BIOGRAPHICAL AND AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL.
1. Boswell’s Johnson. [276b]
2. Lockhart’s Scott. [276c]
3. Pepys’s Diary. [276d]
4. Walpole’s Letters. [277a]
5. The Memoirs of Count de Gramont. [277b]
6. Gray’s Letters. [277c]
7. Southey’s Nelson. [277d]
8. Moore’s Byron. [277e]
9. Hogg’s Shelley. [278a]
10. Rousseau’s Confessions. [278b]
11. Froude’s Carlyle. [278c]
12. Rogers’s Table Talk. [279a]
13. Confessions of St. Augustine. [279b]
14. Amiel’s Journal. [279c]
15. Meditations of Marcus Aurelius. [279d]
16. Lewes’s Life of Goethe. [279e]
17. Sime’s Life of Lessing. [280a]
18. Franklin’s Autobiography. [280b]
19. Greville’s Memoirs. [280c]
20. Forster’s Life of Dickens. [280d]
21. Madame D’Arblay’s Diary. [280e]
22. Newman’s Apologia. [281a]
23. The Paston Letters. [281b]
24. Cellini’s Autobiography. [281c]
25. Browne’s Religio Medici. [281d]
My readers for the most part have read every one of these books. I throw out this list as a
tentative effort in the direction of suggesting a hundred books with which to start a library. The young student will find much to amuse, and certainly nothing here to bore him. These books will not make him a prig, as Mr. James Payn said that Lord Avebury’s list would make him a prig. They will make the dull man less dull, the bright man brighter. Here is good, cheerful, robust reading for boy and girl, for man and woman. There are many sins of omission, but none of commission. Our young friend will add to this list fast enough, but there is nothing in it that he may not read with profit. These books, I repeat, make an universal appeal. The learned man may enjoy them, the unlearned may enjoy them also. They are, as Hamlet is, of universal interest. Devotion to science will not impair a taste for them, nor will zest for abstract speculations. Not even those who are “better skilled in grammar than in poetry” can fail to appreciate. These hundred books will in the main be the hundred best books of many of my readers who are quite capable of selecting for themselves. One last word of advice. Let not the young reader buy large quantities of books
at once or be beguiled into subscribing for some cheap series which will save him the trouble of selecting. He may buy many books from such cheap series afterwards, but not his first hundred, I think. These should be acquired through much saving, and purchased with great thought and deliberation. The purchase of a book should become to the young book-lover a most solemn function.
Butler and Tanner, The Selwood Printing Works, Frome, and London