st of companions; and, by elevating
the thoughts and aspirations, they act as preservatives against low
associations. "A natural turn for reading and intellectual pursuits,"
says Thomas Hood, "probably preserved me from the moral shipwreck so
apt to befal those who are deprived in early life of their parental
pilotage. My books kept me from the ring, the dogpit, the tavern, the
saloon. The closet associate of Pope and Addison, the mind accustomed to
the noble though silent discourse of Shakspeare and Milton, will hardly
seek or put up with low company and slaves."

It has been truly said, that the best books are those which most
resemble good actions. They are purifying, elevating, and sustaining;
they enlarge and liberalize the mind; they preserve it against vulgar
worldliness; they tend to produce highminded cheerfulness and equanimity
of character; they fashion, and shape, and humanize the mind. In the
Northern universities, the schools in which the ancient classics are
studied, are appropriately styled "The Humanity Classes." [1917]

Erasmus, the great scholar, was even of opinion that books were the
necessaries of life, and clothes the luxuries; and he frequently
postponed buying the latter until he had supplied himself with the
former. His greatest favourites were the works of Cicero, which he says
he always felt himself the better for reading. "I can never," he
says, "read the works of Cicero on 'Old Age,' or 'Friendship,' or his
'Tusculan Disputations,' without fervently pressing them to my lips,
without being penetrated with veneration for a mind little short of
inspired by God himself." It was the accidental perusal of Cicero's
'Hortensius' which first detached St. Augustine--until then a profligate
and abandoned sensualist--from his immoral life, and started him upon
the course of inquiry and study which led to his becoming the greatest
among the Fathers of the Early Church. Sir William Jones made it a
practice to read through, once a year, the writings of Cicero, "whose
life indeed," says his biographer, "was the great exemplar of his own."

When the good old Puritan Baxter came to enumerate the valuable and
delightful things of which death would deprive him, his mind reverted
to the pleasures he had derived from books and study. "When I die," he
said, "I must depart, not only from sensual delights, but from the more
manly pleasures of my studies, knowledge, and converse with many wise
and godly men, and f