“This may serve as a specimen.  These are books which will amuse and interest those who obtain them.  To give a boy Abercrombie on the Intellectual Powers, Dick’s Moral Improvement, Young’s Intellectual Philosophy, Chalmers’s Poetical Economy!!! (in passing I may be allowed to ask what that means?) is quite absurd.  I would not give orders at random for books about which we know nothing.  We are under no necessity of ordering at haphazard.  We know Robinson Crusoe, and Gulliver, and the Arabian Nights, and Anson’s Voyage, and many other delightful works which interest even the very young, and which do not lose their interest to the end of our lives.  Why should we order blindfold such books as Markham’s New Children’s Friend, the juvenile Scrap Book, the Child’s Own Book, Niggens’s Earth, Mudie’s Sea, and somebody else’s Fire and Air?—­books which, I will be bound for it, none of us ever opened.

“The list ought in all its parts to be thoroughly recast.  If Sir Benjamin Malkin will furnish the names of ten or twelve works of a scientific kind, which he thinks suited for prizes, the task will not be difficult; and, with his help, I will gladly undertake it.  There is a marked distinction between a prize book and a school book.  A prize book ought to be a book which a boy receives with pleasure, and turns over and over, not as a task, but spontaneously.  I have not forgotten my own school-boy feelings on this subject.  My pleasure at obtaining a prize was greatly enhanced by the knowledge that my little library would receive a very agreeable addition.  I never was better pleased than when at fourteen I was master of Boswell’s Life of Johnson, which I had long been wishing to read.  If my master had given me, instead of Boswell, a Critical Pronouncing Dictionary, or a Geographical Class book, I should have been much less gratified by my success.”

The idea had been started of paying authors to write books in the languages of the country.  On this Macaulay remarks

“To hire four or five people to make a literature is a course which never answered and never will answer, in any part of the world.  Languages grow.  They cannot be built.  We are now following the slow but sure course on which alone we can depend for a supply of good books in the vernacular languages of India.  We are attempting to raise up a large class of enlightened natives.  I hope that, twenty years hence, there will be hundreds, nay thousands, of natives familiar with the best models of composition, and well acquainted with Western science.  Among them some persons will be found who will have the inclination and the ability to exhibit European knowledge in the vernacular dialects.  This I believe to be the only way in which we can raise up a good vernacular literature in this country.”