reader ought
to cultivate his or her taste so that good books will appeal to it, and
that trash won't. But after this point has once been reached, the needs
of each reader must be met in a fashion that will appeal to those needs.
Personally the books by which I have profited infinitely more than
by any others have been those in which profit was a by-product of the
pleasure; that is, I read them because I enjoyed them, because I liked
reading them, and the profit came in as part of the enjoyment.

Of course each individual is apt to have some special tastes in which
he cannot expect that any but a few friends will share. Now, I am very
proud of my big-game library. I suppose there must be many big-game
libraries in Continental Europe, and possibly in England, more extensive
than mine, but I have not happened to come across any such library in
this country. Some of the originals go back to the sixteenth century,
and there are copies or reproductions of the two or three most famous
hunting books of the Middle Ages, such as the Duke of York's translation
of Gaston Phoebus, and the queer book of the Emperor Maximilian. It is
only very occasionally that I meet any one who cares for any of these
books. On the other hand, I expect to find many friends who will turn
naturally to some of the old or the new books of poetry or romance or
history to which we of the household habitually turn. Let me add that
ours is in no sense a collector's library. Each book was procured
because some one of the family wished to read it. We could never afford
to take overmuch thought for the outsides of books; we were too much
interested in their insides.

Now and then I am asked as to "what books a statesman should read," and
my answer is, poetry and novels--including short stories under the
head of novels. I don't mean that he should read only novels and modern
poetry. If he cannot also enjoy the Hebrew prophets and the Greek
dramatists, he should be sorry. He ought to read interesting books on
history and government, and books of science and philosophy; and really
good books on these subjects are as enthralling as any fiction ever
written in prose or verse. Gibbon and Macaulay, Herodotus, Thucydides
and Tacitus, the Heimskringla, Froissart, Joinville and Villehardouin,
Parkman and Mahan, Mommsen and Ranke--why! there are scores and scores
of solid histories, the best in the world, which are as absorbing as
the best of all the novels, and of as