There is a story told of the Russian poet, Pushkin, which I like to think true, because it is so pretty. When he was carried home fatally wounded from the duel which cost him his life, his young wife, who had been the innocent cause of the tragedy, asked him whether there were no relatives or friends whom he wished to see summoned to his bedside. The dying man lifted his heavy eyes to the shelf where stood his favorite books, and murmured faintly in reply, “Farewell, my friends.” When we remember that Pushkin lived before Russian literature had become a great and dispiriting power, when we realize that he had never been ordered by critics to read Turguéneff, never commanded severely to worship Tolstoi or be an outcast in the land, never even reveled in the dreadful gloom of Dostoïevsky, it seems incredible to the well-instructed that he should have loved his books so much. It is absolutely afflicting to think that many of these same volumes were foreign, were romantic, perhaps even cheerful in their character; that they were not his mentors, his disciplinarians, his guides to a higher and sadder life, but only his “friends.” Why, Hazlitt himself could have used no simpler term of endearment. Charles Lamb might have uttered the very words when he closed his patient eyes in the dull little cottage at Edmonton. Sir Walter Scott might have murmured them on that still September morn when the clear rippling of the Tweed hushed his tired heart to rest. I think that Shelley bade some swift, unconscious farewell to all the dear delights of reading, when he thrust into his pocket the little volume of Keats, with its cover bent hastily backward, and rose, still dreamy with fairy-land, to face a sudden death. I think that Montaigne bade farewell to the fourscore “every-day books” that were his chosen companions, before turning serenely away from the temperate pleasures of life. For all these men loved literature, not contentiously, nor austerely, but simply as their friend. All read with that devout sincerity which precludes petulance, or display, or lettered asceticism, the most dismal self-torment in the world. In that delicious dialogue of Landor’s between Montaigne and Scaliger, the scholar intimates to the philosopher that his library is somewhat scantily furnished, and that he and his father between them have written nearly as many volumes as Montaigne possesses on his shelves. “Ah!” responds the sage with gentle malice, “to write them is quite another thing; but one reads books without a spur, or even a pat from our Lady Vanity.”