other hand, that there are books which have withstood even the prison test is known to all readers of Macaulay. In his essay on the Memoirs of Burghley by Dr. Nares, he tells of a criminal in Italy who was suffered to make choice between Guicciardini and the galleys. He chose the history. But the war of Pisa was too much for him. He changed his mind and went to the oar. About Guicciardini opinions differ. Mr. Symonds found in him "the pomp and dignity of Livy," combined with "something of the vivid force of Tacitus." Macaulay found him "certainly not the most amusing of writers," and "a Herodotus or a Froissart" only when compared with Dr. Nares. If Macaulay was unjust the wits presently avenged Guicciardini. An officer of good family had been committed for a fortnight to the House of Correction for knocking down a policeman. The authorities intercepted the prisoner's French novels, but allowed him to have the Bible and Macaulay's History. London gossip went on to say, Sir George Trevelyan tells us, that the gallant captain preferred picking oakum to reading about the Revolution of 1688.

At the other end of the scale, there is no test of real liking for a book so searching as the choice of travelling companions. When lists of their favourite books were published by various famous men, I used to wonder how often they had read the chosen books, and which of them would stand the

I

FOR A DESERT ISLAND

3

strain of carriage in a knapsack. Once, greatly daring, I asked Sir John Lubbock if he could lay his hand on his heart and say that he had verily read the whole hundred of his list. He said that he could, and on my wondering at his industry he added that he had found time for much reading while waiting for trains at his station. Scepticism vanished when I remembered where he lived. Even the Mahabharata might relieve the tedium of waiting on the South-Eastern and Chatham Railway. But it is one thing to choose the Mahabharata for your reading to-day when you can comfortably choose something else to-morrow; it is quite another thing to make choice of it for a sole companion. It is easy to say that one prefers Tennyson to Browning or vice versa; it is more difficult to be quite sure, in packing a small valise, that either volume will prove itself preferable to an extra pair of socks or shoes. The question has often been propounded what two books would best be selected for companions on a desert island. Obviously they must be full, various, humane, companionable. The regula

tion answer gives the Bible for first choice; and indeed, apart from other considerations, and in spite of longueurs and repetitions, the Bible, which is not so much a book as a literature, has incomparable claims. For second place the books which I have most often seen or heard suggested are Shakespeare, Plutarch, and Boswell. These have

one thing in common: each is so full and various as to seem to be not one, but all mankind's epitome.

The test, however, is only theoretical; we are not likely to be packed off to a desert island with a couple of volumes. Napoleon, it is true, was banished to St. Helena, but no restriction was placed upon the number of his books, and he had fourteen hundred pounds' worth. But there are real occasions when the travelling test has strictly to be applied. For instance, men set out on distant expeditions with severely rationed allowance of baggage. So, when data were being collected in such sort, Sir Henry Stanley was asked what books he took with him on his earlier travels across the Dark Continent. The list of them may be read in its place.1 Some of the books were included for purpose of instruction and research, but the greater number were chosen for sake of their companionableness. Stanley's taste in travelling companions was subject to continual sifting, for, as his carriers lessened in numbers, the books one by one were reluctantly thrown away, "until finally, when less than three hundred miles from the Atlantic, I possessed," he said, "only the Bible, Shakespeare, Carlyle's Sartor Resartus, Norie's Navigation, and the Nautical Almanac. Poor Shakespeare was afterwards burned by demand of

1 The Best Hundred Books, a Pall Mall Gazette "Extra," 1885.

I SIR H. M. STANLEY'S CHOICE

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the foolish people of Zinga. At Boma Carlyle and Norie and the Nautical Almanac were pitched away, and I had only the old Bible left." "Many of the books," added Stanley, "are still in Africa, along the line of march, and will be kept as fetishes until some African antiquarian will pick some of them up a century hence, and wonder how on earth Jane Eyre, printed in 1870, came to be in Iturn, or Thackeray's Esmond, Dickens and Scott to be preserved among the lubari of Gambaragara."

Habent sua fata libelli, and their fortunes sometimes affect those of others than their first possessors. One day an African missionary left behind him, or threw away in order to lighten his load, a copy of Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations. Some years later a young Scots mechanic was sent out to serve as foreman-engineer on a steamer upon the Niger. He picked up the book, devoured it, and it was this treasure-trove, as he has often been heard to tell, that gave to the Right Hon. John Burns his interest in economics. Who picked up, I wonder, the pamphlets which Napoleon used to throw out of his carriage window when he had done with them, as he tore along to join his armies?1

At a later date I asked Stanley what books he had taken on the Emin Pasha Relief Expedition. He had forgotten some of the titles, as there

1 See below, p. 129.

were two loads of books weighing in all 120 lbs. "We had many readers," he said, "on this last journey, and I selected many volumes from a desire to consult their interests. Those which gave greatest satisfaction to the majority, and were in almost daily use, were:

A pocket Bible.
Shakespeare.

Tennyson.

Allibone's Cyclopaedia of Prose and Poetry (a perfect treasure of selections).

Sartor Resartus (a book rich in earnest thoughts).
Bates' Naturalist on the Amazon.

Wilkinson's Ancient Egyptians, and

Whitaker's Almanac-as a memoranda book. It served as a link between us and civilization."

"Besides these," continued Stanley, "we had astronomical books, Norie, Nautical Almanac, tables for heights, books of travel in tropical countries, and a respectable assortment of novels. Walter Scott's were read three times over. I am almost sure they kept some of us from unhealthy brooding and melancholia. Think of Nelson in the Starvation Camp twenty-five days! Nelson and Parke in the Manyuema Camp four-and-a-half months! Stair, Nelson, and Parke six months at Fort Bodo! A dismal forest round about them— wretchedness clinging to their eyes by day and troubling their dreams by night-nerves relaxed through suffering-muscles loosened by famine