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great authors of the past. The books provided by the circulating
library, the reviews and magazines, the daily newspapers, are read
whilst they are novelties, but the standard authors are left on their
shelves unopened. We require a firm resolution to resist this invasion
of what is new, because it flows like an unceasing river, and unless we
protect our time against it by some solid embankment of unshakable rule
and resolution, every nook and cranny of it will be filled and flooded.
An Englishman whose life was devoted to culture, but who lived in an
out-of-the-way place on the Continent, told me that he considered it a
decided advantage to his mind to live quite outside of the English
library system, because if he wanted to read a new book he had to buy it
and pay heavily for carriage besides, which made him very careful in his
choice. For the same reason he rejoiced that the nearest English
news-room was two hundred miles from his residence.

But, on the other hand, what would be the condition of a man's mind who
never read anything but the classic authors? He would live in an
intellectual monastery, and would not even understand the classic
authors themselves, for we understand the past only by referring it to
what we know in the present.

It is best to preserve our minds in a state of equilibrium, and not to
allow our repugnance to what we see as an evil to drive us into an evil
of an opposite kind. We are too often like those little toy-fish with a
bit of steel in their mouths, which children attract with a magnet. If
you present the positive pole of the magnet, the fish rushes at it at
once, but if you offer the negative end it retreats continually.
Everything relatively to our character has this positive or negative
end, and we either rush to things or rush away from them. Some persons
are actually driven away from the most entertaining writers because they
happen to be what are called classics, because pedants boast of having
read them. I know a man who is exactly the opposite of a pedant, who has
a horror of the charlatanism which claims social and intellectual
position as the reward for having laboriously waded through those
authors who are conventionally termed "classical," and this opposition
to pedantry has given him an aversion to the classics themselves, which
he never opens. The shallow pretence to admiration of famous writers
which is current in the world is so distasteful to the love of honesty
an