To these he added the Georgia Scenes of Mr.Longstreet, insisting that they were quite equal to Don Quixote.

I can only stop to mention one other department in his Academy.

One case was devoted to the "Best Stories," and an admirable set they were! I wish that anything of mine were worthy to go into such company.

His purity of feeling, almost ascetic, led him to reject Boccaccio, but he admitted Chaucer and some of Balzac's, and Smollett, Goldsmith, and De Foe, and Walter Scott's best, Irving's Rip Van Winkle, Bernardin St.Pierre's "Paul and Virginia," and "Three Months under the Snow," and Charles Lamb's generally overlooked "Rosamund Gray." There were eases for "Socrates and his Friends," and for other classes.

He had amused himself for years in deciding what books should be "crowned," as he called it, and what not.