elf wondering what Mr. Money's daughters were like,
and wishing he had observed them more closely in Paris, and asking
whether it was possible that girls could be pretty and interesting with
such an odd name.

DRIFT-WOOD.

THE SPINNING OF LITERATURE.

"Of making many books there is no end," sighed a preacher in times when
industrious readers might presumably have kept the run of current
literature. Our advantage over Solomon is the utter hopelessness of
reading the new works, not to speak of standard acres in the libraries.
In this holiday season, chief hatching-time of books, it is pleasant to
see them flocking out in numbers so vast. "Germany published 11,315
works of all classes in 1873, 12,070 in 1874, 12,516 in 1875." We rub
our hands over statistics like these, because they check any mad
ambition to master German contemporary literature; and besides, there
are "1,622 newspapers and periodical publications in the German empire."
As for the new works in our own tongue, the only way of getting through
them would obviously be to do as legislators do with the laws they
pass--"read them by title."

Earlier ages, that had not reached this happy hopelessness, produced
great bookworms. When the old monks had devoured their convent
libraries, they were fain to pay vast sums occasionally for extra
reading, as St. Jerome did for the works of Origen; whereas now a
reviewer can only glance at his "complimentary copies" of new books, so
numerous are they. Bacon argued against abridgements, as if the body of
literature could be compassed in his day. A century or two ago there
were prodigious Porsons and Johnsons; but such gluttons are now rare. It
is true that Mill, between his fourth and eighth years, read in the
original all Herodotus and a good part of Xenophon, Lucian, Isocrates,
Diogenes Laertius, Plato, and the Annual Register, besides Hume, Gibbon,
Robertson, Miller, Mosheim, and other historians; while before the age
of thirteen he had mastered the whole of Homer, Virgil, Horace, Sallust,
Thucydides, Aristotle's Rhetoric and Logic, Tacitus, Juvenal,
Quinctilian, parts of Ovid, Terence, Nepos, Caesar, Livy, Lucretius,
Cicero, Polybius, and many other authors, besides learning geometry,
algebra, and the differential calculus. But that lad was crammed
scientifically like a Strasbourg goose; our ordinary modern writers are
not walking cyclopaedias, and are rarely prodigious readers. It is no
longer a reproach eve