. . .He urges Oliver to cultivate a taste for solid reading, and assures him that a taste for any subject can be acquired when the determination is fixed upon it.

“Let me advise you to get Plutarch’s Lives, and read them. Plutarch, you know, is a celebrated Roman author. His Lives of the distinguished men of Greece and Rome has justly immortalized his name, and it will live as long as the men whose actions he has related are admired. The style is simple and unaffected. He has seized upon the principal events in the life of each; relates to us many, anecdotes of their efforts, of their disappointments and failures; then he describes in bold and feeling language that untiring industry, that patient and ceaseless thought, which overcame every difficulty. Read the lives of Cicero and Demosthenes, Nicias and Phocion. When you next write, tell me what you think of them. Another work I want you to read; it is Sparks’s ‘Ameri. . . Read More