I want to read you some new passages from an interleaved copy of my book. You haven't read the printed part yet. I gave you a copy of it, but nobody reads a book that is given to him. Of course not. Nobody but a fool expects him to. He reads a little in it here and there, perhaps, and he cuts all the leaves if he cares enough about the writer, who will be sure to call on him some day, and if he is left alone in his library for five minutes will have hunted every corner of it until he has found the book he sent,--if it is to be found at all, which doesn't always happen, if there's a penal colony anywhere in a garret or closet for typographical offenders and vagrants.--O. W. HOLMES. _The Poet at the Breakfast-Table._ POETS AND THEIR BIBLIOGRAPHIES Old poets fostered under friendlier skies, Old Virgil who would write ten lines, they say, At dawn, and lavish all the golden day To make them wealthier in his readers' eyes; And you, old popular Horace, you the wise Adviser of the nine-years-pondered lay, And you, that wear a wreath of sweeter bay, Catullus, whose dead songster never dies; If glancing downward on the kindly sphere That once had rolled you round and round the Sun, You see your Art still shrined in human shelves, You should be jubilant that you flourished here Before the Love of Letters, overdone, Had swampt the sacred poets with themselves. ALFRED, LORD TENNYSON. MEN IN THEIR NIGHTGOWNS Writing of Lives is very profitable, both to the memory of the party, and to posterity. They do better lance into secret humours, and present men in their nightgowns, when they are truly themselves. A general may be more perfectly discovered on his pallet, than when he appears in the head of an army.--JOHN HALL. _Horae Vacivae._ BIOGRAPHY Oh, that mine enemy had written a book!--and that it were my life; unless indeed it provoked my friend to write another. It has always appeared to me a strong argument for the non-existence of spirits that these friendly microscopic biographers are not haunted by the ghosts of the unfortunate men whom they persist in holding up to public contempt.--SIR A. HELPS. _Thoughts in the Cloister._ BIOGRAPHY PREFERRED TO HISTORY Read French authors. Read Rochefoucauld. The French writers are the finest in the world, for they clear our heads of all ridiculous ideas.... Read no history, nothing but biography, for that is life without theory.--B. DISRAELI, EARL OF BEACONSFIELD. _Contarini Fleming._ ON READING TRANSLATIONS