At this hour, one thousand eight hundred years since their creation, the pagan tales of Ovid, never equaled on this earth for the gayety of their movement and the capricious graces of their narrative, are read by all Christendom." "There is no Past so long as Books shall live," says Lytton.
"No wonder Cicero said that he would part with all he was worth so he might live and die among his books," says Geikie.

"No wonder Petrarch was among them to the last, and was found dead in their company.

It seems natural that Bede should have died dictating, and that Leibnitz should have died with a book in his hand, and Lord Clarendon at his desk.

Buckle's last words, 'My poor book!' tell a passion that forgot death; and it seemed only a fitting farewell when the tear stole down the manly cheeks of Scott as they wheeled him into his library, when he had come back to Abbotsford to die.

Southey, white-haired, a living shadow, sitting stroking and kissing the books he could no longer open or read, is altogether pathetic." "No entertainment is so cheap as reading," says Mary Wortley Montagu; "nor any pleasure so lasting." Good books elevate the character, purify the taste, _take the attractiveness out of low pleasures_, and lift us upon a higher plane of thinking and living.