Middle Ages, by the celebrated author of `Tittle-Tol-Tan,' to appear
in monthly parts; a great rush; don't all come together." All this
they read with saucer eyes, and erect and primitive curiosity, and with
unwearied gizzard, whose corrugations even yet need no sharpening, just
as some little four-year-old bencher his two-cent gilt-covered
edition of Cinderella--without any improvement, that I can see, in the
pronunciation, or accent, or emphasis, or any more skill in extracting
or inserting the moral. The result is dulness of sight, a stagnation of
the vital circulations, and a general deliquium and sloughing off of all
the intellectual faculties. This sort of gingerbread is baked daily and
more sedulously than pure wheat or rye-and-Indian in almost every oven,
and finds a surer market.

The best books are not read even by those who are called good readers.
What does our Concord culture amount to? There is in this town, with a
very few exceptions, no taste for the best or for very good books even
in English literature, whose words all can read and spell. Even the
college-bred and so-called liberally educated men here and elsewhere
have really little or no acquaintance with the English classics; and
as for the recorded wisdom of mankind, the ancient classics and Bibles,
which are accessible to all who will know of them, there are the
feeblest efforts anywhere made to become acquainted with them. I know a
woodchopper, of middle age, who takes a French paper, not for news as he
says, for he is above that, but to "keep himself in practice," he being
a Canadian by birth; and when I ask him what he considers the best thing
he can do in this world, he says, beside this, to keep up and add to
his English. This is about as much as the college-bred generally do or
aspire to do, and they take an English paper for the purpose. One who
has just come from reading perhaps one of the best English books will
find how many with whom he can converse about it? Or suppose he comes
from reading a Greek or Latin classic in the original, whose praises are
familiar even to the so-called illiterate; he will find nobody at all
to speak to, but must keep silence about it. Indeed, there is hardly the
professor in our colleges, who, if he has mastered the difficulties of
the language, has proportionally mastered the difficulties of the wit
and poetry of a Greek poet, and has any sympathy to impart to the
alert and heroic reader; and as for the sacr