thought that he would like some of
his friends and acquaintances each to name his ideal hundred best
books--as for example Bishop Lightfoot, Dean Church, Dean Stanley, Canon
Liddon, Professor Max Muller, Mr. J. R. Lowell, Professor E. A. Freeman,
Mr. W. E. H. Lecky, Mr. John Morley, Sir Henry Maine, the Duke of Argyll,
Lord Tennyson, Cardinal Newman, Mr. Gladstone, Matthew Arnold, Professor
Goldwin Smith, Mr. R. H. Hutton, Mr. Mark Pattison, and Mr. J. A.
Symonds. Strange to say, he thought there would be a surprising
agreement between these writers as to which were the hundred best books.
I am all but certain, however, that there would not have been more than
twenty books in common between rival schools of thought--the secular and
the ecclesiastical--between, let us say, Mr. John Morley and Cardinal
Newman. But it is probable that not one of these eminent men would have
furnished a list with any similarity whatever to the remainder. Each
would have written down his own hundred favourites, and herein may be
admitted is an evidence of the futility of all such attempts. The best
books are the books that have helped us most to see life in all its
complex bearings, and each individual needs a particular kind of mental
food quite unlike the diet that best stimulates his neighbour. Writing
more than a year later, Lord Acton said that he had just drawn out a list
of recommended authors for his son, as being the company he would like
him to keep; but this list is not available--it is not the one before me.
That was compiled yet another twelve months afterwards, when we find Lord
Acton sending to Miss Mary Gladstone (Mrs. Drew) his own ideal "hundred
best books." This list is now printed for the first time. Evidently
Miss Gladstone remonstrated with her friend over the character of the
list; but Lord Acton defended it as being in his judgment really the
hundred _best books_, apart from works on physical science--that it
treated of principles that every thoughtful man ought to understand, and
was calculated, in fact, to give one a clear view of the various forces
that make history. "We are not considering," he adds, "what will suit an
untutored savage or an illiterate peasant woman, who would never come to
an end of the _Imitation_."

However, here is Lord Acton's list, which Mrs. Drew has been kind enough
to place in the hands of the Editor of the _Pall Mall Magazine_. I give
also Lord Acton's comment with which it open