ite wrong.
In matters literary, works have no saving efficacy. He has only half
learnt the art of reading who has not added to it the even more refined
accomplishments of skipping and of skimming; and the first step has
hardly been taken in the direction of making literature a pleasure until
interest in the subject, and not a desire to spare (so to speak) the
author's feelings, or to accomplish an appointed task, is the prevailing
motive of the reader.

I have now reached, not indeed the end of my subject, which I have
scarcely begun, but the limits inexorably set by the circumstances under
which it is treated. Yet I am unwilling to conclude without meeting an
objection to my method of dealing with it, which has I am sure been
present to the minds of not a few who have been good enough to listen to
me with patience. It will be said that I have ignored the higher
functions of literature; that I have degraded it from its rightful
place, by discussing only certain ways in which it may minister to the
entertainment of an idle hour, leaving wholly out of sight its
contributions to what Mr. Harrison calls our "spiritual sustenance."
Now, this is partly because the first of these topics and not the second
was the avowed subject of my address; but it is partly because I am
deliberately of opinion that it is the pleasures and not the profits,
spiritual or temporal, of literature which most require to be preached
in the ear of the ordinary reader. I hold indeed the faith that all such
pleasures minister to the development of much that is best in
man--mental and moral; but the charm is broken and the object lost if
the remote consequence is consciously pursued to the exclusion of the
immediate end. It will not, I suppose, be denied that the beauties of
nature are at least as well qualified to minister to our higher needs as
are the beauties of literature. Yet we do not say we are going to walk
to the top of such and such a hill in order to drink in "spiritual
sustenance." We say we are going to look at the view. And I am convinced
that this, which is the natural and simple way of considering literature
as well as nature, is also the true way. The habit of always requiring
some reward for knowledge beyond the knowledge itself, be that reward
some material prize or be it what is vaguely called self-improvement, is
one with which I confess I have little sympathy, fostered though it is
by the whole scheme of our modern education. Do n