Of the poets, Dante's favourite was Virgil; Corneille's was Lucan;
Schiller's was Shakspeare; Gray's was Spenser; whilst Coleridge
admired Collins and Bowles. Dante himself was a favourite with
most great poets, from Chaucer to Byron and Tennyson. Lord
Brougham, Macaulay, and Carlyle have alike admired and eulogized
the great Italian. The former advised the students at Glasgow
that, next to Demosthenes, the study of Dante was the best
preparative for the eloquence of the pulpit or the bar. Robert
Hall sought relief in Dante from the racking pains of spinal
disease; and Sydney Smith took to the same poet for comfort and
solace in his old age. It was characteristic of Goethe that his
favourite book should have been Spinoza's 'Ethics,' in which he
said he had found a peace and consolation such as he had been able
to find in no other work. (12)

Barrow's favourite was St. Chrysostom; Bossuet's was Homer.
Bunyan's was the old legend of Sir Bevis of Southampton, which in
all probability gave him the first idea of his 'Pilgrim's
Progress.' One of the best prelates that ever sat on the English
bench, Dr. John Sharp, said--"Shakspeare and the Bible have made
me Archbishop of York." The two books which most impressed John
Wesley when a young man, were 'The Imitation of Christ' and Jeremy
Taylor's 'Holy Living and Dying.' Yet Wesley was accustomed to
caution his young friends against overmuch reading. "Beware you
be not swallowed up in books," he would say to them; "an ounce of
love is worth a pound of knowledge."

Wesley's own Life has been a great favourite with many thoughtful
readers. Coleridge says, in his preface to Southey's 'Life of