short paragraphs and chapters in their imperfect state convey more
freshness to the mind than the thick, laboured volumes 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 incomplete 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 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. Indeed, some years before the hundred books were talked of,
the idea had occurred to me of making up a catalogue 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_l_. 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_l_. catalogue was in my mind--I did make a
rough pencil one--and I still think that a 10_l_. 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 modern thought. Two chapters
in Aristotle might almost be printed without change as summaries of our
present natural science. For the facts of nature, of course, neither one