We expect a great man to be a good reader, or in proportion to the spontaneous power should be the assimilating power. There is a wonderful agreement among eminent men of all varieties of character and condition in their estimate of books. Julius Cæsar, when shipwrecked, and forced to swim for life, did not gather his gold, but took his Commentaries between his teeth and swam for the shore. Even the wild and warlike Arab Mahomet said, “Men are either learned or learning: the rest are blockheads.” The great Duke of Marlborough could not encamp without his Shakspeare. The Duchess d’Abrantes, wife of Marshal Junot, tells us that Bonaparte, in hastening out of France to join his army in Germany, tossed his journals and books out of his travelling carriage as fast as he had read them, and strewed the highway with pamphlets. Napoleon’s reading could not be large, but his criticism is sometimes admirable, as reported by Las Casas; and Napoleon was an excellent writer. Montesquieu, one of the greatest minds that France has produced, writes: “The love of study is in us almost the only eternal passion. All the others quit us in proportion as this miserable machine which gives them to us approaches its ruin. Study has been for me the sovereign remedy against the disgusts of life, never having had a chagrin which an hour of reading has not put to flight.” Hear the testimony of Seldon, the oracle of the English House of Commons in Cromwell’s time. “Patience is the chiefest fruit of study. A man, that strives to make himself a different thing from other men by much reading gains this chiefest good, that in all fortunes he hath something to entertain and comfort himself withal.” I have found several humble men and women who gave as affectionate, if not as judicious testimony to their readings. One curious witness was that of a Shaker who, when showing me the houses of the Brotherhood, and a very modest bookshelf, said there was Milton’s Paradise Lost, and some other books in the house, and added “that he knew where they were, but he took up a sound cross in not reading them.”