From his Lectures.

I HAVE proposed to speak to you this evening on the Friendship of Books. I have some fear that an age of reading is not always favorable to the cultivation of this friendship. I do not mean that we are in any special danger of looking upon them as enemies. That is no doubt the temptation of some persons. I have known both boys and men who have looked at books with a kind of rage and hatred, as if they were the natural foes of the human species. I am far from thinking that these were bad boys or bad men; nor were they stupid. Some of them I have found very intelligent, and have learned much from them. I could trace the dislike in some cases to a cause which I thought honorable. The dogs and horses which they did care about, and were always on good terms with, they regarded as living creatures, who could receive affection, and in some measure could return it. Their horses could carry them over hills and moors; their dogs had been out with them from morning till night, and took interest in the pursuit that was interesting them. Books seemed to them dead things in stiff bindings, that might be patted or caressed ever so much, and would take no notice, that knew nothing of toil or pleasure, of hill or stubble field, of sunrise or sunsetting, of the earnest chase or the feast after it. Was it not better to leave them on the shelves which seemed to be made for them? Was it not treating them most respectfully not to finger or soil them, but to secure the services of a housemaid who should occasionally dust them?

  I frankly own that I have great sympathy with these feelings, and with those who entertain them. If books are only dead things, if they do not speak to one, or answer one when one speaks to them, if they have nothing to do with the common things that we are busy with,—with the sky over our head, and the ground under our feet,—I think that they had better stay on the shelves; I think any horse or dog, or tree or flower, is a better companion for human beings than they are. And therefore I say again, it is not with those who count them enemies that I find fault. They have much to say for themselves; if their premises are right, they are right in their conclusions. What I regret is, that many of us spend much of our time in reading books, and in talking of books—that we like nothing worse than the reputation of being indifferent to them, and nothing better than the reputation of knowing a great deal about them; and yet that, after all, we do not know them in the same way as we know our fellow-creatures, not even in the way we know any dumb animal that we walk with or play with. This is a great misfortune, in my opinion, and one which I am afraid is increasing as what we call “the taste for literature” increases. I cannot enter into all the different reasons which lead me to think so, nor can I trace the evil to its source. But I will mention one characteristic of the reading in our times, which must have much to do with it.

  A large part of our reading is given to reviews and magazines and newspapers. Now I am certain that these must have a very important use. We should all of us be trying to find out what the use of them is, because it is clear that we are born into an age in which they exercise great power; and that fact must bring a great responsibility not only upon those who wield the power, but upon us who have to see that it does us good, and not hurt. But whatever good effects works of this kind may have produced, we certainly are not able to make them our friends. Perhaps you will wonder that I should say that a newspaper or a review is a much less awful thing than a quarto or a folio—I mean, of course, to those who are not going themselves to be cut up in it, but only to have the pleasure of seeing their friends and neighbors cut up. Moreover, the writer of the newspaper or magazine or review commonly assumes an offhand, dashing air. He has a number of colloquial phrases and stock jests which seem intended to put us at our ease. He speaks in a loud, rattling tone, like one who wishes to shake hands the first time you meet him. But then, when you stretch out your hand, what is it you meet? Not that of a man, but of a shadow, of something that calls itself “We.” Be friends with a “We!” How is that possible? If the mist is scattered, if we discover that there is an actual human being there, then the case is altered altogether. If Lord Jeffrey, or Mr. Macaulay, or Sir James Stephen publishes articles which he has written in a review, with his name affixed to them, or if a “Times correspondent” whom, in our superstition, we had supposed to be one of the fairies or genii that descend from some other world to our planet, appears with an ordinary name, and dressed like a mortal, why, then we feel we are on fair terms. A person is presenting himself to us, one who may have a right to judge us, but who is willing to be tried himself by his peers. That, you see, is because the We has become an I. All his apparent dignity is dissolved; we can recognize him as a fellow-creature.

  Now, I do not say this the least in condemnation of reviewers, or of any person who, for any reasons whatever, thinks it better to call himself We than I. I only say that there is no friendship under such conditions as this; that we never can make any book our friend until we look upon it as the work of an I. It is the principle which I hope to maintain throughout this lecture, and therefore I begin with stating it at once. I want to speak to you about a few books which exhibit very transparently, I think, what sort of a person he was who wrote them, which show him to us. I think we shall find that there is the charm of the book, the worth of the book. He may be writing about a great many things, but there is a man who writes, and when you get acquainted with that man you get acquainted with the book. It is no more a collection of letters and leaves; it is a friend.

  I mean to speak entirely, or almost entirely, of English books. And I shall begin with a writer who seems to offer a great exception to the remark I have just made. If I thought he was really an exception I should be much puzzled, or rather I should give up my position altogether. For since he is the greatest and the best known of all English authors, for him to be an instance against me would be a clear proof that I was wrong. We continually hear this observation: “William Shakespeare is not to be found in any of his plays.” It is his great and wonderful distinction that he is not. Othello speaks his word, Hamlet his, Bottom, the weaver, his; Desdemona, Imogen, Portia, each her word. But Shakespeare does not intrude himself into any of their places; he does not want us to know what he thought about this matter or that. If you look into one corner or another for him, he is not there. It would appear, then, according to my maxim, as if Shakespeare could never be his reader’s friend. It would appear as if he were the great precedent for all newspaper writers and reviewers, as if he were overlooking mankind just as they do, and had the best possible right to describe himself as a We, and not as an I.

  Well, that sounds very plausible, and, like everything that sounds plausible, there is a truth at the bottom of it. But that the truth is not this, I think the feeling and judgment of the people of England (I might say of the continents of Europe and of America) might convince you without any arguments of mine. For they have been so sure that there was a William Shakespeare, they were so certain that he had a local habitation and a name, that they have rummaged parish registers, hunted Doctors’ Commons for wills, made pilgrimages to Stratford-upon-Avon, put together traditions about old houses and shops, that they might make, if possible, some clear image of him in their minds. I do not know that they have succeeded very well. The facts of his biography are few. A good deal of imagination has been needed to put them together, and to fill up the blanks in them. I do not suppose registers, or wills, or old houses, will give many more answers concerning him. But that only shows, I think, how very clear a witness his own works give, even when the outward information is ever so scanty, of the man that he was, and of the characteristics which distinguished him from his fellows. If you ask me how I reconcile this assertion with the undoubted fact that he does not put himself forward as other dramatists do, and give his own opinions instead of allowing the persons of his drama to utter theirs, I should answer: Have you found that the man who is in the greatest hurry to tell you all that he thinks about all possible things is the friend that is best worth knowing? Have you found that the one who talked most about himself and his own doings is the most worth knowing? Do you not generally become rather exhausted with men of his kind? Do not you say sometimes, in Shakespeare’s own words, or rather in Falstaff’s, “I do see to the bottom of this same Justice Shallow; he has told me all he has to tell. There is no reserve in him, nothing that is worth searching after”? On the other hand, have you not met with some men who very rarely spoke about their own impressions and thoughts, who seldom laid down the law, and yet who you were sure had a fund of wisdom within, and who made you partakers of it by the light which they threw on the earth in which they were dwelling, especially by the kindly, humorous, pathetic way in which they interested you about your fellowmen, and made you acquainted with them? I do not say that this is the only class of friends which one would wish for. One likes to have some who in quiet moments are more directly communicative about their own sufferings and struggles. But certainly you would not say that men of the other class are not very pleasant and very profitable. Of this class Shakespeare is the most remarkable specimen. Instead of being a reviewer who sits above the universe, and applies his own narrow rules to the members of it, he throws himself with the heartiest and most genial sympathy into the feelings of all, he understands their position and circumstances, he perceives how each must have been affected by them. Instead of being a big, imaginary We, he is so much of a man himself that he can enter into the manhood of people who are the furthest off from him, and with whom he has the least to do. And so, I believe, his books may become most valuable friends to us—to us especially who ought to be acquainted with what is going on with all kinds of people. Every now and then, I think (especially, perhaps, in the characters of Hamlet and of Prospero), one discovers signs how Shakespeare as an individual man had fought and suffered. I quite admit, however, that his main work is not to do this, but to help us in knowing ourselves—the past history of our land, the people we are continually meeting. And any book that does this is surely a friend.

  Before I leave Shakespeare, I would speak of the way in which he made friends with books. Perhaps I can do it best by comparing his use of them with the use which was made of them by a very clever and accomplished contemporary of his. Ben Jonson, though he was the son of a bricklayer, made himself a thoroughly good Latin and Greek scholar. He read the best Latin books, and the commentaries which illustrated them; he wrote two plays on subjects taken from Roman history. Very striking subjects they were. The hero of one was Catiline, who tried to overthrow the social order of the republic; the hero of the other was Sejanus, who represents, by his grandeur and his fall, the very character and spirit of the empire in the days of Tiberius. In dealing with these subjects Ben Jonson had the help of two of the greatest Roman authors, both of them possessing remarkable powers of narration, one of them a man of earnest character, subtle insight, deep reflection. Though few men in his day understood these authors, and the government and circumstances of Rome, better than Jonson, though he was a skillful and experienced playwriter, most readers are glad when they have got Catiline and Sejanus fairly done with. They do not find that they have received any distinct impressions from them of Roman life; to learn what it was they must go to the authors whom he has copied. Shakespeare wrote three plays on Roman subjects: “Coriolanus,” “Julius Cæsar,” “Antony and Cleopatra.” He knew very little of Latin, and the materials he had to work with were a tolerable translation of Livy’s “History,” and a capital one of Plutarch’s “Lives.” With no aid but these, and his knowledge of Warwickshire peasants and London citizens, he has taught us more of the Romans, he has made us more at home in their city, and at their fireside, than the best historians who lived upon the soil are able to do. Jonson studied their books; Shakespeare made friends of them. He did just the same with our old chronicles. He read of King John, of Richard II., of John of Gaunt, of Harry of Lancaster, of Hotspur and Owen Glendower, of the good Humphrey of Gloucester, and the dark Cardinal Beaufort, of Wolsey and Catherine. He read of them, and they stood up before him, real armed men, or graceful, sorrowing women. Instead of being dead letters, they all became living persons; not appearing in solitary grandeur, but forming groups; not each with a fixed, immovable nature, but acted upon and educated by all the circumstances of their times; not dwelling in an imaginary world, but warmed by the sun of Italy, or pinched by the chilly nights of Denmark—essentially men such as are to be found in all countries and in all ages, and therefore exhibiting all the varieties of temperament and constitution which belong to each age and to each country.

  Shakespeare’s mind was formed in an age when men were at work, and when they wanted books to explain and illustrate their work. He lived on into another, when men began to value books for their own sakes. James I., who was called a Solomon (and who would have deserved that name if Solomon had not considered that his wisdom was given him that he might rule his subjects well, and if James had not supposed that his was given for every purpose except that), was the great promoter of this worship of books. But they did not speak to Englishmen of that which was going on around them as they had done in Elizabeth’s time. Learned people drew a line about themselves, and signified to common people who had business that they must keep their distance. Still there were many influences which counteracted this tendency. One man, who was not free from it by any means, helped to check it by opening to his fellows a new and real world. Lord Bacon found that they knew the secrets of nature only through books, that they did not come freely and directly into contact with them; he showed them how they might converse with the things they saw, how they might know them as they were in themselves, instead of only seeing them distorted by their spectacles. That was a great work to do; and as I said, it was never more wanted than just at this time, when men were in danger of falling so much in love with the letters in books as to forget into what a universe of mysteries God had put his creature man that he might search them out. Bacon reverenced the study of nature more than he did the study of man; and no wonder! For he found out what a beautiful order there was in nature; and though I believe he looked for an order in human affairs too, and sometimes discerned, and always wished for it, yet there is no denying that he had a keen eye for the disorders and wrongdoings of his fellowmen, and that he rather reconciled himself to them than sought to remedy them. I refer to him, because I fancy that many have a notion of his books on the interpretation of nature as very valuable for scientific men, and his books on morals and politics as very wise for statesmen and men of the world, but not as friends. They form this notion because they suppose that the more we knew of Bacon himself, the less sympathy we should have with him. I should be sorry to hold this opinion, because I owe him immense gratitude; and I could not cherish it if I thought of him, even as the sagest of bookmakers, and not as a human being. I should be sorry to hold it, because if I did not find in him a man who deserved reverence and love, I should not feel either the indignation or the sorrow which I desire to feel for his misdoings. Niebuhr said of Cicero that he knew his faults as well as anybody, but that he felt as much grieved when people spoke of them as if he were his brother. That is the right way to feel about great men who are departed, and I do not think that an Englishman should feel otherwise about Bacon. It is hard to measure the exact criminality of his acts; one of the truest sentences ever passed on them was his own. His words are faithful transcripts of both his strength and weakness. There are some, especially of his dedications, which one cannot read without a sense of burning shame; there are passages in the very treatises which those dedications introduce that it does one’s heart good to remember, and which we are inwardly sure must have come from the heart of him who put them into language. He does not give us at all the genial impressions of other men which Shakespeare gives, but he detects very shrewd tricks which we practice upon ourselves. His worldly wisdom is what we have most to dread, lest he should make us contented with the wrong in ourselves and in the society about us, and should teach us to admire low models. But if we apply to our moral pursuits the zeal for truth, and the method of seeking it and of escaping from our own conceits, which he imparts to us in his physical lessons, if we consider his own errors, and his punishment for tolerating and embracing the base maxims of his time, we shall find him all the safer as a guide because we have felt with him as a friend. When we do that we can always appeal from the man to himself; we can say: “Thank you heartily for what you have said to me; but there were clouds about you when you were here; you did not always walk with straight feet, and with your eyes turned to the light. Now you know better, and I will make use of what you tell me, as well as of all that I can learn about your doings, as warnings to keep me from wandering to the right or to the left.”

  I might speak of other books in this bookish time of James I., which many of us have found valuable and genial friends; as, for instance, the poems of George Herbert, which nobody that ever reads them can think of merely as poems; they are so completely the utterances of the heart of an affectionate, faithful, earnest man, they speak so directly to whatever is best in ourselves, and give us such friendly and kindly admonitions about what is worst. But I must go on to the next period, which was a period of action and strife, when men could no more regard writing books, or even reading them, as an amusement; when the past must be studied for the sake of the present, or not at all. John Milton belongs to that time. He was the most learned of all our poets, the one who from his childhood upwards was a devourer of Greek and Latin books, of the romances of the Middle Ages, of French and Italian poetry, above all of the Hebrew scriptures. All these became his friends; for all of them connected themselves with the thoughts that occupied men in his own time, with the deep religious and political controversies which were about to bring on a civil war. Many persons think that the side which he took in that war must hinder us from making his books our friends; that we may esteem him as a great poet, but that we cannot meet him cordially as a man. No one is more likely to entertain that opinion than an English clergyman, for Milton dealt his blows unsparingly enough, and we come in for at least our full share of them. I know all that, and yet I must confess that I have found him a friend, and a very valuable friend, even when I have differed from him most and he has made me smart most. It does not strike me that on the whole we profit most by the friends who flatter us. We may be stirred up to the recollection of our duty by those who speak stern and terrible words of us, and of our class. If we are persuaded that they are utterly wrong in condemning the institutions to which we are attached, we may often admit that they are very right in condemning us for the sins which hinder men from seeing the worth of those institutions. I do not know any one who makes us feel more than Milton does the grandeur of the ends which we ought to keep always before us, and therefore our own pettiness and want of courage and nobleness in pursuing them. I believe he failed to discern many of the intermediate relations which God has established between himself and us; but I know no one who teaches us more habitually that disobedience to the Divine Will is the seat of all misery to men. I would rather converse with him as a friend than talk of him as a poet; because then we put ourselves into a position to receive the best wisdom which he has to give us, and that wisdom helps to purge away whatever dross is mingled with it; whereas if we merely contemplate him at a distance as a great genius, we shall receive some powerful influence from him, but we shall not be in a condition to compare one thing that he says to us with another. And to say the truth, I do not know what genius is, except it be that which begets some life in those who come in contact with it, which kindles some warmth in them. If there is genius in a poem, it must have been first in the poet; and if it was in the poet, it must have been because he was not a stock or a stone, but a breathing and suffering man. And there is no writer whose books more force upon us the thought of him as a person than Milton’s. There are few passages in his prose writings, full as they are of gorgeous passages, more beautiful than that in which he defends himself from the charge of entering from choice or vanity into controversies, by alleging the far different object and kind of writing to which from his youth upwards he had desired to devote himself. And in his latest poem of “Samson Agonistes,” where what he had learned from the playwriters of Greece is wonderfully raised, and mellowed, and interpreted by what he had learned from the Old Testament, he himself speaks to us in every line. He transfers himself to the prison of Samson in Gaza; he is the blind, downcast, broken man whom God appears to have cast off. The thought of God as the Deliverer gives him a consolation which nothing else can give; he looks forward to some triumph which God will give to his race, as the only hope for himself.

  I have dwelt some time upon these “friends,” because Shakespeare, Bacon, Milton, are the greatest names in our literature, and therefore it was important for my purpose to show you that their books do fulfill the purpose which I have said all books ought to fulfill. I might very fairly have gone back, and spoken to you of older writers than these. I might have spoken of the time of our Edward III., and have given you some proofs that our first poet, Chaucer, was a cordial, genial, friendly man, who could tell us a great many things which we want to know about his own time, and could also break down the barrier between his time and ours, and make us feel that, though our dress may be very much unlike theirs, and our houses a good deal better, and our language a little less French, yet that on the whole our fathers worked at much the same trades as we do, fell into the same kind of sins, looked up at the same skies, had the same wants in their hearts, and required that they should be satisfied in the same way. I might have spoken to you also of some of the men who flourished at the time of the Reformation—of Latimer for instance, whose broad, simple, humorous sermons address themselves to all the common sympathies of Englishmen, and are as free from starch and buckram as any one could wish. I might have spoken to you also of some of Shakespeare’s contemporaries, especially of that delightful and instructive companion, Spenser’s “Faery Queene,” which makes us feel that without stepping a yard from our native English ground, or deserting any of our common occupations, we may be, aye, and must be, engaged in a great fight with invisible enemies, and that we have invisible champions on our side. But as I have not time to speak of many books to-night, I have passed over these and have begun at once with those which, for one reason or another, people are most likely to think of as having claims upon their respect rather than upon their friendship. That must be my reason too for not dwelling upon a book belonging to Milton’s time, which many people would at once recognize as a delightful friend; I mean Izaak Walton’s “Angler.” Knowing nothing of his craft, I should only betray my ignorance by entering upon it, and should lessen the pleasure which some of you, I dare say, have received from its quiet descriptions and devout reflections. But I am glad to remember that there is such a book in our libraries, even if I understand very little of it, because it is one of the links between the life of the woods and streams and the life of the study, which it would be a great misfortune for us to lose.

  A link between this age and the one that follows it is found in Thomas Fuller, one of the liveliest, and yet, in the inmost heart of him, one of the most serious writers one can meet with. I speak of this writer partly because there is no one who is so resolute that we should treat him as a friend, and not as a solemn dictator. By some unexpected jest, or comical turn of expression, he disappoints your purpose of receiving his words as if they were fixed in print, and asserts his right to talk with you, and convey his subtle wisdom in his own quaint and peculiar dialect.

  Fuller uses his wit to make his reader a friend. The writers of Charles II.’s court used their wit to prove that there could be no such thing as friendship with either books or men, that it was altogether a ridiculous obsolete sentiment. They established their point so far as they themselves were concerned; one has no right to ask of them what they had not to give. But their punishment is a singular one. They wished to pass for men of the world, and not for vulgar bookwrights. We are obliged to regard them as bookwrights simply, and not as men at all. There is one exception. John Dryden stands apart from the men whose vices infected him, not merely because his style in prose and verse was immeasurably more vigorous than theirs, but because his confused life and his evil companions did not utterly destroy his heart. I do not know that one could make the writings of John Dryden friends; so many of the very cleverest of them are bitter satires, containing a great deal of shrewd observation, sometimes just, as well as severe, but certainly not binding us by any strong ties of affection to their author. Yet there is such a tragedy in the history of a mind so full of power as his, and so unable to guide itself amidst the shoals and quicksands of his time, that I believe we need not, and that we cannot, speak of him merely with the admiration which is due to his gifts; we must feel for him somewhat of the pity that is akin to love. Mr. Macaulay charges Dryden with changing his religion chiefly that he might get a pension from James II. I do not believe that was his motive, or that the lesson from his life would be worth as much as it is if it had been. If we compare his “Religio Laici,” which he wrote in his former, with his “Hind and Panther,” which expressed his later opinions, I think we may perceive that his mind was unhinged, that he found nothing fixed or certain in heaven or earth, and that he drifted naturally wherever the tide of events carried him. That is the fate which may befall many who have no right to be described as mercenary time-servers.

  However, one is glad to escape from this age, which had become a very detestable one, and to find ourselves in one which, though not exemplary for goodness, produced books of which we can very well make friends. If you take up the Spectator, or the Guardian, your first feeling is that the writers in it wish to cultivate your friendship. They have thrown off the stiff manners of those who reckon it their chief business to write books; at the same time they do not affect to be men of the world despising books. Their object is to bring books and people of the world into a good understanding with each other; to make fine ladies and gentlemen somewhat wiser and better behaved by feeding them with good and wholesome literature; to show the student what things are going on about him, that he may not be a mere pedant and recluse. I do not mean that this was the deliberate purpose of Addison and Steele. It was the natural effect of their position that they took this course. They had been educated as scholars; they entered into civil life, and became members of parliament. The two characters were mixed in them; and when they wrote books they could not help showing that they knew something of men. The two men were well fitted to work together. Addison had the calmer and clearer intellect; he had inherited a respect for English faith and morality. Steele, with a more wavering conduct, had perhaps even more reverence in his inmost heart for goodness. Between them they appeared just formed to give a turn to the mind of their age; not presenting to society a very heroical standard, but raising it far above the level to which it had sunk, and is apt to sink.

  The Spectator and the Guardian have sometimes been called the beginning of our periodical literature. Perhaps they are; but they are very unlike what we describe by that name in our day. There is no We in them. Though the papers have letters of the alphabet, and not names, put to them, and though they profess to be members of a club, each writer calls himself I. You can hardly conceive what a difference it would make in the pleasure with which you read any paper, if the singular pronoun were changed for the plural. The good humor of the writing would evaporate immediately. You would no longer find that you were in the presence of a kindly, friendly observer, who was going about with you and pointing out to you this folly of the town, and that pleasant characteristic of a country gentleman’s life. All would be the dry, hard criticism of some distant being, who did not take you into his counsels at all, but merely told you what you were to think or not to think. And with the good humor, what we call the humor when we do not prefix the adjective to it would also disappear. Mr. Thackeray, the most competent person possible for such a task, has introduced Addison and Steele among the humorists of England, and has shown very clearly both how the humor of the one differed from that of the other, and how unlike both were to Dean Swift, who is the best and most perfect specimen of ill humor—that is so to say, of a man of the keenest intellect and the most exquisite clearness of expression, who is utterly out of sorts with the world and with himself. Addison is on good terms with both. He amuses himself with people, not because he dislikes them, but because he likes them, and is not discomposed by their absurdities. He does not go very far down into the hearts of them; he never discovers any of the deeper necessities which there are in human beings. But everything that is upon the surface of their lives, and all the little cross-currents which disturb them, no one sees so accurately, or describes so gracefully. In certain moods of our mind, therefore, we have here a most agreeable friend, one who tasks us to no great effort, who does not set us on encountering any terrible evils, or carrying forward any high purpose, but whom one must always admire for his quietness and composure; who can teach us to observe a multitude of things that we should else pass by, and reminds us that in man’s life, as in nature, there are days of calm and sunshine as well as of storm.

  But though one may have a very pleasant and useful conversation with this kind-hearted Spectator now and then, I do not think that such conversation would brace one to the hard work of life, or would enable one to sympathize with those who are engaged in it. We must remember that a very considerable majority of the world do not ride in coaches, as nearly all those we read of in the Spectator do: that to earn bread by the sweat of the brow is the common heritage of the sons of Adam, and that it is a great misfortune not to understand that necessity, even if circumstances have exempted us from it. For that reason some of us may welcome another friend, far less happy and genial than Addison, often very rough and crossgrained, with rude inward affection. Old Samuel Johnson had none of Addison’s soft training. He had nothing to do with the House of Commons, except as a contraband reporter; he had not the remotest chance of being a secretary of state even if he had not been a fierce Tory, and in the reign of George II. all but a Jacobite. With only booksellers for his patrons, obliged to seek his bread from hand to mouth by writing for them what they prescribed, with a bad digestion, a temper anything but serene, a faith certainly as earnest as Addison’s, but which contemplated its objects on the dark and not on the sunny side, he offers the greatest contrast one can conceive to the happy well-conditioned man of whom I have just been speaking. The opposition between them is all the more remarkable because the Rambler was formed on the model of the Spectator, and because Johnson as much as Addison belongs to what ought to be called the club period of English literature. I do not suppose any one will be bold enough to vindicate that name, be it good or evil, for our day, merely because gentlemen are now able to eat solitary dinners, hear news, and sleep over newspapers and magazines, in very magnificent houses in Pall Mall. The genuine club, though its locality might be in some dark alley out of Fleet Street, was surely that in which men of different occupations after the toil of the day met to exchange thoughts. In that world Johnson flourished even more than Addison. The latter is accused by Pope of giving his little senate laws; but Johnson’s senate contained many great men who yet listened to his oracles with reverence. And those oracles were not delivered in sentences of three clauses ending in a long word in “tion,” like those papers in the Rambler which are so well parodied in the “Rejected Addresses.” I think that young men ought, undoubtedly, to be early warned of these pompous sentences, not because it is worse to imitate this style than any other,—for we have no business to imitate any (our style must be our own, or it is worth nothing),—but because it is particularly easy to catch this habit of writing, and to fancy there is substance when there is only wind. But I cannot admit that Johnson’s most inflated sentences contain mere wind. He had something to put into them: they did express what he felt, and what he was, better than simpler, more English, more agreeable ones would have done. He adopted them naturally; they are part of himself; if we want to be acquainted with him, we must not find fault with them. And when he is describing scenes as in “Rasselas, Prince of Abyssinia,” he is often quite free and picturesque; when he is writing about business, as in his “Falkland Island,” he does not let his eloquence, which in that book is often very splendid, hinder him from being pointed and direct in his blows. He falls into what some people call King Cambyses’ vein chiefly when he is moralizing on the condition of the world, and the disappointment of all man’s hopes and projects in it. In his club, no one could speak with more straightness, wasting no words, but bringing out the thing he wants to say in the strongest and most distinct dress that could be found. One may not agree in half of the opinions he expresses, and may think that he delivers them very dogmatically. If one looked either at his writings or at Boswell’s life of him merely as books, one would go away very discontented and very angry; but when one thinks of both as exhibiting to us a man, the case becomes altogether different. We are all greatly indebted, I think, to Mr. Carlyle, for having determined that we should contemplate Johnson in this way, and not chiefly as a critic or a lexicographer. We may judge of him in those characters very differently; but in himself Mr. Carlyle has shown most clearly that he deserves our sympathy and our reverence.

  There were two members of Johnson’s club to each of whom he was sincerely attached, and who were attached to each other, though in their habits, occupations, talents, modes of thinking, they were as unlike him, and unlike each other, as any two men could be. They had, indeed, a common origin—Oliver Goldsmith and Edmund Burke were both Irishmen. But Goldsmith carried his country about with him wherever he went; he was always blundering, and reckless, and good-natured. Burke only showed where he had been born by his zeal for the improvement of his country whenever her affairs came under discussion. I believe that these two men, with the vast differences that there are between them, may both become our friends, and that we shall not thoroughly enjoy the “Deserted Village,” or the “Vicar of Wakefield,” or the “Speeches on American Taxation,” or the “Reflections on the French Revolution,” unless they do. All Goldsmith’s friends were always scolding him, laughing at him, and learning from him. They found that he had a fund of knowledge which he had picked up they could not tell how, but apparently by sympathizing with all the people that he came into contact with, and so getting to be really acquainted with them. He compiled histories without much learning about the people he was writing of: yet he did not make them false or foolish, because he had more notion than many diligent historians have of what men must be like in any latitudes. In his poetry he never goes out of his depth; he speaks of things which he has seen and felt himself, and so it tells us of him if it does not tell us of much else. In spite of all his troubles, he is as good-natured as Addison; only he mixed with a different class of people from Addison, and can tell us of country vicars and their wives and daughters, though he may not know much of a Sir Roger de Coverley. His books, I think, must be always pleasant, as well as profitable friends, provided we do not expect from them, as we ought not to expect from any friend, more than they profess to give.

  Burke is a friend of another order. Johnson said of him that if you met him under a gateway in a shower of rain, you must perceive that he was a remarkable man. I do not think we can take up the most insignificant fragment of the most insignificant speech or pamphlet he ever put forth without arriving at the same conviction. But he does what is better than make us acknowledge him as a remarkable man. He makes us acknowledge that we are small men, that we have talked about subjects of which we had little knowledge, and the principles of which we had imperfectly sounded.

  He told the electors of Bristol, that they might reject him if they pleased, but that he should maintain his position as an English statesman, and an honest man. They did reject him, of course, but his speech remains as a model for all true men to follow, as a warning to all who adopt another course, that they may make friends for the moment, but that they will not have a friend in their own conscience, and that their books, if they leave any, will be no friends to those who read them in the times to come.

  Away from the club in which Johnson, Burke, and Goldsmith were wont to meet, in a little village in Buckinghamshire, dwelt another poet, who was not uninterested in their doings, and who had in his youth mixed with London wits. William Cowper inspired much friendship among men, and still more among women, during his lifetime; they found him the pleasantest of all companions in his bright hours, and they did not desert him in his dark hours. His books have been friends to a great many since he left the earth, because they exhibit him very faithfully in both; some of his letters and some of his poems being full of mirth and quiet gladness, some of them revealing awful struggles and despair. Whatever estimate may be formed of his poetry in comparison with that of earlier or later writers, every one must feel that his English is that of a scholar and a gentleman—that he had the purest enjoyment of domestic life, and of what one may call the domestic or still life of nature. One is sure, also, that he had the most earnest faith, which he cherished for others when he could find no comfort in it for himself. These would be sufficient explanations of the interest which he has awakened in so many simple and honest readers who turn to books for sympathy and fellowship, and do not like a writer at all the worse because he also demands their sympathy with him. Cowper is one of the strongest instances and proofs how much more qualities of this kind affect Englishmen than any others. The gentleness of his life might lead some to suspect him of effeminacy; but the old Westminster schoolboy and cricketer comes out in the midst of his “Meditation on Sofas”; and the deep tragedy which was at the bottom of his whole life, and which grew more terrible as the shadows of evening closed upon him, shows that there may be unutterable struggles in those natures which seem least formed for the rough work of the world. In one of his later poems he spoke of himself as one—

	“Who, tempest-tossed, and wrecked at last,
	Comes home to port no more.”

But his nephew, who was with him on his deathbed, says that there was a look of holy surprise on his features after his eyes were closed, as if there were very bright visions for him behind the veil that was impenetrable to him here.

  I have thus given you a few hints about the way in which books may be friends. I have taken my examples from the books which are most likely to come in our way; and I have chosen them from different kinds of authors, that I may not impose my own tastes upon other people. I purposely avoid saying anything about more recent writers, who have lately left the world or are in it still, because private notions and prejudices for or against the men are likely to mingle with our thoughts of their books. I do not mean that this is not the case with the older writers too. I think I have shown you that I have no wish to forget the men in the books—that my great desire is that we should connect them together. But if we have known anything about the writers, or our fathers have known anything about them, if we have heard their acts and words gossiped about, they are not such good tests of the way in which we may discern them in their books, and learn what they are from their books. But as I began this lecture with some animadversions upon the tendency of one part of our popular literature to weaken our feeling that books are our friends, I ought to say that I am very far, indeed, from thinking that this is the effect which the more eminent writers among us produce. In their different ways, I believe most of them have addressed themselves to our human sympathies, and have claimed a place for their books, not upon our shelves, but in our hearts. Of some, both prose writers and poets, this is eminently true. Perhaps, from feeling the depressing influence of the We-teaching upon all our minds, they have taken even overmuch pains to show that each one of them comes before us as an I, and will not meet us upon any other terms. Many, I hope, who have established this intercourse with us will keep it with our children and our children’s children, and will leave books that will be regarded as friends as long as the English language lasts, and in whatever regions of the earth it may be spoken.

  It is very pleasant to think in what distant parts of the earth it is spoken, and that in all those parts these books which are friends of ours are acknowledged as friends. And there is a living and productive power in them. They have produced an American literature, which is coming back to instruct us. They will produce by and by an Australian literature, which will be worth all the gold that is sent to us from the diggings.

  American books have of late asserted very strongly their right to be reputed as our friends, and we have very generally and very cordially responded to the claim. I refer to one book now—Mrs. Stowe’s “Dred,” though I did not mean to notice any contemporary book at all—for the sake of certain passages in it which I think that none that have read them can have forgotten. They are those in which the authoress describes the effects which were produced upon a very simple-hearted and brave negro—whose whole life had been one of zealous self-devotion to some white children, but who had had no book-teaching whatsoever—by the stories which were read to him out of the Old and New Testaments. We are told with great simplicity and with self-evident truth, how every one of these stories started to life in his mind, how every person who is spoken of in them came forth before the hearer as an actual living being, how his inmost soul confessed the book as a reality and as a friend. No lesson, I think, is more suited to our purpose. It shows us what injury we do to the Book of Books when we regard it as a book of letters, and not as a book of life; none can bear a stronger witness to us how it may come forth as the Book of Life, to save all others from sinking into dryness and death. I have detained you far too long in endeavoring to show you how every true book exhibits to us some man from whose mind its thoughts have issued, and with whom it brings us acquainted. May I add this one word in conclusion?—that I believe all books may do that for us, because there is one Book which, besides bringing into clearness and distinctness a number of men of different ages from the creation downwards, brings before us one Friend, the chief and centre of all, who is called there the Son of Man.