l companionship,
and I may become a cultivated man, though excluded from what is called
the best society in the place where I live."

"With the dead there is no rivalry," says Macaulay. "In the dead there
is no change. Plato is never sullen; Cervantes is never petulant;
Demosthenes never comes unseasonably; Dante never stays too long; no
difference of political opinion can alienate Cicero; no heresy can
excite the horror of Bossuet."

"Heed not the idle assertion that literary pursuits will disqualify you
for the active business of life," says Alexander H. Everett. "Reject it
as a mere imagination, inconsistent with principle, unsupported by
experience."

The habit of reading may become morbid. There is a novel-reading
disease. There are people who are almost as much tied to their novels as
an intemperate man is tied to his bottle. The more of these novels they
read, the weaker their minds become. They remember nothing; they read
for the stimulus; their reasoning powers become weaker and weaker, their
memory more treacherous. The mind is ruined for healthy intellectual
food. They have no taste for history or biography, or anything but
cheap, trashy, sensational novels.

The passive reception of other men's thoughts is not education. Beware
of intellectual dram drinking and intellectual dissipation. It is
emasculating. Beware of the book which does not make you determined to
go and do something and be something in the world.

The great difference between the American graduate and the graduates
from the English universities is that the latter have not read many
books superficially, but a few books well. The American graduate has a
smattering of many books, but has not become master of any. The same is
largely true of readers in general; they want to know a little of
everything. They want to read all the latest publications, good, bad and
indifferent, if it is only new. As a rule our people want light reading,
"something to read" that will take up the attention, kill time on the
railroad or at home. As a rule English people read more substantial
books, older books, books which have established their right to exist.
They are not so eager for "recent publications."

Joseph Cook advises youth to always make notes of their reading. Mr.
Cook uses the margins of his books for his notes, and marks all of his
own books very freely, so that every volume in his library becomes a
notebook. He advises all young men and young wo