in the reader to a dogma, which he must
afterwards discover to be inexact; they do not teach him a lesson, which
he must afterwards unlearn. They repeat, they rearrange, they clarify
the lessons of life; they disengage us from ourselves, they constrain us
to the acquaintance of others; and they show us the web of experience,
not as we can see it for ourselves, but with a singular change--that
monstrous, consuming _ego_ of ours being, for the nonce, struck out. To
be so, they must be reasonably true to the human comedy; and any work
that is so serves the turn of instruction. But the course of our
education is answered best by those poems and romances where we breathe
a magnanimous atmosphere of thought and meet generous and pious
characters. Shakespeare has served me best. Few living friends have had
upon me an influence so strong for good as Hamlet or Rosalind. The last
character, already well beloved in the reading, I had the good fortune
to see, I must think, in an impressionable hour, played by Mrs. Scott
Siddons. Nothing has ever more moved, more delighted, more refreshed me;
nor has the influence quite passed away. Kent's brief speech over the
dying Lear had a great effect upon my mind, and was the burthen of my
reflections for long, so profoundly, so touchingly generous did it
appear in sense, so overpowering in expression. Perhaps my dearest and
best friend outside of Shakespeare is D'Artagnan--the elderly D'Artagnan
of the "Vicomte de Bragelonne." I know not a more human soul, nor, in
his way, a finer; I shall be very sorry for the man who is so much of a
pedant in morals that he cannot learn from the Captain of Musketeers.
Lastly, I must name the "Pilgrim's Progress," a book that breathes of
every beautiful and valuable emotion.

But of works of art little can be said; their influence is profound and
silent, like the influence of nature; they mould by contact; we drink
them up like water, and are bettered, yet know not how. It is in books
more specifically didactic that we can follow out the effect, and
distinguish and weigh and compare. A book which has been very
influential upon me fell early into my hands, and so may stand first,
though I think its influence was only sensible later on, and perhaps
still keeps growing, for it is a book not easily outlived: the "Essais"
of Montaigne. That temperate and genial picture of life is a great gift
to place in the hands of persons of to-day; they will find in these
sm