reat poets,
from Chaucer to Byron and Tennyson. Lord Brougham, Macaulay, and Carlyle
have alike admired and eulogized the great Italian. The former advised
the students at Glasgow that, next to Demosthenes, the study of Dante
was the best preparative for the eloquence of the pulpit or the bar.
Robert Hall sought relief in Dante from the racking pains of spinal
disease; and Sydney Smith took to the same poet for comfort and solace
in his old age. It was characteristic of Goethe that his favourite book
should have been Spinoza's 'Ethics,' in which he said he had found a
peace and consolation such as he had been able to find in no other work.
[1912]

Barrow's favourite was St. Chrysostom; Bossuet's was Homer. Bunyan's
was the old legend of Sir Bevis of Southampton, which in all probability
gave him the first idea of his 'Pilgrim's Progress.' One of the
best prelates that ever sat on the English bench, Dr. John Sharp,
said--"Shakspeare and the Bible have made me Archbishop of York." The
two books which most impressed John Wesley when a young man, were 'The
Imitation of Christ' and Jeremy Taylor's 'Holy Living and Dying.' Yet
Wesley was accustomed to caution his young friends against overmuch
reading. "Beware you be not swallowed up in books," he would say to
them; "an ounce of love is worth a pound of knowledge."

Wesley's own Life has been a great favourite with many thoughtful
readers. Coleridge says, in his preface to Southey's 'Life of Wesley,'
that it was more often in his hands than any other in his ragged
book-regiment. "To this work, and to the Life of Richard Baxter," he
says, "I was used to resort whenever sickness and languor made me feel
the want of an old friend of whose company I could never be tired. How
many and many an hour of self-oblivion do I owe to this Life of Wesley;
and how often have I argued with it, questioned, remonstrated, been
peevish, and asked pardon; then again listened, and cried, 'Right!
Excellent!' and in yet heavier hours entreated it, as it were, to
continue talking to me; for that I heard and listened, and was soothed,
though I could make no reply!" [1913]

Soumet had only a very few hooks in his library, but they were of the
best--Homer, Virgil, Dante, Camoens, Tasso, and Milton. De Quincey's
favourite few were Donne, Chillingworth, Jeremy Taylor, Milton, South,
Barrow, and Sir Thomas Browne. He described these writers as "a pleiad
or constellation of seven golden stars, such as in