ing and deploring the hurry, the want of application, the want
of restraint which prevail in the present day. The hurrying reader, on
the one hand, and the indolent reader, on the other, are the types to be
avoided with the most scrupulous care. We suffer from an excess of
opportunities, and require to be constantly reminded that 'it is
impossible to give any method to our reading till we get nerve enough to
reject.'

If we look through the long list of English literary celebrities, we
cannot but be struck with the large proportion of those who have
received little or no regular education in their early days, and whose
opportunities of study have been of the scantiest. Ben Jonson working as
a bricklayer with his book in his pocket: Wm. Cobbett reading his
hard-earned 'Tale of a Tub' under the haystack, or mastering his grammar
when he was a private soldier on the pay of 6d. a day; when 'the edge of
my berth or that of my guard-bed was my seat to study in; my knapsack
was my bookcase; a bit of board lying on my lap was my writing table,
and the task did not demand anything like a year of my life:' Gifford,
as a cobbler's apprentice, working out his problems on scraps of waste
leather; or Bunyan, confined for twelve years in Bedford jail with only
his Bible and 'Foxe's Book of Martyrs,' are but a few among scores of
instances which will immediately suggest themselves.

There are many persons who are possessed with a strange and
unaccountable conviction, that to read a book and to write a book are
processes which require little, if any, previous training or
preparation. The one error is sufficiently obvious to all who pay any
attention to the great mass of cheap literature which is pouring from
our printing-presses; the other is less easy of detection. 'The first
lesson in reading is that which teaches us to distinguish between
literature and merely printed matter,' is the admirable maxim laid down
by Mr. Lowell, and this is one of the essential points in which the
personal influence of an experienced friend is of inestimable value. As
the latent beauties of some great masterpiece of art unfold themselves
to our eye under the guidance of a Kugler or a Ruskin, and we are thus
enabled to detect their presence or their absence in the works of other
hands and other schools, so in the masterpieces of literature the
realization of the points, wherein the chief merits of each lie, places
us in a position to form a standard--to p