what he is, and not to think of the embryo he was, nor the skeleton that he shall be. Because also, Darwin has a mortal fascination for all vainly curious and idly speculative persons, and has collected, in the train of him, every impudent imbecility in Europe, like a dim comet wagging its useless tail of phosphorescent nothing across the steadfast stars.
6. Gibbon—Primarily, none but the malignant and the weak study the Decline and Fall either of State or organism. Dissolution and putrescence are alike common and unclean in all things; any wretch or simpleton may observe for himself, and experience himself, the processes of ruin; but good men study and wise men describe, oaly the growth and standing of things,—not their decay.
For the rest, Gibbon's is the worst English that was ever written by an educated Englishman. Having no imagination and little logic, he is alike incapable either of picturesqueness or wit: his epithets are malicious without point, sonorous without weight, and have no office but to make a flat sentence turgid.
7. Voltaire—His work is, in comparison with good literature, what nitric acid is to wine, and sulphuretted hydrogen to air. Literary chemists cannot but take account of the sting and stench of him; but he has no place in the library of a thoughtful scholar. Every man of sense knows more of the world than Voltaire can tell him; and what he wishes to express of such knowledge he will say without a snarl.
I cannot here enter into another very grave and wide question which neither the Pall Mall nor its respondents ask, respecting literature for the young, but will merely point out one total want in the present confused supply of it—that of intelligible books on natural history. I chanced at breakfast the other day, to wish I knew something of the biography of a shrimp, the rather that I was under the impression of having seen jumping shrimps on a sandy shore express great satisfaction in their life.
My shelves are loaded with books on natural history, but I could find nothing about shrimps except that "they swim in the water, or lie upon the sand in shoals, and are taken in multitudes for the table."
MR. SWINBURNE.
Sir,—I must apologize for the inevitable discourtesy of delay in answering your letter. judging from what I have seen, that any man's or woman's opinion on the relative value of a hundred books of all kinds which he or she might select as the most precious to humanity in general could itself be of any value to any one not concerned in the diagnosis of that man's or woman's morbid development of intellectual presumption and moral audacity. I send you, therefore, simply the list of a student whose reading has lain mainly, though by no means exclusively, in the line of imaginative or creative literature.
There are names which I have not taken upon myself to insert, as assuredly I should not have taken upon myself to reject them, of whose claims to a foremost place I should be sorry to be thought ignorant. It would be superfluous, I presume, for any educated Englishman to say that he does not question the pre-eminence of such names as Bacon and Darwin; but the only possible value of any man's special opinion, it seems to me, must depend, with regard to such writers as these, on the knowledge to be gained only by especial, if not exclusive, study.
I need only add (and, indeed, perhaps I need not add) that after the first two or three entries this list does not give my estimate of the greatness of the names included by the perhaps inevitably chaotic or heterogeneous arrangement, which I have not leisure to remedy or reform.
I am not sure that you may think "selections" from various volumes of ballads or other lyric poetry (25, 27) accurately definable or classifiable as books having an individual vitality of their own. But, as I cannot help thinking some of these waifs and strays worthy to be ranked among the most precious treasures of our own or any language, I could not properly refrain from entering them on my register. In some cases my "selections" would be large, in others very small but very precious. You will see that I have included no living names, and will, therefore, not be surprised that those of Lord Tennyson and M. Leconte de Lisle—to mention none but these two pre-eminent contemporaries—should be wanting. Some entries in any list, I presume, must seem frivolous or eccentric or perverse to readers of different tastes, and many omissions in mine may probably be attributed to pure ignorance as much as to want of taste.—Yours very truly, A. C. Swinburne.
1. Shakspeare.
2. Æschylus.
3. Selections from the Bible: comprising Job, the Psalms, Ecclesiastes, the Song of Solomon, Isaiah, Ezekiel, Joel: the Gospels of St. Matthew and St. Luke, the Gospel and the First Epistle of St. John, and the Epistle of St. James.
4. Homer.
5. Sophocles.
6. Aristophanes.
7. Pindar.
8. Lucretius.
9. Catullus.
10. Dante.
11. Chaucer.
12. Villon.
13. Marlowe.
14. Webster.
15. Molière.
16. Rabelais.
17. Epictetus.
18. Mill on Liberty.
19. Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyám (Fitzgerald's 1st version, 1859).
20. Milton.
21. Shelley.
22. Victor Hugo
23. Landor
24. Boccaccio.
25. Ballads of North England and Scotland (from Percy, Scott, Motherwell, and other selections).
26. Sir Philip Sidney (Astrophel and Stella).
27. Selections from the lyric poetry of the are of Shakspeare (England's Helicon, &c.)
28. Charles Lamb.
29. Boswell's Life of Johnson.
Select Works (30–50):
30. Coleridge (verse and prose.)
31. Scott (prose and verse.)
32. Blake.
33. Wordsworth.
34. Spenser.
35. Keats.
36. Mrs. Browning.
37. Burns.
38. Byron—"Don Juan." Cant. I.–VIII., XI.–XVI. inclusive, and "Vision of Judgment."
39. Balzac.
40. Dickens.
41. Thackeray.
42. Swift.
43. Ben Jonson.
44. Beaumont and Fletcher.
