rmation," is in
reality a most desirable and a not too common form of mental appetite. I
have no sympathy whatever with the horror he expresses at the "incessant
accumulation of fresh books." I am never tempted to regret that
Gutenberg was born into the world. I care not at all though the
"cataract of printed stuff," as Mr. Harrison calls it, should flow and
still flow on until the catalogues of our libraries should make
libraries themselves. I am prepared, indeed, to express sympathy almost
amounting to approbation for any one who would check all writing which
was _not_ intended for the printer. I pay no tribute of grateful
admiration to those who have oppressed mankind with the dubious blessing
of the penny post. But the ground of the distinction is plain. We are
always obliged to read our letters, and are sometimes obliged to answer
them. But who obliges us to wade through the piled-up lumber of an
ancient library, or to skim more than we like off the frothy foolishness
poured forth in ceaseless streams by our circulating libraries? Dead
dunces do not importune us; Grub Street does not ask for a reply by
return of post. Even their living successors need hurt no one who
possesses the very moderate degree of social courage required to make
the admission that he has not read the last new novel or the current
number of a fashionable magazine.

But this is not the view of Mr. Harrison. To him the position of any one
having free access to a large library is fraught with issues so
tremendous that, in order adequately to describe it, he has to seek for
parallels in two of the most highly-wrought episodes in fiction: the
Ancient Mariner, becalmed and thirsting on the tropic ocean; Bunyan's
Christian in the crisis of spiritual conflict. But there is here,
surely, some error and some exaggeration. Has miscellaneous reading all
the dreadful consequences which Mr. Harrison depicts? Has it any of
them? His declaration about the intellect being "gorged and enfeebled"
by the absorption of too much information, expresses no doubt with great
vigor an analogy, for which there is high authority, between the human
mind and the human stomach; but surely it is an analogy which may be
pressed too far. I have often heard of the individual whose excellent
natural gifts have been so overloaded with huge masses of undigested and
indigestible learning that they have had no chance of healthy
development. But though I have often heard of this pers