than
Chaucer. The secret and the charm seems to lie in the fact that all
great books are pictures of human nature, which is and has been
always the same; and we are able to account in a similar manner for
the stupendous popularity of such works as the _Imitatio Christi_ and
the _Pilgrim's Progress_. Above all things, they are strictly _bona
fide_. They are no catch-pennies.

We find ourselves with hundreds, nay, thousands of other books at our
elbow or at our command, living in communion with half-a-dozen minds.
We read our favourite books, and when we have reached the end of our
tether, we recommence as if we were in the Scilly Islands, and there
were no more obtainable or permissible. We never wax tired of conning
over Bayle St. John's _Montaigne the Essayist_, Thoreau's _Walden_,
Howell's _Venetian Life_ and _Italian Journeys_. _Cuique suum._ We
have known those who never let the sun set without dipping into
Burton's _Anatomy of Melancholy_, or who have some pet volume with
which they renew their intimacy every year, as Francis Douce did with
_Reynard the Fox_. There must usually be an unconscious sympathy in
these cases, a pleasing revelation of extended identity, as if these
other productions were what we should have liked to claim as our own,
and as if we felt we should have said the same things and thought the
same thoughts, if they had been ours.

It is the same with some parts of some writers' labours, to be had
separately, as _Hamlet_, _As You Like It_, _A Midsummer Night's
Dream_, _The Merry Wives of Windsor_, _Macbeth_, and the _Merchant of
Venice_; and with a few detached or select compositions to which one
has to thread one's way in a larger volume: a few songs scattered
through the early dramatists and lyrists; Gray's _Elegy_; Tennyson's
_May Queen_ (without the sequel), and _Locksley Hall_ and _In
Memoriam_ (missing the tags).

In the present aspect of our inquiry, _Famous Books_ and the _Best_
are by no means convertible terms. There are such, it is true, as fall
under both categories: the Hebrew Scriptures, Homer, Herodotus,
_Arabian Nights_, _Canterbury Tales_, Montaigne's _Essays_,
Shakespeare, Gibbon. Famous literary compositions at different levels
or in their various classes are Boccaccio's _Decameron_, Ariosto's
_Orlando Furioso_, Aretino, Spenser's _Faery Queen_, Rabelais,
_Pilgrim's Progress_, La Fontaine's _Tales_, Rousseau's _Confessions_,
_Tristram Shandy_, _Candide_, _Don Juan_; and ev