These books must of necessity be national books; for fame, which is essentially the highest gift of which man has the giving, cannot be conferred except by a public voice. Fame dwells upon the lips of men. It is not that memorable books must all be people's books, though the greatest are such--the Book of Common Prayer, the Bible, Shakespeare; but those which embody some rare intellectual power, or illuminate some seldom visited tract of the spirit, or merely display some peculiar taste in learning or pastime, must yet have something racial in them, something public, to secure their hold against the detaching power of time; they must be English books, not in tongue only, but body and soul. They are not less the books of a nation because they are remote, superfine, uncommon. Such are the books of the poets--the Faërie Queene; books of the nobles--Arcadia; books of the scholar--the Anatomy of Melancholy. These books open the national genius as truly, kind by kind, as books of knowledge exhibit the nation's advancement in learning, stage by stage, when new sciences are brought to the birth. The Wealth of Nations, Locke's Essay, Blackstone's Commentaries, are not merely the product of private minds. They are landmarks of English intellect; and more, since they pass insensibly into the power of civilization in the land, feeding the general mind. The limited appeal that many classics made in their age, and still make, indicates lack of development in particular persons; but however numerous such individuals may be, in whatever majorities they may mass, the mind of the race, once having flowered, has flowered with the vigor of the stock. The Compleat Angler finds a rustic breast under much staid cloth; Pepys was never at a loss for a gossip since his seals were broken, and Donne evokes his fellow-eccentric whose hermitage is the scholar's bosom; but whether the charm work on few or on many is indifferent, for whom they affect, they affect through consanguinity. The books of a nation are those which are appropriate to its genius and embody its variations amid the changes of time; even its sports, like Euphues, are itself; and the works which denote the evolution of its civilized life in fructifying progress, whose increasing diversities are yet held in the higher harmony of one race, one temperament, one destiny, are without metaphor its Sibylline books, and true oracles of empire.