What these 20 Volumes Contain.

Observer, Volume XXI, Issue 1182, 24 August 1901, Page 11

What these 20 Volumes Contain.

"The- Library of Famous Literature" is precisely what its title indicates— 'a va,st gathering of the finest and most interesting pieces of literature, from the dawn

of civilisation down to including the authors of our own day— that is to say,, from the old Babylonian stdry of Istar and the quaint Egyptian tale of Two Bi'others, the most ancient piece of literature extant to the best w.ork of living writers, like Tolstoi, Hardy, Swinbiirne, Mark Twain, or Kipling. It contains everything ; the great classics like the Iliad and

ithe OdysjUeyiv^^nat^fuf stories like t6' Wf|s»iii^ lltivhobhax«t&* of W- Mfcieht Hindoos) ; arid *i ftqrieg> iiicjflt < every fsple wfcd^ver lived and" atiig ; J "bejt j^^histpry^ from writers c Moininsert' -iafcd "Curtius, Free*W*n~tiad~¥roiidß, Gibbon and Green; tales of adventure and stories of wild life ; the pith of the great philosophers like Hobbs and Locke and Hume and Spencer ; fascinating chapters of science from writers like Huxley and Darwin and Proctor ; letters from . famous writers of letters ; oratorical masterpieces from Demosthenes and Cicero to John Bright and Gladstone ; choice pages from the intimate thoughts of diarists like Ainiel and Samuel Pepys ; epigrams and maxims from men like La Rochefoucauld and Dean Swift ; philosophical reflections from writers like liosseau and Pascal ; religious writings like those of Cardinal Newman, Thomas a Kempis, and Dean Farrar ; biting sarcasm from a Heine br an Ibsen ; pathos and- hufflwujt'T Lam writers like Charles Lamb, Bret Harte, or Oliver Wendel Holmes ; fables from La Fontaine > autobiographies like Benjamin Franklin's ; in fine the whole gamut of literary production, from grave' to gay, from the deepest questions ' that concern the human soul to the lightest jests of a Horace, a Sterne, a Rabelais, or a Max O'Rell.