They sat down to dinner and after an excellent meal adjourned to the library. Seeing a copy of Homer in a splendid binding, Candide complimented the noble lord on his good taste. That is an author, said he, who was the special delight of great Pangloss, the best philosopher in all Germany. He's no special delight of mine, said Pococurante coldly. I was once made to believe that I took pleasure in reading him; but that constant recital of fights which are all alike, those gods who are always interfering but never decisively, that Helen who is the cause of the war and then scarcely takes any part in the story, that Troy which is always under siege and never taken—all that bores me to tears. I have sometimes asked scholars if reading it bored them as much as it bores me; everyone who answered frankly told me the book dropped from his hands like lead, but that they had to have it in their libraries as a monument of antiquity, like those old rusty coins which can't be used in real trade.