How to Speak and Write Correctly

<h2 name="CHAPTER_XV">CHAPTER XV</h2> <h3>MASTERS AND MASTERPIECES OF LITERATURE</h3> <h4>Great Authors&mdash;Classification&mdash;The World's Best Books.</h4></center> <p>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.</p> <p>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.</p> <h3>INDISPENSABLE BOOKS</h3> <p>Homer, Dante, Cervantes, Shakespeare and Goethe.</p> <p>(The best translation of <i>Homer</i> for the ordinary reader is by Chapman. Norton's translation of <i>Dante</i> and Taylor's translation of Goethe's <i>Faust</i> are recommended.)</p> <h3>A GOOD LIBRARY</h3> <p>Besides the works mentioned everyone should endeavor to have the following:</p> <p><i>Plutarch's Lives</i>, <i>Meditations of Marcus Aurelius</i>, <i>Chaucer</i>, <i>Imitation of Christ</i> (Thomas a Kempis), <i>Holy Living and Holy Dying</i> (Jeremy Taylor), <i>Pilgrim's Progress, Macaulay's Essays, Bacon's Essays, Addison's Essays, Essays of Elia</i> (Charles Lamb), <i>Les Miserables</i> (Hugo), <i>Heroes and Hero Worship</i> (Carlyle), <i>Palgrave's Golden Treasury</i>, <i>Wordsworth</i>, <i>Vicar of Wakefield</i>, <i>Adam Bede</i> (George Eliot), <i>Vanity Fair</i> (Thackeray), <i>Ivanhoe</i> (Scott), <i>On the Heights</i> (Auerbach), <i>Eugenie Grandet</i> (Balzac), <i>Scarlet Letter</i> (Hawthorne), <i>Emerson's Essays</i>, <i>Boswell's Life of Johnson</i>, <i>History of the English People</i> (Green), <i>Outlines of Universal History, Origin of Species, Montaigne's Essays, Longfellow, Tennyson, Browning, Whittier, Ruskin, Herbert Spencer</i>.</p> <p>A good encyclopoedia is very desirable and a reliable dictionary indispensable.</p> <h3>MASTERPIECES OF AMERICAN LITERATURE</h3> <p><i>Scarlet Letter, Parkman's Histories, Motley's Dutch Republic, Grant's Memoirs, Franklin's Autobiography, Webster's Speeches, Lowell's Bigelow Papers</i>, also his <i>Critical Essays</i>, <i>Thoreau's Walden</i>, <i>Leaves of Grass</i> (Whitman), <i>Leather-stocking Tales</i> (Cooper), <i>Autocrat of the Breakfast Table</i>, <i>Ben Hur</i> and <i>Uncle Tom's Cabin</i>.</p> <h3>TEN GREATEST AMERICAN POETS</h3> <p>Bryant, Poe, Whittier, Longfellow, Lowell, Emerson, Whitman, Lanier, Aldrich and Stoddard.</p> <h3>TEN GREATEST ENGLISH POETS</h3> <p>Chaucer, Spenser, Shakespeare, Milton, Burns, Wordsworth, Keats, Shelley, Tennyson, Browning.</p> <h3>TEN GREATEST ENGLISH ESSAYISTS</h3> <p>Bacon, Addison, Steele, Macaulay, Lamb, Jeffrey, De Quincey, Carlyle, Thackeray and Matthew Arnold.</p> <h3>BEST PLAYS OF SHAKESPEARE</h3> <p>In order of merit are: <i>Hamlet</i>, <i>King Lear</i>, <i>Othello</i>, <i>Antony and Cleopatra</i>, <i>Macbeth</i>, <i>Merchant of Venice</i>, <i>Henry IV</i>, <i>As You Like It</i>, <i>Winter's Tale</i>, <i>Romeo and Juliet</i>, <i>Midsummer Night's Dream</i>, <i>Twelfth Night</i>, <i>Tempest</i>.</p> <h3>ONLY THE GOOD</h3> <p>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.</p> <SPAN name="endofbook"></SPAN> <div style="break-after:column;"></div><br />