to fill one of those blank pages; but I long to speak a
word or two, as the Pilgrim did to Neighbour Pliable, upon the glories
that await those who will pass through the narrow wicket-gate. On this,
if one can find anything useful to say, it may be chiefly from the
memory of the waste labour and pitiful stumbling in the dark which fill
up so much of the travail that one is fain to call one's own education.
We who have wandered in the wastes so long, and lost so much of our
lives in our wandering, may at least offer warnings to younger
wayfarers, as men who in thorny paths have borne the heat and burden of
the day might give a clue to their journey to those who have yet a
morning and a noon. As I look back and think of those cataracts of
printed stuff which honest compositors set up, meaning, let us trust, no
harm, and which at least found them in daily bread,--printed stuff which
I and the rest of us, to our infinitely small profit, have consumed with
our eyes, not even making an honest living of it, but much impairing our
substance,--I could almost reckon the printing press as amongst the
scourges of mankind. I am grown a wiser and a sadder man, importunate,
like that Ancient Mariner, to tell each blithe wedding guest the tale of
his shipwreck on the infinite sea of printers' ink, as one escaped by
mercy and grace from the region where there is water, water, everywhere,
and not a drop to drink.

A man of power, who has got more from books than most of his
contemporaries, once said: "Form a habit of reading, do not mind what
you read; the reading of better books will come when you have a habit of
reading the inferior." We need not accept this _obiter dictum_[25] of
Lord Sherbrooke. A habit of reading idly debilitates and corrupts the
mind for all wholesome reading; the habit of reading wisely is one of
the most difficult habits to acquire, needing strong resolution and
infinite pains; and reading for mere reading's sake, instead of for the
sake of the good we gain from reading, is one of the worst and commonest
and most unwholesome habits we have. And so our inimitable humorist has
made delightful fun of the solid books,--which no gentleman's library
should be without,--the Humes, Gibbons, Adam Smiths, which, he says, are
not books at all, and prefers some "kindhearted play-book," or at times
the _Town and County Magazine_. Poor Lamb has not a little to answer
for, in the revived relish for garbage unearthed from old the