“I will read Forster’s Life of Walter Savage Landor, of which you speak, at my first leisure; though I consider Forster personally to be a snob. You will find among my papers in your possession exactly what I think of him. For Landor, even as a boy, I had a great admiration. I sate with wonder while I quaffed instruction at the shrine of his genius. There is a book just published in England which I shall devour with an insatiable mental appetite. It is called ‘Benedict Spinoza, his Life, Correspondence, and Ethics.’ It is the first time that his works have been collected and published in English. So that I shall have a rare treat. His Ethics I have read in a French translation which I found in Paris years ago; and its perusal divided my time between the pleasures of the town and the intellectual culture which the study of his sublime philosophy gave me. It was called ‘Spinoza’s Ethics; or, Man’s Revelation to Man of the Dealings of God with the World.’” Yes, his library was indeed his sure refuge from care and sorrow, a sweet solace for disappointment and vacancy and heartache. Here, in the glorious fellowship of the genius and worth of all ages, he fully gratified that love of reading without whose employment he would hardly have known how to bear some of the years of his checkered life. An anecdote will illustrate the strength of this habit in him and afford an interesting glimpse of the interior of the man. In his library one summer afternoon, the notes of birds in the trees and the hum of bees in his garden languidly stealing in at the open window, he sat, with the precious Shakspeare folio in his lap, conversing with his biographer. He said, “If I could describe how large a space Shakspeare has filled of my inward life, and how intense an interest I feel in his personality, no one would believe me. I would this moment give one hundred thousand dollars simply to read—even if the instant I had finished its perusal the manuscript were to be destroyed forever—a full account of the first eighteen years of the life of Shakspeare,—such an account as he could himself have written at forty had he been so minded, of his joys and sorrows, hopes and fears, his aspirations, his disappointments, his friendships, his enmities, his quarrels, his fights, his day-dreams, his loves; in short, the whole inward and outward drama of his boyhood.” It was certainly one of the most striking tributes ever paid to the genius of the immortal dramatist. A thorough familiarity with the works of Shakspeare is of itself an education and a fortune for the inner man. There all the known grades of experience, all the kinds of characters and styles of life seen in the world, are shown in their most vivid expressions. There all the varieties of thought and sentiment are gathered in their most choice and energetic forms of utterance. There are stimulus and employment for every faculty. There is incitement for all ambition, solace for all sorrow, beguilement for all care,