aware that the titles and rewards which he gained by his own works were as
nothing in the balance compared with the pleasure he derived from the
works of others."

There was no society in London so agreeable that Macaulay would have
preferred it at breakfast or at dinner "to the company of Sterne or
Fielding, Horace Walpole or Boswell." The love of reading which Gibbon
declared he would not exchange for all the treasures of India was, in
fact, with Macaulay "a main element of happiness in one of the happiest
lives that it has ever fallen to the lot of the biographer to record."

"History," says Fuller, "maketh a young man to be old without either
wrinkles or gray hair, privileging him with the experience of age without
either the infirmities or the inconveniences thereof."

So delightful indeed are books that we must be careful not to forget other
duties for them; in cultivating the mind we must not neglect the body.

To the lover of literature or science, exercise often presents itself as
an irksome duty, and many a one has felt like "the fair pupil of Ascham
(Lady Jane Gray), who, while the horns were sounding and dogs in full cry,
sat in the lonely oriel, with eyes riveted to that immortal page which
tells how meekly and bravely (Socrates) the first martyr of intellectual
liberty took the cup from his weeping jailer." [1]

Still, as the late Lord Derby justly observed, [2] those who do not find
time for exercise will have to find time for illness.

Books, again, are now so cheap as to be within the reach of almost every
one. This was not always so. It is quite a recent blessing. Mr. Ireland,