ess censor. His _index expurgatorius_ includes, so far as I
can discover, the whole catalogue of the British Museum, with the
exception of a small remnant which might easily be contained in about
thirty or forty volumes. The vast remainder he contemplates with
feelings apparently not merely of indifference, but of active aversion.
He surveys the boundless and ever-increasing waste of books with
emotions compounded of disgust and dismay. He is almost tempted to say
in his haste that the invention of printing has been an evil one for
humanity. In the habits of miscellaneous reading, born of a too easy
access to libraries, circulating and other, he sees many soul-destroying
tendencies; and his ideal reader would appear to be a gentleman who
rejects with a lofty scorn all in history that does not pass for being
first-rate in importance, and all in literature that is not admitted to
be first-rate in quality.

Now, I am far from denying that this theory is plausible. Of all that
has been written, it is certain that the professed student can master
but an infinitesimal fraction. Of that fraction the ordinary reader can
master but a very small part. What advice, then, can be better than to
select for study the few masterpieces that have come down to us, and to
treat as non-existent the huge but undistinguished remainder? We are
like travelers passing hastily through some ancient city; filled with
memorials of many generations and more than one great civilization. Our
time is short. Of what may be seen we can only see at best but a
trifling fragment. Let us then take care that we waste none of our
precious moments upon that which is less than the most excellent. So
preaches Mr. Frederic Harrison; and when a doctrine which put thus may
seem not only wise but obvious, is further supported by such assertions
that habits of miscellaneous reading "close the mind to what is
spiritually sustaining" by "stuffing it with what is simply curious," or
that such methods of study are worse than no habits of study at all
because they "gorge and enfeeble" the mind by "excess in that which
cannot nourish," I almost feel that in venturing to dissent from it, I
may be attacking not merely the teaching of common sense but the
inspirations of a high morality.

Yet I am convinced that for most persons the views thus laid down by Mr.
Harrison are wrong; and that what he describes, with characteristic
vigor, as "an impotent voracity for desultory info