Show STUDENT LIFE “American Statesmen” and “Beacon Biographies” may be mentioned Most strikas excellent specimens ing of them all are the “Little Journeys” dashed- off at the rate of twelve a year from the nimble pen of Elbert Hubbard The material in them is not always accurate nor just but Hubbard has the faculty of d making a platitude read like a message from the gods and there’s the charm There are splendid single biographies published just as there are books of travel but we have no space for naming them here The series Our European Neighbors published by Putnam affords interesting and valuable material in pleasing style In recent years the American people have mounted a most commendable hobby — that of Nature Study They are coming to know the d world about them and to love natural beauty with the affection of a devoted friend Doubleday Page & Co are the publishers who cater most to this popular taste both in their beautiful new magazine Country Life in America and in their already famous Nature Library a collection of books of great value Probably in line with this movement comes the great popularity of animal stories of the Thompson-Scto- n or Jungle Look type as well as the renewed interest in America’s great nature-priest- s Thoreau and John Bur- dog-eare- God-create- up-to-da- roughs te Now we are ready for the field of fiction — the debatable land where a 197 few still stand aghast at the thought that the things in those fascinating volumes are not true and do not al- ways point a moral while others rush madly in to devour at a gulp every new bit of trash that flaunts a gilt edge and a lurid cover-desig- ri Out of all the great mass of English novels only a few are worth the time of reading well and only a small fraction of those will be known and cared for fifty years from now That fraction if it were possible would be the selection we would put in our home library But we cannot know such things — we can only speculate Some of our novels have already endured the test of time and kept their popularity long enough to pass into the recognized list of “classics” It is interesting to note that when the people decide they are going to like a thing they do so in spite of all the critics in creation Evidently they have decided to like Dickens and Thackeray Scott and George Eliot for these authors are being read with pleasure wherever English speaking people dwell and the constant stream of new editions predicts a long career of usefulness I f we cannot afford complete sets of these writers we should certainly possess a few of their representative works for instance David Copper-fiel- d and Dombev and Son from Dickens : Vanity Fair and The New-comfrom Thackeray Romola and Silas Marner from George Eliot and Waverlev and Tvanhoe from Scott Kingsley Bulwer-Lvt- es |