On marriage vows our author has, too, very sensible views and very amusing stories. He tells of a nervous bridegroom who, confusing the baptismal and marriage ceremonies, replied when asked if he consented to take the bride for his wife: ‘I renounce them all’; of a Hampshire rustic who, when giving the ring, said solemnly to the bride: ‘With my body I thee wash up, and with all my hurdle goods I thee and thou’; of another who when asked whether he would take his partner to be his wedded wife, replied with shameful indecision: ‘Yes, I’m willin’; but I’d a sight rather have her sister’; and of a Scotch lady who, on the occasion of her daughter’s wedding, was asked by an old friend whether she might congratulate her on the event, and answered: ‘Yes, yes, upon the whole it is very satisfactory; it is true Jeannie hates her gudeman, but then there’s always a something!’ Indeed, the good stories contained in this book are quite endless and make it very pleasant reading, while the good advice is on all points admirable. Most young married people nowadays start in life with a dreadful collection of ormolu inkstands covered with sham onyxes, or with a perfect museum of salt-cellars. We strongly recommend this book as one of the best of wedding presents. It is a complete handbook to an earthly Paradise, and its author may be regarded as the Murray of matrimony and the Baedeker of bliss. _How to be Happy though Married_: _Being a Handbook to Marriage_. By a Graduate in the University of Matrimony. (T. Fisher Unwin.) TO READ OR NOT TO READ (_Pall Mall Gazette_, February 8, 1886.) Books, I fancy, may be conveniently divided into three classes: 1. Books to read, such as Cicero’s _Letters_, Suetonius, Vasari’s _Lives of the Painters_, the _Autobiography of Benvenuto Cellini_, Sir John Mandeville, Marco Polo, St. Simon’s _Memoirs_, Mommsen, and (till we get a better one) Grote’s _History of Greece_. 2. Books to re-read, such as Plato and Keats: in the sphere of poetry, the masters not the minstrels; in the sphere of philosophy, the seers not the _savants_. 3. Books not to read at all, such as Thomson’s _Seasons_, Rogers’s _Italy_, Paley’s _Evidences_, all the Fathers except St. Augustine, all John Stuart Mill except the essay on _Liberty_, all Voltaire’s plays without any exception, Butler’s _Analogy_, Grant’s _Aristotle_, Hume’s _England_, Lewes’s _History of Philosophy_, all argumentative books and all books that try to prove anything. The third class is by far the most important. To tell people what to read is, as a rule, either useless or harmful; for, the appreciation of literature is a question of temperament not of teaching; to Parnassus there is no primer and nothing that one can learn is ever worth learning. But to tell people what not to read is a very different matter, and I venture to recommend it as a mission to the University Extension Scheme.