Encouragement to the Summit Towarikh.—What is the book about? How is it executed? I should be obliged to some of our Orientalists to dip into it, and see whether we should do good or harm by distributing copies.—[Book N. page 69.] 8th March, 1837.
Proper Books for Prizes.—I agree with all that Sir B. Malkin has written. But I go even further than he. I own that I think the whole list a bad one. Not one book in ten is such as I should have selected. The mere circumstance that a gentleman is going to leave Hooghly, and is willing to sell us his library in the lump, seems to be no reason for our taking it. We can have no difficulty in making similar purchases every day. I am sure that not a week passes in which Messrs. Jenkins and Low do not sell collections at least as well chosen as this. I would decline altogether to purchase these standard books.
As to the list of prize books, I am not much better satisfied. It is absolutely unintelligible to me why Pope’s works and my old friend Moore’s Lalla Rookh should be selected from the whole mass of English poetry to be prize books. I will engage to frame, currente calamo a better list—Bacon’s Essays, Hume’s England, Gibbon’s Rome, Robertson’s Charles V., Robertson’s Scotland, Robertson’s America, Swift’s Gulliver, Robinson Crusoe, Shakspeare’s Works, Paradise Lost, Milton’s smaller poems, Arabian Nights, Parke’s Travels, Anson’s Voyage, The Vicar of Wakefield, Johnson’s Lives, Gil Blas, Voltaire’s Charles XII. Southey’s Nelson, Middleton’s life of Cicero.
This may serve as a specimen. These are books which will amuse and interest those who obtained them. To give a boy Abercrombie on the Intellectual Powers, Dick’s Moral Improvement, Young’s Intellectual Philosophy, Chalmers’s Poetical Economy!!! (in passing I may be allowed to ask what that means) is quite absurd. I would not give orders at random for books about which we know nothing. There are quite enough books which we know to be good. We are under no necessity of ordering any at haphazard. We know Robinson Crusoe and Gulliver and the Arabian Nights, and Anson’s Voyage, and many other delightful works which interest even the very young, and which do not lose their interest to the end of our lives. Why should we order blindfold such books as Markham’s New Children’s Friend, the Juvenile Scrap Book, The Child’s Own Book, Niggens’s Earth, Mudie’s Sea, and somebody else’s fire and air, books which, I will be bound for it, none of us ever opened.
The list in my opinion ought in all its parts to be thoroughly
