Imagine, in the words of Aikin, "that we had it in our power to call up the shades of the greatest and wisest men that ever existed, and oblige them to converse with us on the most interesting topics--what an inestimable privilege should we think it!--how superior to all common enjoyments! But in a well-furnished library we, in fact, possess this power. We can question Xenophon and Caesar on their campaigns, make Demosthenes and Cicero plead before us, join in the audiences of Socrates and Plato, and receive demonstrations from Euclid and Newton. In books we have the choicest thoughts of the ablest men in their best dress." "Books," says Jeremy Collier, "are a guide in youth and an entertainment for age. They support us under solitude, and keep us from being a burthen to ourselves. They help us to forget the crossness of men and things; compose our cares and our passions; and lay our disappointments asleep. When we are weary of the living, we may repair to the dead, who have nothing of peevishness, pride, or design in their conversation." Sir John Herschel tells an amusing anecdote illustrating the pleasure derived from a book, not assuredly of the first order. In a certain village the blacksmith having got hold of Richardson's novel, _Pamela, or Virtue Rewarded_, used to sit on his anvil in the long summer evenings and read it aloud to a large and attentive audience. It is by no means a short book, but they fairly listened to it all. At length, when the happy turn of fortune arrived, which brings the hero and heroine together, and sets them living long and happily together according to the most approved rules, the congregation were so delighted as to raise a great shout, and procuring the church keys, actually set the parish bells a-ringing. "The lover of reading," says Leigh Hunt, "will derive agreeable terror from _Sir Bertram_ and the _Haunted Chamber_; will assent with delighted reason to every sentence in _Mrs. Barbauld's Essay_; will feel himself wandering into solitudes with _Gray_; shake honest hands with _Sir Roger de Coverley_; be ready to embrace _Parson Adams_, and to chuck _Pounce_ out of the window instead of the hat; will travel with _Marco Polo_ and _Mungo Park_; stay at home with _Thomson_; retire with _Cowley_; be industrious with _Hutton_; sympathizing with _Gay_ and _Mrs. Inchbald_; laughing with (and at) _Buncle_; melancholy, and forlorn, and self-restored with the shipwrecked mariner of _De Foe_." Carlyle has wisely said that a collection of books is a real university. The importance of books has been appreciated in many quarters where we might least expect it. Among the hardy Norsemen runes were supposed to be endowed with miraculous power. There is an Arabic proverb, that "a wise man's day is worth a fool's life," and another--though it reflects perhaps rather the spirit of the Califs than of the Sultans,--that "the ink of science is more precious than the blood of the martyrs."