P. 154. S. Smith.—Bettinelli, a scholar and a Jesuit (1718-1808), who attacked the reputation of Dante and Petrarch.
Coventry Patmore wrote: 'If you want to shine as a diner-out, the best way is to know something which others do not know, and not to know many things which everybody knows. This takes much less reading, and is doubly effective, inasmuch as it makes you a really good, that is, an interested listener, as well as a talker.'—(On Obscure Books.)
P. 154. Colton.—'Methinks 'tis a pitiful piece of knowledge that can be learnt from an index and a poor ambition to be rich in the inventory of another's treasure.'—J. Glanvill. The Vanity of Dogmatizing.
P. 155. Cervantes.—A whole chapter is devoted to the destruction of Don Quixote's library. (Part i, chap, vi.) The books that, condemned by the priest, were passed into the housekeeper's hands and thence into the fire were:—Adventures of Esplandian; Amadis of Greece; Don Olivante de Laura; Florismarte of Hyrcania; The Knight Platir; The Knight of the Cross; Bernardo del Carpio; Roncesvalles; Palmerin de Oliva; Diana, called the Second, by Salmantino; The Shepherd of Iberia; The Nymphs of Henares; and The Curse of Jealousy. The priest, however, put by for further examination or determined to save: Amadis de Gaul; The Mirror of Chivalry, and 'all other books that shall be found treating of French matters'; Palmerin of England; Don Belianis; Tirante the White; Diana, of Montemayor, and its continuation by Gil Polo; Ten Books of the Fortune of Love; The Shepherd of Filida; The Treasure of Divers Poems (de Padilla); Book of Songs, by Lopez Maldonado; Galatea, by Cervantes; Araucana; Austriada; Monserrate; and the Tears of Angelica. The curious reader will find these volumes traced in the admirable notes in J. Fitzmaurice-Kelly's edition of Don Quixote in 'The World's Classics'. Cervantes, Mr. Fitzmaurice-Kelly says, devoured in his wandering youth, 'those folios of chivalrous adventures which he, and he alone, has saved from the iniquity of oblivion'. The early association of Barabbas and books will be noticed.
It is the translation by Charles Jervas, first published in 1742, which is here employed.
The Renowned Romance of Amadis of Gaul, by Vasco Lobeira, which was expressly condemned by Montaigne (see p. [144]), was translated from the Spanish version of Garciodonez de Montalvo by Southey.
P. 159. Ruskin.—As Mr. Frederic Harrison points out, 'Books are no more education than laws are virtue; and, just as profligacy is easy within the strict limits of law, a boundless knowledge of books may be found with a narrow education.'
P. 159. E. B. Browning.—This letter was written to 'Orion' Horne three years before Mrs. Browning's marriage in 1843, when she was thirty-seven. Compare Matthew Arnold in the preface to Literature and Dogma (1873): 'Nothing can be truer than what Butler says, that really, in general, no part of our time is more idly spent than the time spent in reading. Still, culture is indispensably necessary, and culture is reading; but reading with a purpose to guide it, and with system.'
P. 161. Maurice.—This is better than Sydney Smith's attitude expressed in the question, 'Who reads an American book, or goes to an American play, or looks at an American picture or statue?'
P. 162. Blackie.—'Reading is seeing by proxy—is learning indirectly through another man's faculties, instead of directly through one's own faculties; and such is the prevailing bias, that the indirect learning is thought preferable to the direct learning, and usurps the name of cultivation.'—Herbert Spencer. The Study of Sociology.