atrical
dungheaps. Be it jest or earnest, I have little patience with the
Elia-tic philosophy of the frivolous. Why do we still suffer the
traditional hypocrisy about the dignity of literature--literature, I
mean, in the gross, which includes about equal parts of what is useful
and what is useless? Why are books as books, writers as writers, readers
as readers, meritorious, apart from any good in them, or anything that
we can get from them? Why do we pride ourselves on our powers of
absorbing print, as our grandfathers did on their gifts in imbibing
port, when we know that there is a mode of absorbing print which makes
it impossible that we can ever learn anything good out of books?

Our stately Milton said in a passage which is one of the watchwords of
the English race, "as good almost kill a Man as kill a good Book." But
has he not also said that he would "have a vigilant eye how Bookes
demeane themselves, as well as men; and do sharpest justice on them as
malefactors"?... Yes! they do kill the good book who deliver up their
few and precious hours of reading to the trivial book; they make it dead
for them; they do what lies in them to destroy "the precious life-blood
of a master-spirit, imbalm'd and treasured up on purpose to a life
beyond life;" they "spill that season'd life of man preserv'd and stor'd
up in Bookes." For in the wilderness of books most men, certainly all
busy men, _must_ strictly choose. If they saturate their minds with the
idler books, the "good book," which Milton calls "an immortality rather
than a life," is dead to them: it is a book sealed up and buried.

It is most right that in the great republic of letters there should be
freedom of intercourse and a spirit of equality. Every reader who holds
a book in his hand is free of the inmost minds of men past and present;
their lives both within and without the pale of their uttered thoughts
are unveiled to him; he needs no introduction to the greatest; he
stands on no ceremony with them; he may, if he be so minded, scribble
"doggrel" on his Shelley, or he may kick Lord Byron, if he please, into
a corner. He hears Burke perorate, and Johnson dogmatise, and Scott tell
his border tales, and Wordsworth muse on the hillside, without the leave
of any man, or the payment of any toll. In the republic of letters there
are no privileged orders or places reserved. Every man who has written a
book, even the diligent Mr. Whitaker, is in one sense an author; "a