I have said that “Omoo” and “Typee,” the books in which the sailor Melville describes his life among the Otaheitans, have sunk too rapidly into obscurity.  What a charming and interesting task there is for some critic of catholic tastes and sympathetic judgment to undertake rescue work among the lost books which would repay salvage!  A small volume setting forth their names and their claims to attention would be interesting in itself, and more interesting in the material to which it would serve as an introduction.  I am sure there are many good books, possibly there are some great ones, which have been swept away for a time in the rush.  What chance, for example, has any book by an unknown author which is published at a moment of great national excitement, when some public crisis arrests the popular mind?  Hundreds have been still-born in this fashion, and are there none which should have lived among them?  Now, there is a book, a modern one, and written by a youth under thirty.  It is Snaith’s “Broke of Covenden,” and it scarce attained a second edition.  I do not say that it is a Classic—­I should not like to be positive that it is not—­but I am perfectly sure that the man who wrote it has the possibility of a Classic within him.  Here is another novel—­“Eight Days,” by Forrest.  You can’t buy it.  You are lucky even if you can find it in a library.  Yet nothing ever written will bring the Indian Mutiny home to you as this book will do.  Here’s another which I will warrant you never heard of.  It is Powell’s “Animal Episodes.”  No, it is not a collection of dog-and-cat anecdotes, but it is a series of very singularly told stories which deal with the animal side of the human, and which you will feel have an entirely new flavour if you have a discriminating palate.  The book came out ten years ago, and is utterly unknown.  If I can point to three in one small shelf, how many lost lights must be flitting in the outer darkness!

Let me hark back for a moment to the subject with which I began, the romance of travel and the frequent heroism of modern life.  I have two books of Scientific Exploration here which exhibit both these qualities as strongly as any I know.  I could not choose two better books to put into a young man’s hands if you wished to train him first in a gentle and noble firmness of mind, and secondly in a great love for and interest in all that pertains to Nature.  The one is Darwin’s “Journal of the Voyage of the Beagle.”  Any discerning eye must have detected long before the “Origin of Species” appeared, simply on the strength of this book of travel, that a brain of the first order, united with many rare qualities of character, had arisen.  Never was there a more comprehensive mind.  Nothing was too small and nothing too great for its alert observation.  One page is occupied in the analysis of some peculiarity in the web of a minute spider, while the next deals with the evidence for the subsidence of a continent and the extinction of a myriad animals.  And his