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Parts: I, II , III, IV, V, VI, VII, VIII, IX, X, XI, XII, XIII, XIV, XV
Part XV
MASTERS AND MASTERPIECES OF LITERATURE
Great Authors--Classification--The World's Best Books.
The Bible is the world's greatest book. Apart from its character as a work
of divine revelation, it is the most perfect literature extant.
Leaving out the Bible the three greatest works are those of Homer, Dante
and Shakespeare. These are closely followed by the works of Virgil and
Milton.
INDISPENSABLE BOOKS
Homer, Dante, Cervantes, Shakespeare and Goethe.
(The best translation of _Homer_ for the ordinary reader is by Chapman.
Norton's translation of _Dante_ and Taylor's translation of Goethe's
_Faust_ are recommended.)
A GOOD LIBRARY
Besides the works mentioned everyone should endeavor to have the following:
_Plutarch's Lives_, _Meditations of Marcus Aurelius_, _Chaucer_, _Imitation
of Christ_ (Thomas a Kempis), _Holy Living and Holy Dying_ (Jeremy Taylor),
_Pilgrim's Progress, Macaulay's Essays, Bacon's Essays, Addison's Essays,
Essays of Elia_ (Charles Lamb), _Les Miserables_ (Hugo), _Heroes and Hero
Worship_ (Carlyle), _Palgrave's Golden Treasury_, _Wordsworth_, _Vicar of
Wakefield_, _Adam Bede_ (George Eliot), _Vanity Fair_ (Thackeray),
_Ivanhoe_ (Scott), _On the Heights_ (Auerbach), _Eugenie Grandet_ (Balzac),
_Scarlet Letter_ (Hawthorne), _Emerson's Essays_, _Boswell's Life of
Johnson_, _History of the English People_ (Green), _Outlines of Universal
History, Origin of Species, Montaigne's Essays, Longfellow, Tennyson,
Browning, Whittier, Ruskin, Herbert Spencer_.
A good encyclopoedia is very desirable and a reliable dictionary
indispensable.
MASTERPIECES OF AMERICAN LITERATURE
_Scarlet Letter, Parkman's Histories, Motley's Dutch Republic, Grant's
Memoirs, Franklin's Autobiography, Webster's Speeches, Lowell's Bigelow
Papers_, also his _Critical Essays_, _Thoreau's Walden_, _Leaves of Grass_
(Whitman), _Leather-stocking Tales_ (Cooper), _Autocrat of the Breakfast
Table_, _Ben Hur_ and _Uncle Tom's Cabin_.
TEN GREATEST AMERICAN POETS
Bryant, Poe, Whittier, Longfellow, Lowell, Emerson, Whitman, Lanier,
Aldrich and Stoddard.
TEN GREATEST ENGLISH POETS
Chaucer, Spenser, Shakespeare, Milton, Burns, Wordsworth, Keats, Shelley,
Tennyson, Browning.
TEN GREATEST ENGLISH ESSAYISTS
Bacon, Addison, Steele, Macaulay, Lamb, Jeffrey, De Quincey, Carlyle,
Thackeray and Matthew Arnold.
BEST PLAYS OF SHAKESPEARE
In order of merit are: _Hamlet_, _King Lear_, _Othello_, _Antony and
Cleopatra_, _Macbeth_, _Merchant of Venice_, _Henry IV_, _As You Like It_,
_Winter's Tale_, _Romeo and Juliet_, _Midsummer Night's Dream_, _Twelfth
Night_, _Tempest_.
ONLY THE GOOD
If you are not able to procure a library of the great masterpieces, get
at least a few. Read them carefully, intelligently and with a view to
enlarging your own literary horizon. Remember a good book cannot be read
too often, one of a deteriorating influence should not be read at all.
In literature, as in all things else, the good alone should prevail
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