There is a book, however, that will well repay getting and reading in part, from time to time, for many years. That is Modern Painters. It is in four large volumes, and from the title one might suppose it was a technical history of modern painting. This is not the fact, however. It is a popular study of the noblest element in art, and throughout the four volumes one will find marvellous pictures of word-painting, such as Ruskin’s description of Turner’s Slave Ship, when he is discussing sea-painting. He talks of art and nature, always looking at art from the point of view of nature; and the volumes are so well divided into chapters and sections, each with its title and sub-title, that one can pick out an interesting subject here, and another there. It will be of especial interest and value to any one who cares at all about art. Ruskin wrote the first volume of this work before he was twenty-four, and it is perhaps the most brilliant thing he ever did. It is full of life and colour and splendid word-painting. The reader who believes in culture and wishes to cultivate the esthetic and refined should certainly read Matthew Arnold’s book Culture and Anarchy. It requires a close and logical mind to appreciate and understand him, and to read and like him is not easy, but a liking for his chapter on Sweetness and Light is an excellent test of one’s real success in the cultivation of culture. It will be seen that there are good essays of many types. There is the epigrammatic discussion of everyday matters, such as we find in Bacon, and in quite a different way in Emerson; and there is the quaint and playful humour of Addison and Lamb; there is the splendid rhetoric of De Quincey and of Macaulay, and the splendid word-painting of Ruskin; there is the preaching of Carlyle, and the literary lecturing of Matthew Arnold. If we cannot know all, we must choose our bent and follow the lines we like best. The most popular form of the essay is that of Addison and Lamb, the quaint, amusing, human badinage on familiar topics, full of love, and full of sense. Along this line there are a few good modern books--Oliver Wendell Holmes’s Autocrat of the Breakfast Table, Ik Marvel’s Reveries of a Bachelor, Charles Dudley Warner’s Backlog Studies, and Barrie’s My Lady Nicotine and When a Man’s Single.[3]