In the face of the proverb about the pavement of the way to hell, I am prepared to maintain that good intentions are better than bad, and that evil is the wretch who is not full of good intentions and holy plans at the beginning of each New Year. Time, like a fruitful plain, then lies stretched before you; the eye rests on tuneful groves, cool meadow-lands, and sedgy streams, whither you propose to wander, and where you promise yourself many happy, well-spent hours. I speak in metaphors, of course--pale-faced Londoner that I am--my meadows and streams are not marked upon the map: they are (coming at once to the point, for this is a generation which is only teased by allegory) the old books I mean to read over again during the good year of grace 1894. Yonder stately grove is Gibbon; that thicket, Hobbes; where the light glitters on the green surface (it is black mud below) is Sterne; healthful but penetrating winds stir Bishop Butler’s pages and make your naked soul shiver, as you become more and more convinced, the longer you read, that ‘someone has blundered,’ though whether it is you or your Maker remains, like everything else, unsolved. Each one of us must make out his own list. It were cruelty to prolong mine, though it is but begun. As a grace before meat, or, if the simile be preferred, as the _Zakuska_ or _Vorschmack_ before dinner, let me urge upon all to read the three volumes, lately reissued and very considerably enlarged, called ‘Hours in a Library,’ by Mr. Leslie Stephen. Mr. Stephen is a bracing writer. His criticisms are no sickly fruit of fond compliance with his authors. By no means are they this, but hence their charm. There is much pestilent trash now being talked about ‘Ministry of Books,’ and the ‘Sublimity of Art,’ and I know not what other fine phrases. It almost amounts to a religious service conducted before an altar of first editions. Mr. Stephen takes no part in such silly rites. He remains outside with a pail of cold water. ‘It sometimes strikes readers of books that literature is, on the whole, a snare and a delusion. Writers, of course, do not generally share that impression; and on the contrary have said a great many fine things about the charm of conversing with the choice minds of all ages, with the _innuendo_, to use the legal phrase, that they themselves modestly demand some place amongst the aforesaid choice minds. But at times we are disposed to retort upon our teachers. “Are you not,” we observe, “exceedingly given to humbug?”’ Mr. Stephen has indeed, by way of preface to his own three volumes, collected a goodly number of these very fine things, but then he has, with grim humour, dubbed them ‘Opinions of Authors,’ thus reducing them to the familiar level of ‘Nothing like leather!’