, Montaigne, Bacon, Shakespeare, Daniel, Bishop Hall, Fuller, Milton, Baxter, Cowley, Locke, Addison, Johnson, Gibbon, Goethe, Wordsworth, Lamb, Southey, Hazlitt, Landor, De Quincey, Leigh Hunt, Bulwer, Macaulay, Herschel, Carlyle, Emerson, Oliver Wendell Holmes, James Russell Lowell, Ruskin, and more than two hundred others. The reader will find in the following pages the deliberate utterances of the wisest and most searching |
