The task is aided by the strong mutual light which these men shed on each other. Thus, the works of Ben Jonson are a sort of hoop to bind all these fine persons together, and to the land to which they belong. He has written verses to or on all his notable contemporaries; and what with so many occasional poems, and the portrait sketches in his “Discoveries,” and the gossiping record of his opinions in his conversations with Drummond of Hawthornden, he has really illustrated the England of his time, if not to the same extent, yet much in the same way, as Walter Scott has celebrated the persons and places of Scotland. Walton, Chapman, Herrick, and Sir Henry Wotton write also to the times. Among the best books are certain _Autobiographies_: as, St. Augustine’s Confessions; Benvenuto Cellini’s Life; Montaigne’s Essays; Lord Herbert of Cherbury’s Memoirs; Memoirs of the Cardinal de Retz; Rousseau’s Confessions; Linnæus’s Diary; Gibbon’s, Hume’s, Franklin’s, Burns’s, Alfieri’s, Goethe’s, and Haydon’s Autobiographies. Another class of books closely allied to these, and of like interest, are those which may be called _Table-Talks_: of which the best are Saadi’s Gulistan; Luther’s Table-Talk; Aubrey’s Lives; Spence’s Anecdotes; Selden’s Table-Talk; Boswell’s Life of Johnson; Eckermann’s Conversations with Goethe; Coleridge’s Table-Talk; and Hazlitt’s Life of Northcote. There is a class whose value I should designate as _Favorites_: such as Froissart’s Chronicles; Southey’s Chronicle of the Cid; Cervantes; Sully’s Memoirs; Rabelais; Montaigne; Izaak Walton; Evelyn; Sir Thomas Browne; Aubrey; Sterne; Horace Walpole; Lord Clarendon; Doctor Johnson; Burke, shedding floods of light on his times; Lamb; Landor; and De Quincey;--a list, of course, that may easily be swelled, as dependent on individual caprice. Many men are as tender and irritable as lovers in reference to these predilections. Indeed, a man’s library is a sort of harem, and I observe that tender readers have a great pudency in showing their books to a stranger.