translation by Canon Roberts, while Caesar, Tacitus, Thucydides and Herodotus are not forgotten.  “You only, O Books,” said Richard de Bury, “are liberal and independent; you give to all who ask.”  The delightful variety, the wisdom and the wit which are at the disposal of Everyman in his own library may well, at times, seem to him a little embarrassing.  He may turn to Dick Steele in The Spectator and learn how Cleomira dances, when the elegance of her motion is unimaginable and “her eyes are chastised with the simplicity and innocence of her thoughts.”  He may turn to Plato’s Phaedrus and read how every soul is divided into three parts (like Caesar’s Gaul).  He may turn to the finest critic of Victorian times, Matthew Arnold, and find in his essay on Maurice de Guerin the perfect key to what is there called the “magical power of poetry.”  It is Shakespeare, with his

  “daffodils That come before the swallow dares, and take
  The winds of March with beauty;”

it is Wordsworth, with his

“voice ... heard In spring-time from the cuckoo-bird, Breaking the silence of the seas Among the farthest Hebrides;”

or Keats, with his

  “.... moving waters at their priest-like task
  Of cold ablution round Earth’s human shores.”

William Hazlitt’s “Table Talk,” among the volumes of Essays, may help to show the relationship of one author to another, which is another form of the Friendship of Books.  His incomparable essay in that volume, “On Going a Journey,” forms a capital prelude to Coleridge’s “Biographia Literaria” and to his and Wordsworth’s poems.  In the same way one may turn to the review of Moore’s Life of Byron in Macaulay’s Essays as a prelude to the three volumes of Byron’s own poems, remembering that the poet whom Europe loved more than England did was as Macaulay said:  “the beginning, the middle and the end of all his own poetry.”  This brings us to the provoking reflection that it is the obvious authors and the books most easy to reprint which have been the signal successes out of the many hundreds in the series, for Everyman is distinctly proverbial in his tastes.  He likes best of all an old author who has worn well or a comparatively new author who has gained something like newspaper notoriety.  In attempting to lead him on from the good books that are known to those that are less known, the publishers may have at times been too adventurous.  The late Chief himself was much more than an ordinary book-producer in this critical enterprise.  He threw himself into it with the zeal of a book-lover and indeed of one who, like Milton, thought that books might be as alive and productive as dragons’ teeth, which, being “sown up and down the land, might chance to spring up armed men.”  Mr. Pepys in his Diary writes about some of his books, “which are come home gilt on the backs, very handsome to the eye.”  The pleasure he took in them is that which Everyman may take in the gilt backs of his favourite books in his own Library, which after all he has helped to make good and lasting.