Only one doctor has answered our inquiry. Sir William Arbuthnot
Lane sends us the following : Mental and Moral Science, by Bain of Aberdeen, Jevons's Logic and the Works of Darwin. The Stage has catholic tastes in literature. Miss Sybil Thorndike's list is : Browning's Ring and the Book, Mr. Chesterton's The Man Who Was Thirty, the Essays of Professor Gilbert Murray and the Psalms of David. Sir Johnston Forbes-Robertson writes that he cannot recall any authors except Shakespeare that have influenced his career. Sir Gerald du Maurier does not admit that books have influenced him, but those which have given him pleasure are : The Three Musketeers, The Wreck of the Grosvenor, and Treasure Island- " All really children's books," as he point's out. As we go to press, an interesting reply comes from Mr. Alfred Noyes, who is now in Canada. "I always think it is the early reading," he writes, "that has the most influence in determining one's path ; and I believe it was a few lines of Vergil that really introduced me to poetry—the passage in which those great lines occur :- "1111 dura quies °miles et ferrous urguet Somnus: in aeternam elauduntur lumina neetem."
The somnus at the beginning of the line, like the bowing of the head of the fallen warrior, haunted my imagination for years as a schoolboy. Then came Shakespeare, especially in As You Like It, Midsummer Night's Dream, and Hamlet, and completed the spell of poetry. The third book was Carlyle's French Revolution."
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