all sects. He does not require Mr. Froude's delightful apology to
win the Pilgrim's Progress a place on his shelf, because, although
the bookman may be far removed from Puritanism, yet he knows that
Bunyan had the secret of English style, and although he may be as far
from Romanism, yet he must needs have his A'Kempis (especially in
Pickering's edition of 1828), and when he places the two books side
by side in the department of religion, he has a standing regret that
there is no Pilgrim's Progress also in Pickering.

Without a complete Milton he could not be content. He would like to
have Masson's Life too in 6 vols. (with index), and he is apt to
consider the great Puritan's prose still finer than his poetry, and
will often take down the Areopagitica that he may breathe the air of
high latitudes; but he has a corner in his heart for that evil living
and mendacious bravo, but most perfect artist, Benvenuto Cellini.
While he counts Gibbon's Rome, I mean the Smith and Milman edition in
8 vols., blue cloth, the very model of histories, yet he revels in
those books which are the material for historians, the scattered
stones out of which he builds his house, such as the diaries of John
Evelyn and our gossip Pepys, and that scandalous book, Grammont's
Memoirs, and that most credulous but interesting of Scots annalists,
Robert Wodrow.

According to the bookman, but not, I am sorry to say, in popular
judgment, the most toothsome kind of literature is the Essay, and you
will find close to his hand a dainty volume of Lamb open perhaps at
that charming paper on "Imperfect Sympathies," and though the bookman
be a Scot yet his palate is pleasantly tickled by Lamb's description
of his national character--Lamb and the Scots did not agree through
an incompatibility of humour--and near by he keeps his Hazlitt, whom