A READER'S LIST.

Press, Volume LXVIII, Issue 20470, 13 February 1932, Page 13

A READER'S LIST.

FROM CHAUCER TO DON MARQUIS. In one of his "Bowling Green' columns in the "Saturday Review of Literature," Mr Christopher Morley recently gave what he hoped would be the last Heading List he should ever have to compile. He fulfilled in it a promise to name the writers in English who had given tiim the greatest pleasure in twenty years of mature reading: It is aubjeet to the qualiiicntionß of all such lists. Jt is a confession, not a recommendation. It doc» not suggest that these at* ''best'* or inoflt important; simply that thoy have given the most pleasure to ourself. Tho list is set down in merely caxual ordor. Undoubtedly there ar» many omiasious o£ sheer forgetfulness. The list is worth printing as an interesting mixture of expectables and surprises, though readers who are as well "up" in American as in English literature and who have traced for themselves some of the alimentary sources of Mr Morley's writing will not so often be surprised as pleasantly confirmed. Chaucer: Troilus and Cressida Shakespeare: ad lib. A. Conau Doyle: Complete Sheriotk Holmes Swift: Gulliver's Travels: Journal to Stella Thackeray: The English Humorists John Morley: Voltaire O. Henry: ad lib. Joseph Conrad: The Shadow Line; A Personal Record; The Nigger of the Narcissus; Twist Land and Sea Boswell: Life of Johnson Robert Bridges: The Spirit of Mm (an anthology) W. It. Hudson: The Puiple Laud. Samuel Butler: The Way of All I'lerh; Notebooks Melville: Moby Dick C. E. Montague: Disenchantment Keats: Poems; Letters William Blake: Poems John Donne: Poems, Devotions, Letters Thomas Fuller: The lioly State and the Profane State R. L. Stevenson: ad lib. Thomas Hardy: Poems Bacon: Essays Lamb: Essays of Elia: Lettars Santaj-ana: Little Essays; Character and Opinion in the U.S. Vaehcl Lindsay: Poems. Virginia Woolf: The Common Reader John Maseficld: Poems Haveloek Ellis: Tho. Dance of Life Sir William Osier: The Student Life Elinor Wvlie: Poems; The Venetian Glass Nephew Rose Benet: Man Possessed Siegfried Sassoon: Memoirs of an Infantry Officer Sterne: Sentimental .Journey; Tristram Shandy Fielding: Toin Jones F. C. Burnainl: Happy Thoughts Hawthorne: The Scarlet Letter Landor: Selections (Golden Treasurv Series) Katheriue Manslield: Bliss Anatole France: Penguin Island; The Revolt of the Angels The Oxford Book of English Verse The Book of Common Prayer Benjamin Franklin: Autobiography. Thoreau: Waldeu William Pcnii: Some Fruits of Solitude A. Edward Newton: The Amenities of Book Collecting Du Maurier: Peter Ibbetson; Trilby Stories by Saki (one volume edition) Kipling: The Jungle Book; Traffics and Discoveries Aldous Huxley: Lecla William MeFee: Casuals of the Sea Felix Biesenberg: Endless River Rupert Brooke: Poems Edna St. Vincent Millay: Poems John Aubrey: Brief Lives 11. M, Tomlinson: The Sea and the Jungle; Old Junk; Out of Soundings Pepysj Diary Walt Whitman: Leaves of Grass; Complete Prose De Quineey: The Opium Eater; The English Mail Coach; Reminiscences of tho English Lake Poets Hazlitt: ad lib. Walter Pater: Marius the Epicurean George Moore: Confessions of a Young Man Van Wyck Brooks: The Ordeal of Mark Twain The Heart of Emerson's J'ournals, edited by Bliss Perry Complete Catalogue of the Oxford. University Press Robert Cortes Holliday: Walking Stick Papers; Broome Street Straws Colt-ridge: Biograpliia Literaria Wordsworth: Poems Wilkie Collins: The Moonstone; The Woman in White Emily Bronte: Wuthering Heights George Borrow: Lavengro George Gissing: The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft Alexnnder Smith: Dreamthorp L.. Pearsall Smith: Trivia Emily Dickitiaon: Poems Edward Fitzgerald: Rubaiyat of Omat Khayyam; Euphranor Hiloire Belloc: Hills and the Sea E. Lucas: The Opeu Road (an anthol* ogy) Matthew Arnold: Poems; Culture and Anarchy Jane Austen: Persuasion Sherwood Anderson: Wincsburg, Ohio David W. Bone: The Brassbounder j DSn Marquis: The Almost Perfect State Max Beerbohm: Seven Men; And Even Now W. Compton Leith: Sirenica Walter de la Mare: Poems; Desert | Islands Sir Thomas Browne: Religio Medici