Dr. Johnson, nearly a hundred years later, filled a niche of his own, irreverent though he was to books except for their message. The latter half of the eighteenth century is especially memorable, for it synchronized with the early years of Southey, Lamb, and Leigh Hunt, the very temples of the spirit which I have sought to enshrine in these pages, and of Hazlitt, and of two who should be dear to librarians, Crabbe and John Foster. I should like to claim an honoured place in the nineteenth century for Bulwer Lytton, who, although he understood 'the merits of a spotless shirt', understood books also and appreciated them thoroughly; and for the Brownings, especially the author of _Aurora Leigh_. Emerson is conspicuous, not only as a book-lover, but also as a professor of books, and as a missionary in the sense that Carlyle and Ruskin preached the gospel of books. Many others deserve honourable mention, but I must pass on to some of those who adorn the present day. It would have been very pleasant to have seen Lord Morley, Mr. Frederic Harrison, Mr. Austin Dobson, Mr. Edmund Gosse, Mr. Andrew Lang, and Mr. Augustine Birrell appearing in this cloud of witness, but happily they are alive to testify to the faith that is in them, and for that reason are beyond the scope of an anthology confined to authors who are dead. It may be pointed out that there has been an increasing tendency to write not so much about books as about the authors of books; but to have included literary criticism, except incidentally, would have increased this volume to prodigious size. While I have been obliged for the same reason to ignore, as a rule, individual volumes, an exception has been made of the Bible, which is itself a library, and this is justified by the fact that many pages are devoted to libraries. Scores of poems have been prefixed to volumes or addressed in apology to possible readers, but these, and colophons, interesting though they may be, do not fit in with my scheme. However tempting it seemed to give versions of Catullus, Horace, or Martial, translations from ancient classic writers have been excluded; but room has been found for classic writers of comparatively modern times, for it would have been ridiculous to have passed over, for example, Montaigne, whose immortal essays have been handed down in the splendid English dress of John Florio's design. For the rest, the contents of this volume, in which more than 200 authors bear their varying testimony, must speak for themselves.