The closet associate of Pope and Addison, the mind accustomed to the noble though silent discourse of Shakspeare and Milton, will hardly seek or put up with low company and slaves." It has been truly said, that the best books are those which most resemble good actions.

They are purifying, elevating, and sustaining; they enlarge and liberalize the mind; they preserve it against vulgar worldliness; they tend to produce highminded cheerfulness and equanimity of character; they fashion, and shape, and humanize the mind.

In the Northern universities, the schools in which the ancient classics are studied, are appropriately styled "The Humanity Classes." [1917] Erasmus, the great scholar, was even of opinion that books were the necessaries of life, and clothes the luxuries; and he frequently postponed buying the latter until he had supplied himself with the former.

His greatest favourites were the works of Cicero, which he says he always felt himself the better for reading.

"I can never," he says, "read the works of Cicero on 'Old Age,' or 'Friendship,' or his 'Tusculan Disputations,' without fervently pressing them to my lips, without being penetrated with veneration for a mind little short of inspired by God himself." It was the accidental perusal of Cicero's 'Hortensius' which first detached St.Augustine--until then a profligate and abandoned sensualist--from his immoral life, and started him upon the course of inquiry and study which led to his becoming the greatest among the Fathers of the Early Church.