Marlowe, Drayton, Drummond of Hawthornden, and Cowley.

Much depends upon _when_ and _where_ you read a book. In the five or
six impatient minutes, before the dinner is quite ready, who would
think of taking up the Fairy Queen for a stop-gap, or a volume of
Bishop Andrewes' sermons?

Milton almost requires a solemn service of music to be played before
you enter upon him. But he brings his music, to which, who listens,
had need bring docile thoughts, and purged ears.

Winter evenings--the world shut out--with less of ceremony the gentle
Shakspeare enters. At such a season, the Tempest, or his own Winter's
Tale--

These two poets you cannot avoid reading aloud--to yourself, or (as
it chances) to some single person listening. More than one--and it
degenerates into an audience.

Books of quick interest, that hurry on for incidents, are for the eye
to glide over only. It will not do to read them out. I could never
listen to even the better kind of modern novels without extreme
irksomeness.

A newspaper, read out, is intolerable. In some of the Bank offices
it is the custom (to save so much individual time) for one of the
clerks--who is the best scholar--to commence upon the Times, or the
Chronicle, and recite its entire contents aloud _pro bono publico_.
With every advantage of lungs and elocution, the effect is singularly
vapid. In barbers' shops and public-houses a fellow will get up,
and spell out a paragraph, which he communicates as some discovery.
Another follows with _his_ selection. So the entire journal transpires
at length by piece-meal. Seldom-readers are slow readers, and, without
this expedient no one in the company would probably ever travel
through the contents of a whole paper.

Newspapers always excite curiosity. No one ever lays one down without
a feeling of disappointment.

What an eternal time that gentleman in black, at Nando's, keeps the
paper! I am sick of hearing the waiter bawling out incessantly, "the
Chronicle is in hand, Sir."

Coming in to an inn at night--having ordered your supper--what can be
more delightful than to find lying in the window-seat, left there time
out of mind by the carelessness of some former guest--two or three
numbers of the old Town and Country Magazine, with its amusing
_tete-a-tete_ pictures--"The Royal Lover and Lady G----;" "The Melting
Platonic and the old Beau,"--and such like antiquated scandal? Would
you exchange it--at that time, and in that place--for a