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Leaving out the Bible the three greatest works are those of Homer, Dante and Shakespeare. These are closely followed by the works of Virgil and Milton.
INDISPENSABLE BOOKS
Homer, Dante, Cervantes, Shakespeare and Goethe.
(The best translation of _Homer_ for the ordinary reader is by Chapman.
Norton's translation of _Dante_ and Taylor's translation of Goethe's _Faust_ are recommended.)
A GOOD LIBRARY
Besides the works mentioned everyone should endeavor to have the following:
_Plutarch's Lives_, _Meditations of Marcus Aurelius_, _Chaucer_, _Imitation of Christ_ (Thomas a Kempis), _Holy Living and Holy Dying_ (Jeremy Taylor), _Pilgrim's Progress, Macaulay's Essays, Bacon's Essays, Addison's Essays, Essays of Elia_ (Charles Lamb), _Les Miserables_ (Hugo), _Heroes and Hero Wors.h.i.+p_ (Carlyle), _Palgrave's Golden Treasury_, _Wordsworth_, _Vicar of Wakefield_, _Adam Bede_ (George Eliot), _Vanity Fair_ (Thackeray), _Ivanhoe_ (Scott), _On the Heights_ (Auerbach), _Eugenie Grandet_ (Balzac), _Scarlet Letter_ (Hawthorne), _Emerson's Essays_, _Boswell's Life of Johnson_, _History of the English People_ (Green), _Outlines of Universal History, Origin of Species, Montaigne's Essays, Longfellow, Tennyson, Browning, Whittier, Ruskin, Herbert Spencer_.
A good encyclopoedia is very desirable and a reliable dictionary indispensable.
MASTERPIECES OF AMERICAN LITERATURE
_Scarlet Letter, Parkman's Histories, Motley's Dutch Republic, Grant's Memoirs, Franklin's Autobiography, Webster's Speeches, Lowell's Bigelow Papers_, also his _Critical Essays_, _Th.o.r.eau's Walden_, _Leaves of Gra.s.s_ (Whitman), _Leather-stocking Tales_ (Cooper), _Autocrat of the Breakfast Table_, _Ben Hur_ and _Uncle Tom's Cabin_.
TEN GREATEST AMERICAN POETS
Bryant, Poe, Whittier, Longfellow, Lowell, Emerson, Whitman, Lanier, Aldrich and Stoddard.
TEN GREATEST ENGLISH POETS
Chaucer, Spenser, Shakespeare, Milton, Burns, Wordsworth, Keats, Sh.e.l.ley, Tennyson, Browning.
TEN GREATEST ENGLISH ESSAYISTS
Bacon, Addison, Steele, Macaulay, Lamb, Jeffrey, De Quincey, Carlyle, Thackeray and Matthew Arnold.
BEST PLAYS OF SHAKESPEARE
In order of merit are: _Hamlet_, _King Lear_, _Oth.e.l.lo_, _Antony and Cleopatra_, _Macbeth_, _Merchant of Venice_, _Henry IV_, _As You Like It_, _Winter's Tale_, _Romeo and Juliet_, _Midsummer Night's Dream_, _Twelfth Night_, _Tempest_.
ONLY THE GOOD
If you are not able to procure a library of the great masterpieces, get at least a few. Read them carefully, intelligently and with a view to enlarging your own literary horizon. Remember a good book cannot be read too often, one of a deteriorating influence should not be read at all.
In literature, as in all things else, the good alone should prevail.
