[17] Thirlwall.
[18] Blackwood's Magazine, February, 1896.
[19] J. S. Blackie.
[20] H. D. Traill.
[21] See Mr. Gladstone's ideas on the subject, in Gladstone in the Evening of his Days, p. 145.
[22] Bowen's lecture on Novel Reading.
[23] 'Periodically I am addressed by two constant and somewhat exigeant classes of correspondents: the young gentlemen who wish me to give them a list of the works requisite to form a journalist's library; and, next, the esteemed individuals of both sexes and all ages who want me to tell them how to keep a commonplace-book. I have replied to both these questions over and over again; and to give yet another list of the books which I think would be useful to professional writers for the press would be to outrage the patience of my non-professional patrons. The recipe for keeping a commonplace-book may, however, it is to be hoped, be repeated without giving offence to any one. Here it is; and pray observe that I have had it printed in small type, in order that the susceptibilities of readers who want to be amused and do not require to be instructed may not be wounded:—Procure a blank book, strongly bound, big or little, according to the largeness or smallness of your handwriting. Let the book have an index. It will be better if the paper of the book were ruled. When in the course of your reading you come on a passage which strikes you as worthy of being common-placed, copy it legibly in your commonplace-book. Say that the passage is the following, from Bacon's Natural History: "So the beard is younger than the hair of the head, and doth, for the most part, wax hoary later." At the end of this passage inscribe a circle or an ellipse, a square or a lozenge, just as you choose to do; and in the inscribed space write with red ink (better still with carmine) the figure 1. Then index the passage under letter B. "Beard younger than hair of head. 1." If you wish to be very careful in your common-placing, you may double index the passage by turning to letter H, and indicating the passage as "Head, hair of, older than beard." And so you may continue to transcribe consecutively all the passages which strike you in the course of your reading: never omitting to number the passage and to index it as soon as numbered. That is the system adopted by the Distressed Compiler, and he has made constant use of it for nearly forty years.'—G. A. Sala.
[24] Those who read everything acquire something, and especially they acquire, as the Bishop of Oxford (Dr. Wilberforce), once said, the invaluable power of knowing where, when they wanted first-hand information, they could most easily obtain it. That is the knowledge of the lawyer; and the knowledge of the lawyer, if he is competent, gradually becomes of the kind which qualifies him to be a judge.—Spectator, January 2nd, 1897.
[25] Napoleon was a great lover of small books. 'An insatiate reader while on his travels, Napoleon complained, when at Warsaw, in 1807, and when at Bayonne, in 1808, that his librarian at Paris did not keep him well supplied with books. "The Emperor," wrote the secretary to Barbier, "wants a portable library of a thousand volumes in 12mo., printed in good type without margin, and composed as nearly as possible of forty volumes on religion, forty of epics, forty of plays, sixty of poetry, a hundred of novels, sixty of history, the remainder, to make up the thousand, of historical memoirs. The religious works are to be the Old and New Testament, the Koran, a selection of the works of the Fathers of the Church, works respecting the Aryans, Calvinists, of Mythology, &c. The epics are to be Homer, Lucan, Tasso, Telemachus, The Henriade, &c." Machiavelli, Fielding, Richardson, Montesquieu, Voltaire, Corneille, Racine, and Rousseau were also among the authors mentioned.'
[26] Murray's Magazine, September, 1889.