7003 
 
 in 100 
 
 ON THE RIGHT USE 
 
 BOOKS 
 
 . P. ATKINSON 
 
GIFT OF 
 
 '*Jt4-4tfsiMj^ , cfcljt 
 
 L1BRAW 
 
 SCUOOl 
 
ffJ. 
 
ON 
 
 THE RIGHT USE OF BOOKS 
 
 A LECTURE. 
 
 BY WILLIAM P. ATKINSON, 
 
 PROFESSOR OF ENGLISH AND HISTORY IN THE MASSACHUSETTS 
 INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY. 
 
 BOSTON: 
 ROBERTS BROTHERS. 
 
 1878. 
 
IfBfUJCf 
 SCHOOL 
 
 Copyright, 1878, 
 BY W. P. ATKINSON. 
 
 The following Lecture was written for ', and first read to, 
 a class of young business men, at that admirable institution, 
 the Boston Voting Men's Christian Union. Many additions 
 have since been made to //, and some parts have been altered. 
 For the opinions it contains nc one is responsible but the 
 author. 
 
 Cambridge : 
 Press of John Wilson &* Son. 
 
THE RIGHT USE OF BOOKS. 
 
 THAT excellent writer, the Rector of Lincoln 
 College, Oxford, discoursing the other day on Books 
 and Critics,* quotes Mrs. Browning as saying: 
 " The ne plus ultra of intellectual indolence is the 
 reading of books. It comes next to what the 
 Americans call whittling." Nothing can be more 
 diametrically opposed to popular belief ; for 
 that belief is that there is something meritorious 
 in the very act of reading. It does not matter 
 much what we read barring immoral reading 
 provided we only read. Parents love to see their 
 children reading, it keeps them out of mischief, 
 they say, and take little heed of the quality or 
 direction of their reading ; as if, the main point 
 once gained, these were of quite inferior impor- 
 tance. Is it not all contained in books ? There is 
 a sorj: of sacredness attached, in their minds, to the 
 printed page ; as if, the imprimatur once received, 
 
 * Fortnightly Review, Nov., 1877. 
 
 411415 
 
THE RIGHT USE OF BOOKS. 
 
 thought took on quite a different character from 
 what it had before. 
 
 Nevertheless, I am much of the mind of Mrs. 
 Browning. I do not believe that the world is much, 
 if any, the wiser for a good deal of the reading that 
 goes on in it ; and perhaps I cannot better begin 
 what I have to say on the subject than by trying to 
 ascertain why this is true. 
 
 Perhaps I may say that the answer is an obvious 
 one. We do not profit by our reading because we 
 do not know how to read, and we do not know how 
 because we have never been taught. To be sure, 
 it is a ,very difficult art ; and in one sense, and that 
 the deepest, we may say that it cannot be taught. 
 Goethe is reported to have said : " I have been fifty 
 years trying to learn how to read, and I have not 
 learned yet." The art which Goethe had not 
 learned in fifty years, we need not feel ashamed 
 not to be perfect in ; and yet the question may well 
 arise, Why, with all the reading that goes on, is so 
 much well-meant effort absolutely thrown away ? 
 I am a teacher in a school of science, but my own 
 teaching lies not among scientific, but among 
 non-scientific subjects, though I cannot use the 
 current phraseology without a protest, and I am 
 in the habit of prefacing my instruction in history 
 
THE RIGHT USE OF BOOKS. 
 
 and literature to the successive classes of young 
 men who come to me by a request that they would 
 give me an account of their previous English 
 studies and English reading ; and I remember the 
 contrast which, not long ago, two of their answers 
 afforded. One wrote me a list of English authors, 
 beginning with Chaucer and ending with Haw- 
 thorne whom he had " gone through," as the phrase 
 is, at school, and wound up with the naive remark 
 that there was only one study that he hated more 
 than he hated English Literature, and that was 
 the other study with which I was about to engage 
 his attention ; namely, Rhetoric and Composition. 
 And herein I suppose he was only honestly and 
 frankly expressing the state of mind of the average 
 school-boy, which is the result of the ordinary 
 school teaching of these subjects. A state of 
 chronic disgust at good literature which drives 
 him to "dime novels" for recreation, combined with 
 a chronic incapacity to pen an ordinary letter cor- 
 rectly, is, I fear, too often the upshot of the literary 
 training of our schools. The other told me that 
 he was the son of a country physician ; that he had 
 not had much schooling, but that his father had a 
 small general library, and that he had done much 
 reading in his father's books up in the retirement 
 
3 THE RIGHT USE OF BOOKS. 
 
 of his father's hay-mow ; and the hay-mow had so 
 far proved the better school that no disgust was in- 
 dicated for Rhetoric or Literature. What the 
 school, with its elaborately misdirected effort, had 
 failed to do for the one, the other had done for him- 
 self : he had learned in part the Art of Reading. 
 
 I do not wish to draw any argument from these 
 examples in favor of what is called self-education, 
 or to underrate the value of school training, even 
 with all its present imperfections and absurdities. 
 At school, the child's mind is drilled, however badly ; 
 trained, in company with others, to take the first 
 steps on that broad highway which all generations 
 must follow ; put in possession, however imper- 
 fectly, not so much of knowledge, as of those tools 
 of knowledge which are indispensable, if higher 
 real knowledge is to be acquired afterwards. I 
 would be the last to overlook the importance, in 
 early school training, of those semi-mechanical ele- 
 ments of drill, discipline, and mental gymnastic, 
 on which the value of the mind as an instrument 
 for future acquisition so much depends. But why 
 the question comes does this school training, so 
 elaborately applied, so often prove fruitless ? Why 
 does this school knowledge, so painfully acquired, 
 lie like dead lumber in the mind, even if it enter 
 
THE RIGHT USE OF BOOKS. 
 
 the mind at all ? Why does it not take root, and 
 quicken into life, and grow ? The answer can only 
 be that pedants have exalted the means into an end ; 
 in perfecting the machinery, have lost sight of the 
 object the machinery should accomplish ; and thus, 
 while our children are overtaught and overdrilled, 
 they are not educated ; and the defects of our edu- 
 cational system are nowhere so patent as in its 
 failure to impart a real taste for books, to commu- 
 nicate the true Art of Reading. 
 
 You have invited me, whose calling keeps me 
 among books, to say a word to you about the right 
 use of them. And because my calling has kept 
 me among books, and I can thus bring personal 
 experience to bear upon the subject, I hope I may 
 be able to say a helpful word or two. But, though 
 I speak of an Art of Reading, do not suppose I mean 
 to lay down any body of rules for your guidance. 
 I have no such rules. In study as in life, each of 
 us must find his own way, though there are none of 
 us so wise that we cannot be helped by the experi- 
 ence of our neighbors. It is some of the results of 
 that experience that I purpose giving you ; and if 
 some of my remarks seem trite, and quite wanting 
 in the charm of novelty, I can only plead that the 
 most important subjects are the most hackneyed, 
 
10 THE RIGHT USE OF BOOKS. 
 
 and that one of the results of my experience has 
 been to find that the older I grow the more highly 
 I value many truths which, for the very reason that 
 they are trite and obvious, are most certain of 
 being neglected. 
 
 I shall therefore begin with this remark, that for 
 success in reading and study, though it is well 
 enough to have a good head, it is far more impor- 
 tant to have a good digestion. I do not think it 
 makes us unhappy to know that we have not all 
 the wits of our eminent intellectual neighbors. 
 What does make us unhappy is not to be able to 
 use all the little wits that we possess ; and we 
 never can do that, unless we have a good stomach. 
 Now, to the end of having a good stomach, in order 
 that we may be in possession of all our wits, we 
 must be abstemious in our reading. Nothing so 
 certainly deranges the digestion as cramming the 
 brain. This is one of those trite remarks which I 
 wish above all things to impress upon you. If it 
 were really impressed upon the mind of the com- 
 munity, it would revolutionize our education. That 
 the very first and most indispensable of all the 
 qualifications that go to make a successful student 
 is a sound physical constitution, is the great truth 
 which all modern physiology preaches, and, none the 
 
THE RIGHT USE OF BOOKS. 1 1 
 
 less, which almost all modern practice still ignores. 
 And it seems in vain that modern physiology tells 
 us why, that it is only thus that fresh and 
 healthy blood can flow, to set in healthy activity 
 that wonderful little instrument, delicate as wonder- 
 ful, by means of which alone, while we are on this 
 little ball of earth, we think. We must have an in- 
 tellectual existence of some kind. To live what 
 is it but to think and feel ? And, willingly or un- 
 willingly, that existence is carried on here through 
 the medium of that material instrument, the brain. 
 And it is by the indirect control we possess over 
 that, that we are enabled largely to determine what 
 sort of an intellectual and emotional life we shall 
 lead upon the earth, whether it shall take us over 
 clear and sunny mountain-tops, or through the very 
 valley of the shadow of death. 
 
 This is all getting trite and commonplace enough ; 
 and yet is it not what we still ignore in all our prac- 
 tice ? The popular idea of a young scholar is that 
 he should be a pale and spectacled young man, very 
 thin, and with a slight and interesting tendency 
 to sentimentality and consumption. Parents send 
 their weakly children to college ; and it is supposed 
 to be an ordinance of nature that a large proportion 
 of what are called promising young persons should 
 
12 THE RIGHT USE OF BOOKS. 
 
 die young. Well, they are promising young persons 
 in the sense of never performing any thing ; but, 
 instead of killing them with a college, it would be 
 vastly better to turn them out to grass till they got 
 strong enough to exchange promise for perform- 
 ance ; at least, till such time as we can get colleges 
 organized that will not kill them. While they con- 
 tinue in that so-called promising condition, depend 
 upon it, they are not stuff to make successful schol- 
 ars of. You might as well take all the weakly 
 trees to make an orchard, or all the lean and stunted 
 cattle to make a herd. "How can you," said I 
 once to the most laborious student I ever knew, 
 " how can you do such an enormous amount of study 
 and mental labor ? " " Because," was the answer, 
 " I laid up so many rods of stone wall on my 
 father's farm when I was a boy." 
 
 It is plain, then, that the most important question 
 for the good student and reader is not, amidst this 
 multitude of books which no man can number, how 
 much he shall read. The really important questions 
 are, first, what is the quality of what he does read ; 
 and, second, what is his manner of reading it. 
 There is an analogy which is more than accidental 
 between physical and mental assimilation and diges- 
 tion ; and, homely as the illustration may seem, it is 
 
THE RIGHT USE OF BOOKS. 13 
 
 the most forcible I can use. Let two sit down to a 
 table spread with food : one possessed of a healthy 
 appetite, and knowing something of the nutritious 
 qualities of the various dishes before him; the 
 other cursed with a pampered and capricious appe- 
 tite, and knowing nothing of the results of chemical 
 and physiological investigation. One shall make 
 a better meal, and go away stronger and better fed, 
 on a dish of oatmeal, than the other on a dinner 
 that has half emptied his pocket. Shall we study 
 physiological chemistry and know all about what 
 is food for the body, and neglect mental chemistry, 
 and be utterly careless as to what nutriment is 
 contained in the food we give our minds ? I am 
 not speaking here of vicious literature : we don't 
 spread our dinner-tables with poisons. I speak 
 only of the varying amount of nutritive matter 
 contained in books. Only think of the range 
 what we may call the nutritive range which lies 
 between Shakspeare and Mr. Tupper ! And yet 
 " Proverbial Philosophy " weighs as much avoir- 
 dupois, and looks as fair on the library shelves, as 
 the greatest of poets. 
 
 We have been building a monument lately in 
 Boston, but I think the grandest and noblest monu- 
 ment our good old city ever reared is that Public 
 
14 THE RIGHT USE OF BOOKS. 
 
 Library of hers, open, without money and without 
 price, to rich and poor alike ; albeit, its architecture 
 does leave something to desire. But I saw the 
 other day, in a newspaper, lamentable statistics of 
 the use it is put to by the rising generation. There 
 is a storehouse of the richest and best intellect- 
 ual food, but mingled with great heaps of husks 
 and not a little poison, and they have never been 
 taught how to pick out the grain from the chaff, 
 not even how to avoid the poison. I do not think 
 they find much there that is positively vicious, but 
 there seems to be an absolutely unlimited demand 
 for twaddle. Does not this prove what I set out 
 with saying, that our schools do not teach the Art 
 of Reading? At the only schools the great ma- 
 jority of the boys and girls attend, they have been 
 set down to a Barmecide feast of empty cups and 
 platters. The alphabet, cyphering, grammar, writ- 
 ing, are not knowledge : they are only the tools of 
 knowledge, indispensable tools, indeed, skill 
 in the use of which it is the business, but not the 
 only nor the highest business, of these schools to im- 
 part. But the poor boys and girls are kept, year in 
 and year out, wielding knife and fork of grammar 
 and spelling and cyphering over dishes empty of 
 all real mental nutriment, diligently dipping spoons 
 
THE RIGHT USE OF BOOKS. IS 
 
 into bowls where the intellectual draught that 
 should have slaked their thirst has been forgotten.* 
 Then we turn these babies in intellect loose in a 
 public library, and expect them to find their way ! 
 What wonder that, to supply the demands of such 
 readers, twaddle-mills, if I may be allowed such 
 an expression, are set up, and cannot grind their 
 grist of intellectual chaff fast enough to supply 
 the market. After all, age has its advantages. 
 I thank my stars that I was born in those prehis- 
 toric times when boys read Scott's novels, and be- 
 fore the advent of the Oliver Optics and the Mrs. 
 Southworths, who are doing so much to weaken 
 the mental fibre of thjs generation. 
 
 Just as the Public Library is the needful supple- 
 ment to the Public School, and Boston will some 
 day be honored for having been the first to give the 
 truth a practical recognition, and a good collec- 
 tion of books has been well called the college of the 
 nineteenth century, so it will never be rightly 
 made use of till our schools give a really efficient 
 preparation for it by teaching the Art of Reading. 
 
 * A long step will have been taken towards remedying this 
 state of things when the admirable " Suggestions accompanying 
 the Course of Study for Grammar and Primary Schools,'* recently 
 issued by the Boston Board of School Supervisors, shall be 
 universally carried out in the spirit in which they have been 
 drawn up. 
 
1 6 THE RIGHT USE OF BOOKS. 
 
 And at the foundation of this art of reading 
 there lie certain distinctions, which, if we learn to 
 make them, will guide us in our choice of books. 
 Let me quote one of these distinctions from De 
 Quincey, that, namely, between what he calls the 
 Literature of Knowledge and the Literature of 
 Power. You will find it in his Essay on Pope. 
 
 "There is the literature of knowledge" he 'says, 
 " and there is the literature of power. The func- 
 tion of the first is to teach; the function of the 
 second is to move. The first is a rudder; the 
 second, an oar or a sail. The first speaks to the 
 mere discursive understanding ; the second speaks, 
 ultimately it may happen, to the higher understand- 
 ing or reason, but always through affections of 
 pleasure and sympathy." And he illustrates his 
 distinction thus : " What do you learn from ' Para- 
 dise Lost ' ? Nothing at all. What do you learn 
 from a cookery-book ? Something new, something 
 that you did not know before, in every paragraph. 
 But would you therefore put the wretched cookery- 
 book on a higher level of estimation than the divine 
 poem ? What you owe to Milton is not any knowl- 
 edge, of which a million separate items are still but 
 a million of advancing steps on the same earthly 
 level : what you owe is power, that is, exercise and 
 
THE RIGHT USE OF BOOKS. I/ 
 
 expansion to your own latent capacity of sympathy 
 with the infinite, where every pulse and each sepa- 
 rate influx is a step upwards. . . . All the steps of 
 knowledge, from first to last, carry you further on 
 the same plane, but could never raise you one foot 
 above your ancient level of earth ; whereas the very 
 first step in power is a flight, is an ascending 
 into another element/' 
 
 Such, slightly abbreviated, is Mr. De Quincey's 
 fine distinction. Now I think the books we are 
 most concerned with here are those belonging, not 
 to the literature of knowledge, but those belonging 
 to the literature of power, and first and foremost 
 the books of the poets. Is it not worth our while 
 to study Poetry ? " Study poetry ! " I hear some 
 sentimental young lady or gentleman say. " What 
 occasion is there for study ? why, it 's my delight. 
 Stars and flowers and the moon and hearts and 
 darts and every thing lovely, all those dear, de- 
 lightful volumes in blue and gold, I have them 
 about me all the time." Yes, about you, my dear 
 sentimental young lady or young gentleman, on the 
 centre-table, and in elegant rows on the book- 
 shelves, about you, but not in you. 
 
 I once met with a lecture and a very good 
 lecture it was by Mr. Palgrave, an excellent 
 
1 8 THE RIGHT USE OF BOOKS. 
 
 critic, on the " Scientific Study of Poetry," and it 
 was addressed to the members of a Workingmen s 
 College. Was there ever a more incongruous com- 
 bination of ideas, some people would say, than this 
 of Science, Study, Poetry, and Workingmen ? And 
 yet I venture to say that unless we approach the 
 subject of Poetry in just that spirit, viewing it first 
 as a serious study, next as a study involving prin- 
 ciples quite as much as Chemistry or any other of 
 those branches of the investigation of the laws of 
 matter to which, by a strange perversity of lan- 
 guage, the term Science is getting to be exclusively 
 confined ; and, again, if we do not believe that the 
 subject of Poetry is one pre-eminently fitted to be 
 a theme for a lecture to workingmen, in other 
 words, if we do not believe that Poetry addresses 
 itself not merely to the so-called " cultured classes," 
 who are so ready to believe that they possess a 
 monopoly of wisdom, but to man as man, we shall 
 never know any thing at all about it, we shall 
 remain in the intellectual condition of the blue- 
 and-gold young lady, with her poetry on her centre- 
 table, but not in her soul. 
 
 I have no thought of attempting here a definition 
 of Poetry, though I should like to come and give 
 you a lecture on the art of reading it. Whether 
 
THE RIGHT USE OF BOOKS. 19 
 
 we call it, with Aristotle, imitation ; whether we 
 say more worthily, with Lord Bacon, " that it was 
 ever thought to have some participation of divine- 
 ness, because it doth raise and erect the mind by 
 submitting the shows of things to the desires of 
 the mind ; whereas, reason doth buckle and bow 
 the mind unto the nature of things ; " * whether, in 
 more modern times, we define it, with Shelley, as 
 " the best and happiest thoughts of the best and 
 happiest minds ; " or say, with Matthew Arnold, that 
 "poetry is simply the most beautiful, impressive, 
 and widely effective mode of saying things ; " and, 
 again, that " it is to the poetical literature of an age 
 that we must in general look for the most perfect 
 and most adequate interpretation of that age ; " or 
 whether we say, with the greatest poet of the last 
 generation, that " poetry is the breath and finer 
 spirit of all knowledge, the impassioned expression 
 which is in the countenance of all science," f all 
 I am concerned to say here is, that Poetry is that 
 branch of the Literature of Power pre-eminently 
 worthy of study, and that without study we shall 
 know but little about it. 
 
 Now suppose, to revert to my first position, that 
 
 * Advancement of Learning, B. n. 4. 2. 
 t Wordsworth's Critical Preface. 
 
20 THE RIGHT USE OF BOOKS. 
 
 our children were really taught to read Poetry in 
 school ; I am as sure that it could be done as I am 
 that it is not done now ; suppose that the tyranny 
 of Gradgrind, with his clatter of grammar-books 
 and spelling-books and cyphering-books, most of 
 them useless, were somewhat abated, and feeling 
 and imagination as well as bare intellect were 
 appealed to, and not only appealed to but trained 
 and developed and directed, do you think there 
 would be such a rush at the library for the Oliver 
 Optics, and the Mrs. Southworths, and, worse still, 
 for the Miss Braddons of the day ? I am sure the 
 twaddle-factories would have to shut up, or at least 
 work half-time. Peter Parleyism and other goody- 
 goodyisms would be less rampant, and the gin-and- 
 water of the circulating library would lose its 
 attractive flavor. 
 
 " Do not laugh at him," said an accomplished 
 lady once to me, as we were talking of an eccentric 
 teacher, famous in the days of our youth, " do 
 not laugh at him. He taught me really to love 
 and appreciate English poetry, so that it has been a 
 delight to me all my life through." That was much 
 to say of any teacher ; that was true education. 
 
 I just spoke of the gin-and- water of the circu- 
 lating library ; but let me put in a good word for 
 
THE RIGHT USE OF BOOKS. 21 
 
 the circulating library, and for the study of novels. 
 Yes, the study of novels ; for novel-writing has be- 
 come, in these modern days, an important branch 
 of art, and novels a very real and substantial 
 department of literature. He who either neglects 
 'or despises or fears novels, not only cuts himself 
 off from one of the very best sources of intellectual 
 and moral refreshment, but ignores a branch of 
 literature from which a wise reader can get instruc- 
 tion as well as entertainment. I am not a very 
 social man, and some of my best friends are in 
 novels. Don't you know all Jane Austen's people ? 
 Have you ever lain on a couch, languid with illness, 
 and had some pleasant voice read "Wives and 
 Daughters " to you ? I say nothing of the great 
 artists, of Thackeray, of George Eliot ; but such 
 is my love for the dear old mother-country, that 
 I can greatly enjoy Mr. Trollope's best stories, and 
 even read his worst, for the sake of the glimpses of 
 English life they give me. I can even find an 
 hour's amusement in the absurdities of that extraor- 
 dinary mountebank whose remarkable fortune it 
 now is for the moment to misgovern England. 
 
 You know what Talleyrand said to the young 
 man who could not play whist : "Young man, what 
 an unhappy old age you are laying up for yourself ! " 
 
22 THE RIGHT USE OF BOOKS. 
 
 And so, of him who has not learned how to read 
 novels, it may be said, What a source of refreshing 
 and improving and innocent amusement he has 
 failed to avail himself of ! 
 
 You say that no department of literature con- 
 tains so much mischievous rubbish. It is very true, 
 and the only remedy is such a training of the popu- 
 lar taste as would make such rubbish intolerable ; 
 and I know of no more hopeless feature in the rather 
 hopeless-looking subject of popular education, than 
 its failure to train the imagination, the greatest of 
 all educational forces. Is it owing to the remains 
 in us, here in New England, of that old Puritanism 
 which hated every thing beautiful because it could 
 only associate it with that license and lawlessness 
 against which it was the grim and unlovely protest ? 
 Let us hold the virtues of our Puritan Fathers in 
 all honor, for they were the salvation of the nation ; 
 but let us discriminate. These same Puritan Fa- 
 thers of ours were stone-blind to much that consti- 
 tutes the very essence of all true education. 
 
 Many good people have Puritanic objections to 
 poetry, and still more to novel-reading, because of 
 its abuses ; and certainly the intemperate novel- 
 reader is little, if any, better than the intemperate 
 dram-drinker. But there is another class of ob- 
 
THE RIGHT USE OF BOOKS. 23 
 
 jectors whom the defender of imaginative literature 
 has to meet, and that is the Gradgrinds before- 
 mentioned, the so-called practical men. " Poetry ? 
 Imagination ? " they say. " What have they to do 
 with the realities of life?" meaning corn, cotton, 
 lard, iron, and other solid things. " Do you think a 
 young man who goes mooning about in the woods, 
 and can't for the life of him tell whether the tim- 
 ber is fit to cut, or can go right by a good water- 
 privilege and never see it, is going to succeed in 
 life ? " Well, Mr. Goschen is a practical man. Mr. 
 Goschen is a London banker, who has succeeded in 
 life. He was a member of Mr. Gladstone's Cabinet. 
 He is an author ; not of poems, but of a valuable 
 work on Foreign Exchanges not a poetical 
 subject. He is certainly a good authority for our 
 practical men. And this is what he has just been 
 saying in a public address in that most practical 
 and dirty of cities, Liverpool. " Mr. Goschen gave 
 a powerful address," says the Liverpool newspaper, 
 " on the cultivation of the imagination as essential 
 to the highest success in politics, in learning, and 
 in the commercial business of life. The cultivation 
 of the imagination would no more enfeeble men's 
 minds than a journey to a fine scene or a breezy 
 shore would enfeeble their bodies. He preferred 
 
24 THE RIGHT USE OF BOOKS. 
 
 ' Alice in Wonderland ' for children to any amount 
 of verbal photographs of good little Tommies. 
 Imagination was needful for business ; and he 
 gave as an illustration his own father. ' Let me 
 give you,' he says, l another instance on this 
 point, and you will forgive me if it is somewhat 
 of a personal character; but it may come home 
 to some of the young men here more forcibly 
 than the most eloquent generalization. My own 
 father came over to England as a very young man, 
 with one friend as young as himself, and with very 
 little more money in his pocket than a great many 
 of the students here, I dare say, possess ; and he 
 has told me, half in joke and half in earnest, that 
 he was obliged to found a firm because he wrote 
 such a bad hand that no one would take him for a 
 clerk. But he was steeped to the lips in intel- 
 lectual culture. In his father's house, as a boy, he 
 had met all the great literary men of the best period 
 of German literature. He had heard Schiller read 
 his own plays. He had listened to the conversation 
 of great thinkers and great poets. He was a good 
 historian, an acute critic, well versed in literature, 
 and a very good musician to boot. But did this 
 stand in his way as a young man coming over to 
 London with a view to found a business ? Has it 
 
THE RIGHT USE OF BOOKS. 2$ 
 
 stood in his way of founding a firm of which I, as 
 his son, am very proud ? It did not stand in his 
 way. On the contrary, it aided his success ; and 
 with this before me I am able to speak with affec- 
 tionate conviction of the fact that culture will not 
 interfere with the due discharge of the duties of 
 business men in any sphere of business life.' " * 
 
 Do not, I beg you, spoil a good handwriting, if 
 you possess that useful accomplishment, in hopes 
 of thereby emulating the success of the elder Mr. 
 Goschen. I don't believe that a bad handwriting 
 leads to certain success in Lombard Street ; neither 
 do I believe that an untrained imagination leads to 
 success there or anywhere else. Observe that the 
 elder Mr. Goschen's was a real, not a sham educa- 
 tion. We may not have the fortune to hear great 
 authors read their own poems ; but we may read, 
 without the labor of acquiring a foreign tongue, the 
 poems and dramas, the works of genius of all kinds, 
 of a literature second to none in richness and 
 variety to any that the world ever saw. When shall 
 we learn to be as wise as the Germans, and make 
 use of it as fully as we might as an instrument of 
 popular culture ? f 
 
 * The Culture of the Imagination, an address delivered by the 
 Rt. Hon. George J. Goschen, M. P., at the Liverpool Institute. 
 London. Efnngham Wilson. 1878. 
 
 t " German schools have a good habit," says Matthew Arnold, 
 
26 THE RIGHT USE OF BOOKS. 
 
 But Mr. Goschen goes much farther, and is much 
 more precise and practical in his view, than those 
 who in general terms admit the indirect value of 
 general culture in the practical business of life. 
 He claims that the possession of imaginative power 
 is directly needful to success in all the most practi- 
 cal and prosaic of business affairs, and indispensa- 
 ble to the formation of a sound judgment in politics. 
 Commending to his hearers the study of history 
 as the study of all others best suited to cultivate that 
 masculine power of conceiving other circumstances 
 than those which immediately surround us, which is 
 so necessary to the politician and to the man of large 
 affairs, he says, " I am often frightened when, upon 
 some great question, I hear a man say, ' I am going 
 to take a very business-like view of this question/ It 
 is almost as bad as when a man, upon some question 
 of propriety, says he is' going to look at it as a man 
 of the world. I then always suspect the judgment 
 he is going to give. When a man says, ' I am going 
 to look at a great question as a business man/ it is 
 ten to one he means, ' I am not going to be gulled 
 by any of your grand generalizations. I am not 
 going to be misled by historical parallels, or se- 
 
 " of reading and commenting on German poetry as we read and 
 comment on Homer and Virgil, but do not read and comment on 
 Chaucer and Shakspeare." 
 
THE RIGHT USE OF BOOKS. 2/ 
 
 duced by any rhetorical phrases. I do not wish to 
 be told what foreign nations are thinking of or are 
 likely to do. I wish to judge of this as a sensible 
 man of business. I know the effect such and such 
 a line of policy will have on trade and on the funds, 
 and that is enough for me.' Now, I have some- 
 times hoped that I might have claimed myself to 
 be a business man, or a business-like man, and 
 most of you will consider yourselves the same ; and 
 I say that it is prostituting the name of ' business- 
 like ' to confound it, as is often done, with a narrow- 
 minded view of questions. That is not business-like 
 at all : it is very un-business-like. Call it by what- 
 ever name you will, whether narrow-mindedness or 
 not, I consider that to judge from hand to mouth 
 of all great questions is a very dangerous tendency, 
 a tendency which is fostered by ignorance of 
 the great principles of human action, and of the 
 former teaching of the history of the world. . . . 
 The study of history will correct these tendencies, 
 and will mitigate the influence of any narrow- 
 minded judgment of passing events." 
 
 Again he says : " I began with the nursery, and 
 I am afraid I have launched you in the end into a 
 very wide field indeed. I might have followed up 
 my argument by showing the necessity, even for 
 
28 THE RIGHT USE OF BOOKS. 
 
 many serious domestic questions, of cultivating the 
 faculty to which I have alluded. I might almost 
 venture to say that a House of Commons without 
 imagination would to my mind be a bad House of 
 Commons and a dangerous House of Commons. 
 A church without imagination would be a church 
 without life, and without the power of retaining its 
 hold upon its flock. Imagination, in the sense 
 which I have described, is necessary everywhere." 
 
 Mr. Goschen expatiates eloquently on the value of 
 History as a study for the young business men who 
 heard him. Do not think that it is because I am 
 a teacher of History myself that I echo his recom- 
 mendation to a similar audience. In my own seri- 
 ous judgment, no study is half so valuable to young 
 men engaged in the active pursuits of life as a real 
 study of History, and all the preparatory and col- 
 lateral work which a real study of History im- 
 plies. I say a real study of History ; for I do not 
 mean by it that petty memorizing of miserable 
 compendiums, the " moths of History," * as Bacon 
 long ago called them, which goes on in schools ; 
 
 * "As for the corruptions and moths of history, which are 
 Epitomes, the use of them deserveth to be banished, as all men of 
 sound judgment have confessed : as those that have fretted and 
 corroded the sound bodies of many excellent histories, and 
 wrought them into base and unprofitable dregs." Advancement 
 of Learning, B. II. 2, 3. 
 
THE RIGHT USE OF BOOKS. 29 
 
 nor do I mean, on the other hand, that pottering 
 over the mere gossip of the past, that perusal of 
 volume upon volume of " memoirs of the unmemor- 
 able," which passes for History with antiquarians ; 
 as if worthless facts were any the less burdens to 
 the memory because they happened five hundred 
 years ago, or as if unsavory stories out of the past 
 could be deodorized by time so as to be any less 
 unsavory now. By the study of History I mean 
 that robust and manly grappling with the real 
 problems of the Past which will make you more 
 thoughtful, more useful, more far-seeing and wide- 
 seeing men in the Present. And let no one think 
 that History studied in this fashion is work for idle 
 or languid hours. History is the record of the life 
 of the past. It shows how the men of the past 
 solved the ethical, religious, social, economical, po- 
 litical problems of their day and generation. The 
 purpose of a wise man's studies is to learn how 
 to solve his own life-problem. Placed in the flow- 
 ing stream of time, which will not stop at his bid- 
 ding, which whirls him away if he does not strike 
 boldly out and learn the nature of the medium in 
 which he is floating and the currents that bear him 
 on, it must be, unless the world is all haphazard, 
 that the wisest guidance is to be found in the 
 
30 THE RIGHT USE OF BOOKS. 
 
 study of the records of those who have gone before 
 him. Here is the story of past failures and of past 
 success. It is on the past we must build ; it is out 
 of the past that the present must come. I believe 
 it is by the study of the records of the past that the 
 young student can gather that concrete experience 
 which is the necessary foundation for all profitable 
 abstract thinking. If there is any thing I feel dis- 
 posed to caution you against it is a premature study 
 of metaphysics, that vague beating of the air in 
 which so many youthful minds weary themselves 
 in vain. Philosophy will come, but let it be the 
 ripe fruit of experience based on the actual facts 
 of life. Do not lose yourselves prematurely in the 
 cobweb mazes of the metaphysicians. Accumulate 
 experience, and keep your feet firm on the ground 
 of fact, and enlarge the horizon of real life by 
 lifting the curtain which hides from us the life of 
 the long procession of those who have gone before 
 us, that picturesque procession, by the side of 
 whose story the best fiction of the romancer grows 
 pale and uninteresting. 
 
 But do not suppose you can put any life into the 
 teaching of the past, unless you can learn to see the 
 History that is a-making all round you. He who 
 has not learned to read his daily newspaper will 
 
THE RIGHT USE OF BOOKS. 31 
 
 hardly read Gibbon and Grote to any purpose ; he 
 who cannot see History in the streets of Boston 
 will trouble himself to no purpose with books about 
 Rome or Pompeii. 
 
 But, alas ! who is taught History ? In my young 
 days, and I fear matters are not much mended, 
 as Isaac Taylor says, some rattling dry bones, 
 some, grinning skeleton of Chronology, was hung 
 up before us, and we were told, "There, my young 
 friends, there is the noble and beautiful study of 
 History: fall in love and become passionately at- 
 tached to that." But Nature taught us better. Some- 
 how, we did not clasp the dull compendiums to our 
 bosoms, and swear they should be our daily compan- 
 ions for the rest of our lives. I am afraid the dull 
 compendiums were wrathfully swept into the low- 
 est cupboard when the day of school emancipation 
 came; and the misfortune is that the pupil thus 
 miseducated fancies he has no taste for History. 
 He might as well say he has no taste for Life, no 
 taste for Thought ; and indeed it is more than prob- 
 able that school that realm of unreason has 
 done all it could to make that true. When better 
 days shall dawn on us, I believe that a real study 
 of History and all the kindred and collateral studies 
 which it implies will be found near the very heart of 
 
32 THE RIGHT USE OF BOOKS. 
 
 our system of school study. And if I say no more 
 about it here, it is because I hope you will give me 
 the opportunity to make it my special subject on 
 some future occasion. 
 
 But I must not dwell so long on one branch of 
 my subject. What shall I say of the Literature of 
 Knowledge ? I have a few thoughts to suggest. 
 I think that, in view of the headlong speed with 
 which mere knowledge is now pursued all round 
 us, it begins to be needful to advocate the cultiva- 
 tion of a little of the spirit of contented ignorance. 
 Berzelius, I .think it was, who said that he was the 
 last general chemist. The single science of Chem- 
 istry had grown into such vast proportions that no 
 one man could ever again attempt in a single life- 
 time to traverse the whole field of it. And if this 
 is true of a single branch, what shall we say of this 
 vast new intellectual world of modern Physical Sci- 
 ence ? Sitting in my study in a Scientific School, 
 with my books of Literature and History about me, 
 I look with some awe and wonder at what goes on 
 in the laboratories and lecture-rooms of my col- 
 leagues, of the greater part of which I do not un- 
 derstand one single word. But it is a contented 
 wonder and a happy ignorance. Have not I my 
 greater world of man's thoughts and man's doings, 
 
THE RIGHT USE OF BOOKS. 33 
 
 a field itself far wider than I can cultivate ? I 
 will not be an Alexander to cry for new worlds to 
 conquer. 
 
 But I have one practical remark to make. Did 
 you ever happen to see, in shrewd, old, hard-headed 
 Bishop Whately's annotations on Lord Bacon's 
 Essays, a good passage about what is and what is 
 not superficiality ? It is in the sentence in Bacon's 
 Essay on Studies, " Crafty men contemn studies." 
 " This contempt," says the bishop, " whether of 
 crafty men or narrow-minded men, finds its expres- 
 sion in the word ' smattering ; ' and the couplet is 
 become almost a proverb, 
 
 ' A little learning is a dangerous thing : 
 Drink deep, or taste not the Pierian spring.' 
 
 But the poet's remedies for the dangers of a little 
 learning are both of them impossible. No one can 
 1 drink deep ' enough to be in truth any thing more 
 than superficial ; and every human being that is 
 not a downright idiot must taste" And the bishop, 
 in his downright way, goes on to give practical 
 illustrations of the usefulness of a little knowledge, 
 and proceeds : " What, then, is the smattering, 
 the imperfect and superficial knowledge that does 
 deserve contempt ? A slight and superficial 
 knowledge is justly condemned when it is put 
 
 3 
 
34 THE RIGHT USE OF BOOKS. 
 
 in the place of more full and exact knowledge. 
 Such an acquaintance with chemistry and anatomy, 
 for instance, as would be creditable and not useless 
 to a lawyer, would be contemptible for a physician ; 
 and such an acquaintance with law as would be 
 desirable for him, would be a most discreditable 
 smattering for a lawyer." * 
 
 The bishop's remarks amount in substance to 
 this, that on the great majority of subjects an ordi- 
 nary man's knowledge must be limited to a very 
 general view ; and that a general view is not a su- 
 perficial view, provided it is an accurate general 
 view, and is not taken for more than it is worth ; 
 while it is truly superficial to be ever so well 
 acquainted with all the minutest details of some 
 corner of a great subject, and be at the same time 
 utterly incapable of taking a correct view of it as a 
 whole. We justly admire the sketches of great 
 artists, for they show the same sweep and power of 
 design as their finished paintings. Should we 
 admire some little corner of a great canvas, fin- 
 ished with minute and painful pre-Raphaelite dili- 
 gence, while all the rest was left a blank ? We 
 have no opportunity to know, because no artist 
 works so. 
 
 * Whately's Bacon's Essays, p. 446, Am. Ed. 
 
THE RIGHT USE OF BOOKS. 35 
 
 Now, I have found fault with the teaching of our 
 elementary schools as too often degenerating into a 
 dead, dry, empty clatter. I find fault with the teach- 
 ing of what we are pleased to call our high schools on 
 an opposite ground, because it attempts so much that 
 it becomes a thing of shreds and patches. Only look 
 at the course of study laid down in them ! The boys 
 escape into active life, and get there a real educa- 
 tion. It is not that the parents grudge the time, 
 that they do not keep them at school longer : it is 
 from a true instinct, which tells them that any real 
 work is a better education than more of such 
 schooling. The burthen of this omniscience falls 
 on the girls, who, having nothing else to do, are 
 kept at school longer ; and really, if they did but 
 take in all they are supposed to be taught, they 
 might well go forth, at about the age of eighteen, 
 as missionaries of knowledge and instructors of the 
 nation. But, alas ! it is but the bishop's true 
 smattering, that smattering that does deserve 
 contempt. It runs off them as water runs off a 
 duck's back ; and in a very few years, or months, 
 these young persons who have " gone through " (I 
 like that phrase) all the "ologies," are found to be 
 no wiser than their neighbors. Of much of the 
 teaching that goes on in what we call our high 
 
36 THE RIGHT USE OF BOOKS. 
 
 schools, all that can be said is, that it is laboriously, 
 conscientiously, and elaborately bad ; because it 
 attempts so much, and is so little suited to the 
 wants or capacities of its recipients. 
 
 Or, I might illustrate the same point by an 
 American classical education, which is an education 
 ingeniously arranged so as not to accomplish its 
 object, but is held in superstitious and undeserved 
 esteem for the supposed excellence of the mental 
 discipline it imparts : as though one should be 
 offered a great treasure if he would walk to Spring- 
 field, and should walk only as far as Worcester, 
 where indeed he found no treasure, but returned 
 contented (though with much loss of time), and 
 congratulating himself on the admirable muscular 
 exercise the excursion had given his legs. And in- 
 deed so valuable is exercise that he might well be 
 contented even with the treadmill, if there were not 
 so many other directions in which he could have 
 reached a treasure and got his exercise too. 
 
 In this wide ocean, then, of modern knowledge^ 
 how shall we save ourselves from being lost ? I 
 think there is one principle by which we can be 
 guided. The popular notion of an educated man is 
 that he is a " book in breeches ; " a sort of reservoir, 
 which you can tap for miscellaneous information. 
 
THE RIGHT USE OF BOOKS. 37 
 
 A vulgar person, when he hears an educated man 
 say he doesn't know, say, the date of King Se- 
 sostris, thinks that that man's education don't 
 amount to much. To such an one, he is the most 
 learned man who' can answer the greatest number 
 of questions. Hence this epidemic of examinations 
 which is attacking our education-system, and which 
 we have caught from England, where, it is to be 
 hoped, it has pretty nearly run its course, com- 
 petitive examinations, civil-service examinations, 
 examinations for women, and all the rest. Wise 
 old Dr. Wiese, returning to England twenty years 
 after he wrote his first book on her schools, thinks 
 England has gone examination-mad ; and I greatly 
 fear that we are catching the infection. Here is 
 his description of the present condition of Eng- 
 land : " From time to time," he says, " something 
 like an alarum-bell sounds throughout the country : 
 ' Come and be examined ! ' And they come, boys 
 and girls, young and old, having crammed into 
 themselves as much knowledge as they could. 
 How they have acquired what they know is never 
 asked, nor are they shown what is the best 
 method." * 
 
 " The apparent grandeur and vastness of this 
 
 * German Letters on English Education. London, 1877. 
 
38 THE RIGHT USE OF BOOKS. 
 
 system of examination," he says quietly, " accord- 
 ing to which the same set of printed papers is dis- 
 tributed over England, and sent all over the world, 
 to Canada, the Mauritius, &c., has nothing im- 
 posing for us." No, it has nothing imposing for 
 Germans, because they know what true education 
 means ; know that an educated man is not a book 
 in breeches, not a dead reservoir of information 
 which you can tap; and that an educated man may 
 not know the date of King Sesostris, and, in order 
 to be really educated, must continue ignorant of a 
 great many far more important things; that, in 
 short, to be educated is to be something real, and 
 that the first step towards that intellectual and 
 moral reality is to prepare ourselves by our training 
 to be and do in life just what Nature, in the distri- 
 bution of her gifts, has best qualified us to be and 
 do ; and that the heaping up of miscellaneous 
 knowledge, under the pressure of examinations, 
 competitive or otherwise, is about the worst method 
 for accomplishing this object which human per- 
 versity has yet devised.* 
 
 * A witty professor, on being asked his opinion of certain col- 
 lege examinations for girls, recently established, is said to have 
 replied : " It seems to me to be very much as though the town 
 paupers were to come to the overseers of the poor and ask for 
 assistance, and the overseers were to say, ' No, we have nothing 
 
THE RIGPIT USE OF BOOKS. 39 
 
 Examinations have their legitimate place and in- 
 dispensable function in education. When teacher 
 and pupil have faithfully done their respective parts, 
 they may well sit down together and see how far 
 they have successfully mastered the subjects in 
 hand. Examinations are a needful supplement, 
 they can never be a substitute for teaching ; and it 
 is mortifying to see that, just when the enormous 
 evils of too much dependence on them are being 
 exposed by the very ablest of scholars and teachers 
 in the mother-country, we should be threatened in 
 this with a repetition of the mistaken policy. 
 And we should especially be on our guard against 
 the introduction of that bane of all true education, 
 the competitive-examination system, a system 
 which substitutes an extraneous, mercenary mo- 
 tive for a true love of knowledge, obliterates all 
 landmarks by which the student is guided to a 
 knowledge of the limits of his powers and the 
 nature of his real intellectual wants, and for the 
 labor of learning substitutes a cramming process, 
 which can only be compared to that of a lawyer 
 getting up some patent-case, where, the moment the 
 cause is won, the information needed to win it is 
 
 for you ; but if you will come again, this 'day twelvemonth, we will 
 audit your accounts? " It is the teaching of the wise professors 
 which the girls need. 
 
40 THE RIGHT USE OF BOOKS. 
 
 swept out of a mind on which it never made any 
 real impression.* 
 
 I sadly fear that amidst all this clatter of exam- 
 inations we shall lose sight more and more of the 
 only intellectual labor that really profits ; of the 
 
 "Toil unsevered from tranquillity, 
 The labor that in still advance outgrows 
 Far noisier schemes, accomplished in repose 
 
 Too great for haste, too high for rivalry." 
 
 What does all this recent foolish outcry against 
 over-educalion, and especially against the over- 
 education of girls, mean but this : not that there is 
 too much education, it will be many generations 
 before there is any danger of that, but that what 
 education there is is of so bad a quality. It isn't 
 too much study, Heaven knows, that our boys or 
 
 * I do not believe that this new system of running educa- 
 tional machinery by examination-power, and especially by com- 
 petitive-examination-power, will ever succeed in producing any 
 real and healthy growth in our school system, though it may tem- 
 porarily serve a useful purpose as an antidote to the educational 
 torpor of England. It is the last new nostrum in a department 
 of human effort which is more than all others at the mercy of 
 nostrum-mongers. I have accumulated notes of a great body of 
 testimony against it from the best living scholars and wisest living 
 teachers ; but this is not the place to pursue the subject. It is 
 encouraging to find that the accomplished gentleman who now 
 holds the responsible office of Superintendent of Boston Schools 
 is alive to its dangers. See his recently published first semi- 
 annual Report. 
 
THE RIGHT USE OF BOOKS. 41 
 
 our girls are in any danger from. The real danger, 
 and it is a great one, comes from bad study 
 and bad teaching. " True study," says a wise 
 writer I fell in with the other day, " is eminently a 
 leisurely process, the great condition of success in 
 it being deliberation ; and though it always suf- 
 ficiently interests the student to keep his faculties 
 lively, it seldom excites him to any dangerous 
 degree. Hence, I believe that genuine study is 
 much less injurious to health than is often sup- 
 posed, certainly, much less injurious than many 
 things which are scarcely reputed injurious at all 
 The processes of genuine and well-directed study 
 positively save the brain, by their rational and 
 orderly sequence, by the safe advance from step to 
 step. Study of this kind is like a well-built stair- 
 case, by which you can climb to a great height 
 with a minimum of fatigue, never lifting the body 
 more than a few inches at a time. But as there 
 might be such a thing as racing up a staircase, so, 
 when we study against time, there is a strain in 
 the mere speed, however good may be the system 
 that we are following. There mav also be a strain 
 on the faculties, in the direction ot them towards a 
 kind of study which is not adapted to our natural 
 gifts. If we learn what Nature qualified us to learn, 
 
42 THE RIGHT USE OF BOOKS. 
 
 and learn it step by step, without hurry, we incur a 
 minimum of cerebral fatigue and gain a maximum 
 of acquirement. Study of this kind gently stimu- 
 lates, and does not fatigue, unless prolonged for an 
 unreasonable length of time. It is positively favor- 
 able to health, because it is favorable to cheerful- 
 ness ; it makes life pleasanter and more interesting, 
 and so far from being injurious to the nervous sys- 
 tem, gives it tone and vigor, exactly as manly exer- 
 cises give tone and vigor to the muscular system. 
 There can be no doubt that men were intended to 
 bear intellectual labor without injury to their health 
 [and women too], We are constituted to think 
 and learn, as a fish is constituted to swim or a 
 bird to fly. But a man [or a woman] may bear 
 this healthy kind of mental toil very easily, or may 
 even derive real benefit from it, and yet be quite 
 unable to bear either hurry or cram."* 
 
 I have a profound sense of the importance of 
 systematic mental training, and know well what 
 provoking defects are sure to characterize what are 
 called self-educated men. It is the instinct which 
 teaches us that any mental training, even the very 
 worst, is better than none, that leads us to tolerate 
 so long the enormous defects and the entire un- 
 
 * London " Globe," quoted in " Essays in Mosaic." 
 
THE RIGHT USE OF BOOKS. 43 
 
 suitableness of the old classical system of educa- 
 tion. Better this, we say, than no training. If 
 the Greek and Latin classics are the only things 
 we know how to teach, utterly unsuited as they 
 are to be the staple of education of our genera- 
 tion, in such a way as to be a true mental disci- 
 pline, let us continue to teach them till we have 
 learned how to make a mental discipline out of 
 the teaching of subjects as really suited to the 
 wants of our age as the ancient classics were to 
 the generation of the Renaissance. That time is 
 fast approaching. Unhappily, I fear it must be 
 admitted that between the senility and decrepitude 
 of the old system, all run to pedantry and word- 
 mongering, and the still inchoate condition of the 
 new, our education-system is just now a realm of 
 chaos and confusion, and the young man who has 
 missed what is called a liberal education has per- 
 haps quite as much reason to congratulate himself 
 on the evil of misguidance he has escaped as on 
 the advantages of mental discipline he has been 
 deprived of.* At any rate, young men like your- 
 
 * What, for instance, can be more preposterous, judged by any 
 rational or consistent theory of education, than the present 
 entrance examinations to the oldest and most conspicuous of our 
 colleges : examinations which still compel all candidates alike to 
 waste their precious school-days over Greek and Latin grammars, 
 
44 THE RIGHT USE OF BOOKS. 
 
 selves, with the intellectual resources of a great 
 modern city at command, and with a resolute will 
 to take advantage of them, need never despair of 
 doing much for yourselves which colleges should 
 have done, but very likely would not have done for 
 you. You may well take encouragement in reading 
 the long list of men eminent in all departments of 
 intellectual activity, the Watts, the Grotes, the 
 Faradays, who either received no college training, 
 or have put on record an emphatic condemnation 
 of that they did receive.* 
 
 almost precisely in the way, perhaps, if any thing, in not so 
 rational or so good a way, as their predecessors spent them in 
 times when a classical was a real education ; while, the moment 
 the candidate succeeds in entering the college gates, the modern 
 theory of adapting education to the wants and capacities of the 
 pupils is even too fully recognized by the "elective system." If 
 the elective system, with proper restrictions, is the only true sys- 
 tem, as it undoubtedly is, what possible objection can there be to 
 applying it in season to save the boys' school-days from the obso- 
 lete pedantries of classical grinders ? A real demand for good 
 teachers of modern subjects would soon create a supply, and we 
 might besides have some real classical scholars. 
 
 * See, for a beginning of such researches as will be the founda- 
 tion at some, I fear far distant, day of a true inductive science of 
 education, the little book, " English Men of Science, their Nature 
 and Nurture ; " and the more important work of Alphonse de 
 Candolle, " Histoire des Sciences et des Savants depuis deux 
 Siecles." The same investigation should be made into the early 
 history of men distinguished in. literature and in the practical 
 pursuits of life. 
 
THE RIGHT USE OF BOOKS. 45 
 
 In choosing the studies on which to spend such 
 precious leisure hours and such reserve of mental 
 power as you can command, I think you may well 
 be guided mainly by two considerations : first, will 
 such or such a study be helpful to you in your trade 
 or profession, whatever that may be, does it fall 
 in with the mental aptitudes and habits of thought 
 which your daily calling has produced ? or, secondly, 
 have you any natural love and inborn taste for it ? 
 
 I am not afraid to say that a man may, if he 
 chooses, make his calling and profession, the very 
 means by which he earns his bread, into a liberal 
 education. But is it not, perhaps you ask, the 
 very definition of a liberal education that it should 
 not " smell of the shop " ? Yes, it is still the defi- 
 nition of certain high-stepping pedants, who have 
 not yet waked up to the fact that the mediaeval 
 monopoly of the term "liberal," enjoyed by certain 
 special callings and occupations, has quite ceased ; 
 and that in these modern days there are innumerable 
 forms of education, all equally capable of being 
 made liberal. When the merchant, for example, was 
 the despised Jew, the prey of every plundering rob- 
 ber-baron, the robber-baron looked down upon the 
 Jew, though even then the Jew could probably write 
 his name, and his plunderer could not. But now, 
 
46 THE RIGHT USE OF BOOKS. 
 
 when in every civilized community a vast proportion 
 of its intellectual power is engrossed in the great 
 operations of commerce and manufactures, how 
 astonishing it is that any reasonable human being 
 should not look upon them as liberal and liberalizing 
 pursuits ! How strange that a course of training 
 should not be organized for them, as distinctly 
 leading up to them as the training of what are 
 called, par excellence, the liberal professions ! Why, 
 it is not many generations since the liberal pro- 
 fession of medicine grew out of the practice of 
 barber-surgeons and old women ; and the best and 
 wisest physicians will be the readiest to tell you 
 now that, with all their science, they are practically 
 little better than careful and skilled nurses. 
 
 Let me advise you, then, to make your calling 
 and occupation, whatever it may be, an instrument 
 of education. The practice of the simplest handi- 
 craft involves and may lead a man straight to the 
 study of the laws by which the universe is governed ; 
 for those laws are the same laws, whether in a 
 globe or a drop of water. The time will surely 
 come when it will hardly be credited that in a 
 century which boasted itself of its enlightenment, 
 and which was distinguished above all others for 
 its progress in physical science, a costly system of 
 
THE RIGHT USE OF BOOKS. 47 
 
 elementary education should have existed, in which, 
 while much unintelligible grammar was prematurely 
 taught, physical science was absolutely neglected. 
 Why, Nature herself, if we would heed her ways, is 
 for ever teaching the baby artisan, the baby me- 
 chanic. You are, most of you, engaged in com- 
 mercial pursuits. See what a wide field of liberal 
 study the merchant's calling might lead to. Would 
 it make it any less liberal if the merchant or the 
 manufacturer should follow the example of the 
 lawyer and the physician, and select from the wide 
 field of possible acquisitions those which would be 
 practically useful to him in his calling ? I think the 
 study of the great currents of trade that flow round 
 our globe, slowly uniting and civilizing nations, is 
 at least as profitable a mental exercise as the study 
 of the rise and fall of dynasties, or the gossip of 
 court circulars. The question of Protection and 
 Free Trade would be settled for ever by a single 
 generation of scientifically educated merchants. 
 A manufacturer would surely not be a worse man 
 of business for possessing a scientific knowledge 
 of the goods he makes or traffics in. Was 
 Wedgewood a worse potter for possessing the 
 artistic taste which led him to employ Flaxman to 
 design his pitchers ? It was the foundation of his 
 fortune. 
 
48 THE RIGHT USE OF BOOKS. 
 
 You say that a merchant can be a good merchant 
 without such knowledge. I don't doubt it ; but 
 will he be a worse merchant with it ? I assume 
 that in desiring to hear of home study, you intimate 
 that you do not want to devote body and soul to 
 mere money-getting drudgery. You want to com- 
 bine study with a life of business : well, make your 
 business your study, not merely with the view of 
 making more money by it, though that would 
 seem to be the directest way, but with the view 
 of elevating your business into a means of culture. 
 When the merchant and the manufacturer shall 
 prepare themselves for and pursue their calling in 
 that spirit, they will be reckoned members of liberal 
 professions ; just as the barber-surgeon has grown 
 into a Master of Arts, a Doctor of Science, and a 
 member of royal colleges of medicine and surgery ; 
 just as the vast extent and complicated nature of 
 modern mechanical works, demanding as they do 
 an elaborate scientific training on the part of those 
 superintending them, have already raised engineer- 
 ing to the dignity of a liberal profession. 
 
 One of the greatest of England's living preachers 
 has thus described a too common type of merchant: 
 " In every society, and especially in a country like 
 our own, there are those who derive their chief 
 
THE RIGHT USE OF BOOKS. 49 
 
 characteristic from what they have, who are always 
 spoken of in terms of revenue, and of whom you 
 would not be likely to think much but for the large 
 account that stands on the world's ledger in their 
 name. In themselves, detached from their favorite 
 sphere, you would notice nothing wise or winning. 
 At home, possibly a dry and withered heart; among 
 associates, a selfish and mistrustful talk; in the 
 council, a style of low and ignoble sentiment ; at 
 church, a formal, perhaps an irreverent dulness, 
 betray a barren nature, and offer you only points of 
 repulsion, so far as the humanities are concerned. 
 And you are amazed to think that you are looking 
 on the idols of the Exchange. Their greatness 
 comes out in the affairs of bargain and sale, to 
 which their faculties seem fairly apprenticed for 
 life. If they speak of the past, it is in memory of 
 its losses and its gains ; if of the future, it is to an-" 
 ticipate its incomings and its investments. The 
 whole chronology of their life is divided according 
 to the stages of their fortune ; their children are 
 interesting to them principally as their heirs ; and 
 the making of their will fulfils the main conception 
 of being ready for their death. And so completely 
 do they paint the grand idea of their life on the 
 imagination of all who know them, that when they 
 
 4 
 
SO THE RIGHT USE OF BOOKS. 
 
 die the mammon-image cannot be removed, and it 
 is the fate of the money, not of the man, of which 
 we are most apt to think. Having put vast prizes 
 in the funds, but only unprofitable blanks in the 
 admiration and the hearts of us, they leave behind 
 nothing but their property, or, as it is expressively 
 termed, their 'effects' the thing which they 
 caused, the main result of their having been 
 alive." * 
 
 We are all familiar with the original of this pic- 
 ture of the uneducated man of wealth ; and it is a 
 commonplace of the pulpits though the great 
 preacher I have just been quoting is far above such 
 narrow-mindedness that this is the natural and 
 inevitable result upon the character, of commercial 
 pursuits. But no opinion can be more unjust. 
 Commerce and manufactures have expanded in 
 these modern days into a field for the exercise of 
 some of the very highest faculties of the human 
 mind, and demand its very highest training. Let 
 me contrast with this a different picture. 
 
 Speaking of the late accomplished editor of the 
 London " Economist," Mr. Bagehot, a man who 
 combined so remarkably a scientific knowledge of 
 finance with great literary accomplishments, Mr. 
 
 * James Martineau's Endeavors after the Christian Life, p. 316. 
 
THE RIGHT USE OF BOOKS. 51 
 
 Hutton says : " Every one who knows his writings 
 in the ' Economist ' knows how he ridiculed the 
 common impression that the chief service of the 
 capitalist class that by which they earn their 
 profits is merely what the late Mr. Senior used 
 to call ' abstinence ; ' that is, the practice of defer- 
 ring their enjoyment of their savings, in order that 
 those savings may multiply themselves ; and how 
 wholly inadequate he thought it merely to add that, 
 when capitalists are themselves managers, they dis- 
 charge the task of ' superintending labor ' as well. 
 Bagehot held that the capitalists of a commercial 
 country do not merely the saving and the work of 
 foremen in superintending labor, but all the difficult 
 intellectual work of commerce besides ; and are so 
 little appreciated as they are, chiefly because they 
 are a dumb class, who are seldom equal to explain- 
 ing to others the complex processes by which they 
 estimate the wants of the community and conceive 
 how best to supply them. He maintained that 
 capitalists are the great generals of commerce ; 
 that they plan its whole strategy, determine its 
 tactics, direct its commissariat, and incur the danger 
 of great defeats, as well as earn, if they do not al- 
 ways gain, the credit of great victories." * 
 
 * Fortnightly Review, Oct., 1877, p. 480. 
 
52 THE RIGHT USE OF BOOKS. 
 
 Mr. Bagehot's description of the leaders in com- 
 merce and manufactures as a dumb class is so far 
 true that unhappily we still have to look upon Mr. 
 Bagehot himself as an unusual phenomenon ; and 
 are still more astonished when a London banker, 
 without university education, writes an elaborate 
 and admirable history. But is not the wonder 
 rather that in these days these should be unusual 
 phenomena? And would they continue so, if the 
 pursuit of commerce were looked upon, as it should 
 be, as a liberal and liberalizing profession, with its 
 own appropriate course of liberal professional train- 
 ing. We express no surprise when we find in the 
 descendant of the feudal baron a cultivated and ac- 
 complished gentleman, though in all probability the 
 founder of his family could not write his name. 
 
 And in truth, just as the vastness of modern 
 mechanical enterprises has raised engineering into 
 a liberal profession, so the demands of modern 
 commerce are so great that even for the sake of 
 material success alone these demands must be 
 met by higher forms of education. On this point, 
 Mr. Matthew Arnold has raised a warning voice in 
 his recent valuable Report on the Higher Education 
 of Germany. 
 
 " If the English business class," he says, " can 
 
THE RIGHT USE OF BOOKS. S3 
 
 listen to testimonies that, in the judgment of others 
 at any rate, its inferior education is beginning to 
 threaten it with practical inconvenience, such testi- 
 monies are formidably plentiful. A diplomatist of 
 great experience, not an Englishman, but much at- 
 tached to England, who, in the course of the acqui- 
 sition and the construction of the Italian lines of 
 railroad, had been brought much in contact with 
 young men of business of all nations, told me that 
 the young Englishman of this class was manifestly 
 inferior, both in manners and instruction, to the cor- 
 responding young men of other countries. . . . And 
 the Swiss and Germans aver, if you question them 
 as to the benefit they have got from the Realschulen 
 and Polytechnicums, that in every part of the world 
 their men of business, trained in those schools, are 
 beating the English when they meet on equal 
 terms as to capital ; and that when English capital, 
 as so often happens, is superior, the advantage of 
 the Swiss or the German in instruction tends more 
 and more to balance this superiority. M. Duruy, 
 till lately the French Minister of Public Instruc- 
 tion, confirms this averment, not as against England 
 in especial, but generally, by saying that all over 
 the Continent the young North German, or the 
 young Swiss of Zurich or Basle, is seizing, by rea- 
 
54 THE RIGHT USE OF BOOKS. 
 
 son of his better instruction, a confidence and a 
 command in business which the young men of no 
 other nation can dispute with him." * 
 
 To the same effect, Prof. Goldwin Smith, writing 
 on University Extension, says: "The change to 
 which, and the question arising out of it, we wish 
 here emphatically to call attention, is the increased 
 demand for university culture produced of late by 
 the immense development of the wealthy class, 
 particularly in the great centres of manufacture 
 and trade. ... It is necessary that the chiefs of 
 English industry should have culture. It is neces- 
 sary for themselves, if they would truly and wor- 
 thily enjoy their riches. A man of business in 
 America being asked why, having already amassed 
 enormous wealth and having no children, he still, 
 in the evening of life, went on building saw-mills, 
 answered : ' I have no education. I can find no pleas- 
 ure in reading, hardly any in conversation. I have 
 no taste for any thing, no interest in any subject. 
 What can I do but build saw-mills ? ' Still more 
 necessary is it for the nation that the leaders of its 
 industrial society, and the arbiters of the questions 
 which it is evident industrial society in the coming 
 
 * Arnold's "Higher Schools and Universities in Germany," 
 p. 210. 
 
THE RIGHT USE OF BOOKS. 55 
 
 years will present, should possess the openness of 
 mind, the intellectual elevation, and the breadth of 
 view which, as a general rule, culture alone can 
 give." * 
 
 And, whether in the college or the scientific 
 school, it is very manifest that that culture must 
 take on new forms, adapted to the new circum- 
 stances ; that a youthful training in Latin and 
 Greek grammars is no more its proper instrument 
 than would be a training in the folios of the medi- 
 aeval schoolmen. The high promise of many a 
 youthful life has been blasted through the perverse 
 efforts of pedants making it the victim of their un- 
 suitable training.! 
 
 In laying out the true liberal education of the 
 merchant, the manufacturer, and the man of prac- 
 tical affairs, the natural and physical sciences afford 
 one wide and ever-enlarging field of study ; while, 
 as a good patriot and good citizen, he is bound to 
 make himself acquainted with political science,:}: 
 
 * Fortnightly Review, January, 1878. 
 
 t It excites one's indignation to see how, in the so-called High 
 Schools all over the country, the education of the great majority 
 of the pupils is sacrificed to the interests of a mere handful of 
 youths who are preparing for a college examination in the Latin 
 and Greek classics. I speak from a large experience in the 
 examination of the victims. 
 
 \ The rapid and decisive success of that new experiment in the 
 higher education, the " Ecole Libre des Sciences Politiques," in 
 
56 THE RIGHT USE OF BOOKS. 
 
 political history, and political economy. What is 
 it that at this moment threatens an honest and sol- 
 vent country with the disgrace of repudiation, but 
 the knavery of demagogues of whom I fear 
 Massachusetts has the bad eminence of producing 
 the most impudent and worst acting on the dense 
 ignorance of the mass of the people, and even of 
 their fellow-legislators ? Would such a state of 
 things have existed if the occupation of the mer- 
 chant, in all its varieties, were looked upon, as it 
 should be, as a liberal profession, and prepared for 
 with professional zeal and accuracy ? 
 
 Take, then, for your hobby whatever pleases you 
 the more remote from your daily calling the 
 better, because the more refreshing. Unhappy is 
 the man who cannot give himself rest and change 
 and recreation by mounting a hobby. Be it butter- 
 flies or microscopes or Jersey cattle, have a hobby ; 
 the best you can afford, the one that gives you 
 most amusement. But that is amusement. Study 
 your profession, not merely that you may make 
 more money, for that would be to be illiberal, 
 but that you may make your calling the instrument 
 for liberalizing your mind. Do not degrade your 
 
 Paris, is one among many evidences of the latent demand that 
 exists for new and better educational organization and machinery. 
 
THE RIGHT USE OF BOOKS. 57 
 
 characters as men of business by imitating that 
 most illiberal of all illiberal kinds of study, albeit 
 carried on at universities, the cramming for com- 
 petitive examinations, the headlong race for the 
 money prizes of college scholarships and fellow- 
 ships. 
 
 And this will lead to one further result : it will 
 teach the much-needed lesson of concentration ; the 
 lesson that, if we are to accomplish anything in 
 this world, we must not dissipate our forces. It is 
 the bad farmer who just scratches the surface of too 
 many acres ; the good general who fights it out on 
 the same line. The main reason for the ill success 
 of our reading and our education is because -they 
 lack point, lack system, lack concentration. So 
 that I am inclined to think that the time is coming 
 when the very opposite view will be taken of what 
 constitutes a liberal education from what has here- 
 tofore prevailed ; and instead of its being thought to 
 be a vague and indefinite something, made up of 
 disconnected ingredients, whose chief characteristic 
 is that they are as remote as possible from the 
 duties and responsibilities of life, he will come 
 hereafter to be considered to have the best liberal 
 education who, having discovered betimes what he 
 was best fitted to do in life, shall have prepared 
 
58 THE RIGHT USE OF BOOKS. 
 
 himself in the soundest and most perfect manner 
 to do that work in the broadest and most 
 liberal spirit. Then the antiquated superstition 
 will disappear, that there is a necessary antagonism 
 between what is practical and what is liberal. 
 Then the merchant will not be to imitate a 
 phrase of Mr. Emerson's a trader, but a man 
 trading ; the engineer will not be an engineer, but 
 a man engineering ; the farmer not a farmer, but a 
 man farming. And why a man farming, or a man 
 trading, should be inferior in dignity to a man 
 preaching, or a man healing the sick, or a man plead- 
 ing a cause, it passes my wisdom to discover. 
 
 I have no method of study to prescribe to you. 
 There are as many methods as there are men. 
 The mind, if it has any true vitality, is a magnet 
 which selects unerringly from the heap of knowl- 
 edge those grains which are in vital relation with 
 itself ; but, unlike the magnet, every mind has its 
 own specialty of attraction. But the metaphor is 
 incomplete : for it must not only attract particles 
 of knowledge into a heap, it must assimilate 
 them into a whole ; and though this is done partly 
 in the poet's " wise passiveness," * yet that wise 
 
 * " Nor less I deem that there are powers 
 
 Which of themselves our minds impress : 
 That we can feed this mind of ours 
 
 In a wise passiveness." WORDSWORTH. 
 
THE RIGHT USE OF BOOKS. 59 
 
 passiveness is never earned save by much and wise 
 activity. But I say the mind must have vitality ; 
 and I sadly fear, nay, I am very sure, that the true 
 vitality of many a young mind is paralyzed, not de- 
 veloped, by our dead mechanical school-training. 
 
 Do not imagine that you can find study easy, or 
 that, as busy and occupied men, you can do very 
 much of it. It is the easiest thing in the world to 
 waste time over books. The fundamental error about 
 reading is to suppose it easy. The tired man reads, 
 and is not conscious that he is learning nothing, sim- 
 ply because his mental force is already exhausted ; 
 or he throws down his book in disgust, and calls 
 himself stupid and a dunce, unconscious all the 
 while that throughout the day he may have been 
 exerting mental powers and mental activity which 
 the best student might well afford to envy. Such 
 are the contradictory superstitions about books, 
 on the one hand that they are mysterious compli- 
 cated machines, which it takes a lifetime to learn to 
 manage ; on the other that they are the fit recrea- 
 tion for exhausted minds. One view is as far from 
 truth as the other. Books are tools of knowledge, 
 like any other tools. To be a great scholar or a 
 great writer is as difficult as to be a great merchant 
 or a great captain, no more, no less. To write a 
 
60 THE RIGHT USE OF BOOKS. 
 
 good book requires the same investment of time 
 and thought and patient labor as to make money, 
 or build a bridge, or plead a cause successfully, 
 no more, no less. There have been a few great 
 geniuses in the world who have written very great 
 books. So there have been a few great generals, a 
 few great statesmen. Men of genius in all depart- 
 ments are very rare ; the makers of great fortunes are 
 not many. But the majority of books are not mi- 
 raculous performances. Given the requisite leisure, 
 the requisite command of materials, a reasonable 
 amount of brains, and the rest is, as everywhere else 
 in human affairs, a matter of patient, persevering 
 labor. And as is the making of books, so is the 
 reading of them, a matter of time and patient 
 perseverance. 
 
 I cannot close without giving you one little piece 
 of purely practical advice. I advise you all to be- 
 come what I am myself, devoted disciples of Captain 
 Cuttle, and to bind on your brows his admirable 
 maxim, " When found, make a note of." Witty 
 old Thomas Fuller says : " Adventure not all thy 
 learning in one bottom, but divide it between thy 
 memory and thy note-books. ... A commonplace 
 book contains many notions in garrison, whence 
 an owner may draw ouj: an army into the field 
 
THE RIGHT USE OF BOOKS. 6 1 
 
 on competent warning/' This is one of those 
 notions which I have kept in the garrison of my 
 note-book for many years. The great secret of 
 reading consists in this, that it does not matter so 
 much what we read or how we read it, as what we 
 think and how we think it. Reading is only the 
 fuel ; and, the mind once on fire, any and all 
 material will feed the flame, provided only it have 
 any combustible matter in it. And we cannot tell 
 from what quarter the next material will come. 
 The thought we need, the facts we are in search of, 
 may make their appearance in the corner of the 
 newspaper, or in some forgotten volume long ago 
 consigned to dust and oblivion. Hawthorne, in 
 the parlor of a country inn, on a rainy day, could 
 find mental nutriment in an old directory. That 
 accomplished philologist, the late Lord Strangford, 
 could find ample amusement for an hour's delay at 
 a railway station in tracing out the etymology of 
 the names in Bradshaw. The mind that is not 
 awake and alive will find a library a barren wil- 
 derness. Now, gather up the scraps and fragments 
 of thought on whatever subject you may be 
 studying, for of course by a note-book. I do 
 not mean a mere receptacle for odds and ends, a 
 literary dust-bin, but acquire the habit of gath- 
 
62 THE RIGHT USE OF BOOKS. 
 
 ering every thing whenever and wherever you 
 find it, that belongs in your own line or lines of 
 study, and you will be surprised to see how such 
 fragments will arrange themselves into an orderly 
 whole by the very organizing power of your own 
 thinking, acting in a definite direction. This is a 
 true process of self-education ; but you see it is no 
 mechanical process of mere aggregation. It re- 
 quires activity of thought, but without that what 
 is any reading but mere passive amusement ? And 
 it requires method. I have myself a sort of literary 
 book-keeping. I keep a day-book, and at my leisure 
 I post my literary accounts, bringing together in 
 proper groups the fruits of much casual reading. 
 
 But let him who would succeed in knowing any 
 thing be careful of one rule, not to meddle 
 in his studies with subjects that don't concern 
 him. He may read for amusement what he 
 pleases : in his studies let him keep himself to his 
 chosen line and keep order among his acquisitions, 
 if he would have his intellectual wealth accumulate. 
 He need not potter about to find the very best 
 thing : let him take the best available. A poor 
 book a very erroneous book is sometimes the 
 very best provocative of thought. Who is better 
 for this than Mr. Buckle, and who is fuller of crude 
 
THE RIGHT USE OF BOOKS. 63 
 
 paradoxes and undigested knowledge ? Of him 
 unfortunately that was true which Bentley said of 
 Warburton, that "there never was a man with so 
 great an appetite and so bad a digestion." You 
 say Mr. Buckle himself was a great commonplace- 
 book maker. Yes, but he didn't half digest his 
 commonplaces. Take them and digest them 
 yourself. 
 
 And I have one more thing to say, that noth- 
 ing can be done in study without a spirit of fear- 
 less independence. He who is not prepared to set 
 Truth above all sect or party, or popular prejudice 
 or mere traditional belief, will never find her, and 
 may as well abandon the search. And in these 
 days of warring faiths and contradictory philoso- 
 phies, this is hard. But study is not easy ; think- 
 ing is not easy. Whatever is worth having in this 
 world has got to be paid for. Let me only recom- 
 mend that your independence be the thoughtful 
 independence of a modest man, not the brawling 
 aggressive independence of a fool ; and let me give 
 it as my deepest conviction, that it is only by the 
 exercise of such a modest and manly independence 
 that we can attain to that calmness of faith that 
 enables us to bear the troubles of this life, and 
 secures to us a belief in a better one. And you 
 
64 THE RIGHT USE OF BOOKS. 
 
 will accept this advice perhaps the more readily 
 from one who knows well the responsibility he 
 incurs in giving it, but who, in a life which has had 
 its full share of disappointments and sorrows, has 
 never repented of having acted upon it himself; 
 and who, now that his hair has grown gray, can 
 say in all honesty that, though he knows much less 
 than at your age he thought he knew, yet believes 
 and hopes a great deal more ; and who sees no bet- 
 ter way for us, in these days when the foundations of 
 the great deep are moved, and the old systems, but 
 not old truths, are vanishing, than to possess our 
 souls in patience, think modestly but independently 
 for ourselves, and seek unweariedly for the light 
 which, when sought for rightly, will never fail us. 
 
 And, studied in this spirit, (who can overestimate 
 the value of good books, those ships of thought, 
 as Bacon so finely calls them, voyaging through the 
 sea of time, and carrying their precious freight so 
 safely from generation to generation ? Here are 
 the finest minds giving us the best wisdom of pres- 
 ent and all past ages ; here are intellects gifted far 
 beyond ours, ready to give us the results of lifetimes 
 of patient thought ; imaginations open to the beauty 
 of the universe, far beyond what it is given us to 
 behold ; characters whom we can only vainly hope 
 
THE RIGHT USE OF BOOKS. 65 
 
 to imitate, but whom it is one of the highest privi- 
 leges of life to know. Here they all are ; and to 
 learn to know them is the privilege of the educated 
 man. To travel life's journey without knowing 
 them is to be uneducated ; to be taught to pretend 
 to know them, to know the surface and shell of 
 them, without ever penetrating to the reality, 
 that is to be 7/zz.reducated ; and there is no country 
 in the world where so much of that miseducation 
 goes on as our own. However much or however 
 little may be our acquaintance with books, let us 
 strive to make it a real acquaintance, and we shall 
 find few better companions than the best of these 
 silent ones. 
 
 Cambridge : Press of John Wilson & Son. 
 
14 DAY USE 
 
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