This essay by William Hazlitt, called “On Reading Old Books,” includes some thoughts that are appropriate for this site. Like this one:

I do not think altogether the worse of a book for having survived the author a generation or two. I have more confidence in the dead than the living.

Oxford University Press recently published William Hazlitt: The First Modern Man by Duncan Wu. The Washington Post called it “a distinctly eye-opening biography.”

(Via I’ve Been Reading Lately)