45. Ford.
46. Dekker.
47. Tourneur,
48. Marston.
49. Middleton.
50. Rossetti.
51. Theocritus.
52. Story of the Volsungs and the Niblungs.
53. The Saga of Burnt Njal.
54. Lockhart's Life of Scott.
55. Autobiography of Lord Herbert of Cherbury.
56. Malory's Morte d'Arthur.
57. Ariosto.
Select Works (58–100).
58. Donne.
59. Massinger.
60. Congreve.
61. Vanbrugh.
62. Dryden.
63. Pope.
64. Defoe.
65. Goldsmith,
66. Fielding.
67. Sterne.
68. Sheridan.
69. Butler (excerpts from ("Hudibras" and "Remains.")
70. Collins.
71. Grey.
72. Herrick.
73. Suckling.
74. Prior.
75. *Omitted by Mr. Swinburne.
76. Drayton.
77. George Herbert,
78. Crashaw.
79. Randolph.
80. Wither.
81. La Fontaine.
82. Voltaire.
83. Diderot.
84. Chamfort (Maxims).
85. Beaumarchais.
86. Stendhal.
87. Dumas.
88. Jane Austen.
89. Charlotte Brontë.
90. Emily Brontë (verse and prose).
91. Leigh Hunt.
92. Hood.
93. Mrs. Gaskell.
94. George Eliot.
95. Campbell.
96. Musset.
97. Macaulay.
98. Crabbe.
99. Meinhold (English translation).
100. Early English metrical romances, from the collections of Weber, Ritson and Wright.
* Mr. Swinburne subsequently supplied this omission in the following letter:—
Sir—As I find I have omitted one of my hundred, I am inclined to supply the gap with the name of Etherege, who, as I have just been reminded by a far wider and deeper student of English literature than myself, was the founder—among us—of the pure comedy of manners, as opposed to the Shakspearian comedy of fancy and the Jonsonian comedy of humour; and who was certainly a great master of style and dialogue.—Yours very truly,
MR. WILLIAM MORRIS.
Sir,—I answer your letter with much pleasure. Like my friend Mr. Swinburne, I do not pretend to prescribe reading for other people: the list I give you is of books which have profoundly impressed myself: I hope I shall be acquitted of egotism or conceit for having ventured to add a few notes to the list; in some cases I felt explanation was necessary; in all, it seemed to me that my opinion could be of no value unless it were given quite frankly; so I ask your readers to accept my list and notes as a confession such as might chance to fall from me in friendly conversation; and, after all, these are matters about which one must have an opinion, though it may, I feel too well, be sometimes prudent to conceal it.
My list seems a short one, but it includes a huge mass of reading. Also there is a kind of book which I think might be excluded in such lists, or at least put in a quite separate one. Such books are rather tools than books: one reads them for a definite purpose, for extracting information from them of some special kind. Among such books I should include works on philosophy, economics, and modern or critical history. I by no means intend to undervalue such books, but they are not, to my mind, works of art; their manner may be good, or even excellent, but it is not essential to them; their matter is a question of fact, not of taste. My list comprises only what I consider works of art.—I am, Sir, yours obediently,
List.
| 1 | Hebrew Bible (excluding some twice done parts and some pieces of mere Jewish ecclesiasticism) | These books are of the kind which Mazzini called "Bibles;" they cannot always be measured by a literary standard, but to me are far more important than any literature. They are in no sense the work of individuals, but have grown up from the very hearts of the people.Some other books further down share in the nature of these "Bibles;" I have marked them with a star.* |
| 2 | Homer | |
| 3 | Hesiod | |
| 4 | The Edda (including some of the other early old Norse romantic genealogical poems) | |
| 5 | Beowulf | |
| 6 | Mahabharata | |
| 7 | Collections of folk tales, headed by Grimm and the Norse ones | |
| 8 | Irish and Welsh traditional poems | |
| *9 | Herodotus | Real ancient imaginative works. I have left out others of which (to confess and be hanged) I know little or nothing. The greater part of the Latins I should call sham classics. I suppose that they have some good literary qualities; but I cannot help thinking that it is difficult to find out how much. I suspect superstition and authority have influenced them till it has become a mere matter of convention. Of course I admit the archæological value of some of them, especially Virgil and Ovid. |
| 10 | Plato | |
| 11 | Æschylus | |
| 12 | Sophocles | |
| 13 | Aristophanes | |
| 14 | Theocritus | |
| 15 | Lucretius | |
| 16 | Catullus | |
| 17 | Plutarch's Lives | |
| 18* | Heimskringla (the tales of the Norse Kings) | Uncritical or traditional history: almost all these books are admirable pieces of tale-telling: some of them rise into the dignity of prose epics, so to say, especially in parts. Note, for instance, the last battle of Olaf Tryggvason in Heimskringla; and the great rally of the rebels of Ghent in Froissart. |
| 19* | Some half-dozen of the best Icelandic Sagas | |
| 20 | The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle | |
| 21 | William of Malmsbury | |
| 22 | Froissart |
