pot-house all day long; and there is incessant
talk in omnibus, train, or street by we know not whom, about we care not
what. Yet if a printer and a bookseller can be induced to make this
gabble as immortal as print and publication can make it, then it
straightway is literature, and in due time it becomes "curious."

I have no intention to moralise or to indulge in a homily against the
reading of what is deliberately evil. There is not so much need for this
now, and I am not discoursing on the whole duty of man. I take that part
of our reading which by itself is no doubt harmless, entertaining, and
even gently instructive. But of this enormous mass of literature how
much deserves to be chosen out, to be preferred to all the great books
of the world, to be set apart for those precious hours which are all
that the most of us can give to solid reading? The vast proportion of
books are books that we shall never be able to read. A serious
percentage of books are not worth reading at all. The really vital books
for us we also know to be a very trifling portion of the whole. And yet
we act as if every book were as good as any other, as if it were merely
a question of order which we take up first, as if any book were good
enough for us, and as if all were alike honourable, precious, and
satisfying. Alas! books cannot be more than the men who write them; and
as a fair proportion of the human race now write books, with motives and
objects as various as human activity, books, as books, are entitled _a
priori_, until their value is proved, to the same attention and respect
as houses, steam-engines, pictures, fiddles, bonnets, and other products
of human industry. In the shelves of those libraries which are our
pride, libraries public or private, circulating or very stationary, are
to be found those great books of the world _rari nantes in gurgite
vasto_,[26] those books which are truly "the precious life-blood of a
master-spirit." But the very familiarity which their mighty fame has
bred in us makes us indifferent; we grow weary of what every one is
supposed to have read; and we take down something which looks a little
eccentric, some worthless book, on the mere ground that we never heard
of it before.

Thus the difficulties of literature are in their way as great as those
of the world, the obstacles to finding the right friends are as great,
the peril is as great of being lost in a Babel of voices and an
ever-changing mass of be