help us to enjoy life or teach us to endure it." To the man of
letters, to the man of wide reading, they will at least serve to
recall, when far from libraries and books, those authors who have been
the delight and the instructors of a lifetime. They will bring at
least the pleasures of memory and that keener pleasure which arises
when we meet a poem or a passage of prose which we know as an old and
well-loved friend, remote from home, upon some alien page.

To that larger public whose lives are not spent among books and
libraries, and for whose delectation such a collection as this is
primarily intended, these volumes rightly read at odd times, in idle
moments, in out-of-the-way places, on the ship or the train, offer
much. They will bring the reader in contact with many of the greatest
intellects of all time. They contain some of the noblest thoughts that
have passed through the minds of our weak and erring race. There is no
man who will not be the better, for the moment at least, by reading
what Cicero says about old age, Seneca about death, and Socrates
about love, to go no further for examples than to

"The glory that was Greece,
And the grandeur that was Rome."

Moreover, the bowing acquaintance which can be formed here may easily
offer attractions which will lead to a close and intimate friendship,
with all that the word implies in the case of a great author or a
great book. It seems to me, for example, as if no one who read here
the too brief extracts from Erasmus or from Cervantes, to take at
random two writers widely separated in thought, could fail to pursue
the acquaintance thus begun, so potent are the sympathetic charm, the
wit, the wisdom and the humor of both these great men. There is, at
least, variety in these little volumes, and while many things in them
may not appeal to us, they may to our neighbors. That which "is dumb
to us may speak to him."

Again, let it be noticed that there is much more than the "high
seriousness" which is the test of the greatest prose as of the finest
poetry. Humor and pathos, tragedy and comedy, all find their place and
glimpses of the pageant of human history flit through the pages. It
would seem as if it were impossible to read extracts from Thucydides
and Tacitus and Gibbon and not long to go to their histories and learn
all that could be said by such men about the life of man upon earth,
about Athens and Rome and the rise and fall of empires. Selections ar