BOOKS AND THEIR USES

CHARLES LAMB'S friend who left off reading to the great increase of his originality, assuredly erred on the right side. The danger in this muchwritten-for age is of reading too much. Placed amongst the countless shelves of modern libraries, we are like men with many acquaintances but few friends. We may be on comparatively intimate terms with the novelists; we may occasionally ask a new poet into the house; we are perhaps on bowing terms with the scientific writers; we may just know the historians to speak to; but where are the old, old books which our forefathers loved because they were true and tried, when there were not so many newcomers that a reader felt himself called upon to give up his best friend, to step across and chat with the smartly dressed crowd of strangers at the door? Why do we not know our Shakspeare as good Sir Henry Lee, in Woodstock, knew his? Has the reader of these pages ever read the Paradise Lost through? Will he ever achieve it, unless he be one day cast upon a desert island, and save

a Milton from the wreck, as well as the salt beef and biscuit ? Did he ever read the Faerie Queene? The only chance for most of us would be to be shut up with a Spenser, as the writer was once with the Children of the Abbey, for three wet days in a Welsh inn, with no consolation in sight but a Bradshaw's Guide and a cruet-stand. "Young men nowadays," says one, the late record of whose earnest and loving life has impressed the true stamp on all he has written, "read neither their Bible nor their Shakspeare enough."

Thus, there are books-and books. We read too much, and too little. The former of the two excesses is, I think, the more new and remarkable. In days such as our own, when the circulating libraries, with their million mouths, are speaking to the public, it would be strange to say that there is little thirst for information of some sort. But there still remains a question whether the craving for books may not be a disease, and whether we may not live too little in ourselves, and too much in others. The professor, whose young friend boasted that he read ten hours a day, inquired with amazement, "Indeed, then when do you think?" The old man was right. The master who sees a pupil with idle hands, and fears that, being without a book, he is losing his time, might not unreasonably hope that his other pupil, who is never without a book, is not losing his thoughts. "It is hard," Orlando says, "to

see happiness through another man's eyes." It is also unprofitable always to see things reflected in another man's mind. There are other books besides those printed on paper, which are not without their value. Perhaps, even, it was intended that we should sometimes strive to see nature at first-hand.

How refreshing it is to meet now and then with those who never read at all. What a relief it is from that clever technical conversation which

is acquired among readers. I envy those persons, unspotted from Mudie's, who listen to the sentiments of books with as much astonishment as a savage in a state of primeval nature gazes on a crinoline. They have advantages over us, proud as we feel ourselves. Their thoughts and feelings are their own. They can trace them home to their objects, and know that they are genuine, unplagued by the thought that the same things have often been thought before, and are as old as the first man who ever gazed on a sunset. Their aspirations and wants are more awful to them that they do not know a quotation to fit them with. This is high ground, perhaps, and the ingenuous reader at this point will exclaim, "Pooh, pooh!" I am content, if he demur, to take a lower ground. The non-reader, if he lose much by not reading at all, consider well from how much he is saved. Truly, the illiterate man has much to be thankful for.

This last sentiment has inconsiderately escaped

me.

Much as may be found to criticise, perhaps to contemn, in yonder last week's volume, on the whole we treat books worse than they treat us. They do not meet with the right welcome at our hands. Unrecognised for their just claims, we grumble because they do not present some others. Often are they read so quickly that their eccentricities strike the attention before their worth is discovered. The much-reader hastens from volume to volume, and learns the colour of each, but not its properties. Thus, that delight of moralists, the bee, might look into many more blossoms in a day, if it only did not care to carry away any of the honey. To make the right use of a book is not so easy a matter as it appears.

Various as are the kinds of books, so various are the uses to which we put them. There are those who read to kill time, as a refuge—oh, shame! shame!-from themselves. There are

those who read because some work is in fashion, and it were bad taste not to be able to talk of it. There are those who read in order to give the public the benefit of their judgment— those mysterious men, the critics. There are those who read indiscriminately with morbid wideness of taste, as the savage devours earth. Lastly, there are those who read little, but with discernment; whose books are their honoured friends— "the souls who have made their souls wiser."

Of those who do think-and the practice has rather gone out of late-there are a few who think

for themselves, and a great many who think for the benefit of others. These last are sometimes called, for convenience, critics. All works must first pass through their furnace before they are fit for the general reader, who pays his fivepence cheerfully for the Weekly Rasper, and gets a vast variety of opinions for his money. In a spare ten minutes he has the opportunity of reading what another has written in ten days concerning a work which has occupied a third party perhaps as much as ten years. How admirably is labour shortened nowadays! As we pay an architect to build, so we pay a critic to think for us; and so considerate it is of the critics always to extract the faults of a book, and leave the general reader to find the beauties. Sometimes there is a notice in the shop-windows-"A few improvers wanted." It must certainly come from an author who is wanting critics.

It was a beautiful morning in July when we were introduced to a new poem. In a spirit of the purest symbolism, it was bound in a suit of green, that it might shine upon our bookshelves as a pleasant oasis in a desert of law calf or theological cloth. It was given us in the summer months that we might read it, where it should be read, under the laburnum shade or by the brook side. Thousands of hands were held out for it; thousands of hearts were content to watch and to receive. But by and by there arose murmurs. One said that it ought not to be called an idyll;