LIGHT READING AND AMUSING BOOKS FOR THE PATIENTS IN TILE
LONDON HOSPITALS.
THE EDITOR OF THE " SPECTATOR.")
Stn,—If you will permit it, I would fain open up a fresh vein of the obliging contributors towards the stock of amusing books, and works of unobjectionable fiction. Thanks to the kindness of the Editors of the Daily News, the Daily Telegraph, and the Pall Mall Gazette, the Medical Journal, and some other of the London papers, I have been enabled, since I have been attached myself to a hospital, to collect and put into eight or ten of the largest of the London hospitals some four to five thousand volumes of the sorts I have mentioned. These have been sent me, both by old friends and former pupils and by outsiders, and in many cases unknown contributors. At only three of all the hospitals to whose secre- taries or chaplains I have offered to send these, has any objection been made to receiving any but religious books. Nowhere else, excepting in these three hospitals, is any objection made towards the patients receiving and reading the works of Scott, Dickens, Marryat, and other standard novelists, or to any of the leading magazines or reviews, such as Blackwood, Macmillan, &c., or books of travels, adventures, tales and stories, or any books of un- objectionable fiction. Any such works as your readers have it in their power and inclination to send me (of course, knowing that they might be objected to, I never offer to send novels of the sen- sational class), I should be thankful to receive, and utilise, if they were left, addressed to me, to the care of the Porter, Westminster Hospital, or sent, carriage paid, to my address here.—I am, P.S.—May I add that any of your young-lady readers who will make up and send me scrap-books for the numerous little ones in the hospital, would be doing a very kind and benevolent work, as I know only three hospitals where all religious books, except those authorised by the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel, and edited by members of the Established Church, are excluded ? May I say that any such magazines as The Day of Rest, Sunday at Home, Good Words, Sze., will be sure of finding grateful readers ?
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