Look now at the accomplished man of letters. He sits in his quiet study with clear head, sympathetic heart, and lively fancy. The walls around him are lined with books on every subject, and in almost every tongue. He is, indeed, a man of magical powers, and these books are his magical volumes full of wonder-working spells. When he opens one of these and reads with eye and soul intent, in a few minutes the objects around him fade from his senses, and his soul is rapt away into distant regions, or into by-gone times. It may be a book descriptive of other lands; and then he feels himself, perhaps, amid the biting frost and snowy ice-hills of the polar winter, or in the fierce heat and luxuriant vegetation of the equator, panting up the steeps of the Alps with the holiday tourist, or exploring the mazes of the Nile with Livingstone or Baker. Or, perchance, it may be a history of England; and then the tide of time runs back, and he finds himself among our stout-hearted ancestors: he enters heartily into all their toil and struggles; he passes amid the fires of Smithfield at the Reformation; he shares in all the wrangling, and dangers, and suspense of the Revolution; he watches with eager gaze the steady progress of the nation, until he sees British freedom become the envy of Europe, and British enterprise secure a foothold in every quarter of the globe. Or perhaps the book may be one of our great English classics-Shakespeare, Bacon, or Carlyle-and immediately he is in the closest contact with a spirit far larger than his own his mind grasps its grand ideas, his heart imbibes its glowing sentiments, until he finds himself dilated, refined, inspired-a greater and a nobler being. Thus does this scholar's soul grow and extend itself until it lives in every region of the earth and in every by-gone age, and holds the most intimate intercourse with the spirits of the mighty dead; and thus, though originally a frail mortal creature, he rises toward the godlike attributes of omnipresence and omniscience.

There is no doubt, then, that books are the instruments of almost miraculous power in the hands of a scholar. But two

important questions now start up-I. What books are we to read and II. How are we to read them?

I. What books are we to read? The great difficulty in the way of answering this question is the incalculable number of books. Ever since the days of Moses, men have been writing books. And now both men and women are writing books faster than ever. The "itch for scribbling" has become an epidemic. The crowd of eager authors is becoming almost alarming:

66 'All Bedlam or Parnassus is let out.

Fire in each eye, and pamphlets in each hand,

They rave, recite, and madden through the land.”

In course of time, we can almost imagine, it will be difficult to find a man who has not been guilty of authorship; and when he is found, he will be regarded as a miracle of selfdenial, and perhaps a wiser and happier man than his fellow

creatures.

Different men have different ways of dealing with this multitude of books. One man, very unsophisticated, buys all the new works that are recommended to him, arranges them on the shelves of what he calls his "library," does not cut them up, for fear, apparently, lest the knowledge in them should all run out, sits down in the midst of them, and fancies that by looking at their outsides he is actually becoming learned. Another man, more active, reads everything in the shape of a volume that comes to hand. It may be "Locke on the Human Understanding," or "Berkeley on Tar Water," for it matters not provided it is print. And he tells you, with a self-satisfied face, that he is "fond of his reading." Possibly! But "his reading" is evidently not fond of him, for it takes the very first opportunity of vanishing, and leaves him with as empty a head as it found him. A third man most religiously peruses all the monthlies and quarterlies, and imagines that while he is reading what are called reviews, but what are really in many cases distorted fragments of new works, he is master

ing the new works themselves. He is as much mistaken as the poor half-naked savage, who believed that he had secured a full European suit when he picked up a hat and a pair of dressboots.

All these methods, it need scarcely be said, are unsatisfactory. The true method seems to consist of two steps: (1) To read first the one or two great standard works in each department of literature; and (2) to confine then our reading to that department which suits the particular bent of our mind.

These two steps would tend to make us achieve in literature what John Stuart Mill says every student should achieve in the domain of universal knowledge, namely, "The knowing something of everything, and everything of something."

(1) Let us first see how standard works come to be of use amid the overwhelming multitude of books. Men have a natural tendency to imitate each other in their opinions as well as in other peculiarities. Besides, they are lazy by nature, and would rather appropriate an idea ready-made than have the trouble of forming one for themselves. Hence we often hear one opinion echoed from one hollow skull to another, round the whole circle of a political party; and when we learn Brown's views on the Education Act, we can easily infer what those of Jones and Robinson must be. This same law likewise influences authors. They, too, are lazy, and they, too, imitate each other. They look at a subject from the same point of view, read each other's works, and, willingly or unwillingly, borrow from each other. It is true that, like the robber who melts down a piece of plate to efface the marks of the owner, they put the idea into a new mould of language and a new setting; but it is essentially unchanged. When we attempt to read through all the books on a particular subject, we are soon disgusted and wearied out by the sameness that meets us everywhere. We feel ourselves, in fact, lost in a weary and far-extending waste of commonplaces. Now, it is here that the standard author comes to our aid. pensation of Providence to save us

He rises like a special disfrom mental bewilderment