ought of them
by a few Greek poets or Jewish prophets, men who were one in a million
among their contemporaries.

But it might be said that though the writers were few, the readers
were many. Is that so? I believe you would be surprised to hear how
small the number of readers is even in modern times, while in ancient
times reading was restricted to the very smallest class of privileged
persons. There may have been listeners at public and private
festivals, at sacrifices, and later on in theatres, but readers, in
our sense of the word, are a very modern invention.

There never has been so much reading, reading spread over so large an
area, as in our times. But if you asked publishers as to the number of
copies sold of books which are supposed to have been read by
everybody, say Macaulay's History of England, the Life of the Prince
Consort, or Darwin's Origin of Species, you would find that out of a
population of thirty-two millions not one million has possessed itself
of a copy of these works. The book which of late has probably had the
largest sale is the Revised Version of the New Testament; and yet the
whole number of copies sold among the eighty millions of
English-speaking people is probably not more than four millions. Of
ordinary books which are called books of the season, and which are
supposed to have had a great success, an edition of three or four
thousand copies is not considered unsatisfactory by publishers or
authors in England. But if you look to other countries, such, for
instance, as Russia, it would be very difficult indeed to name books
that could be considered as representative of the whole nation, or as
even known by more than a very small minority.

And if we turn our thoughts back to the ancient nations of Greece and
Italy, or of Persia and Babylonia, what book is there, with the
exception perhaps of the Homeric poems, of which we could say that it
had been read or even heard of by more than a few thousand people? We
think of Greeks and Romans as literary people, and so no doubt they
were, but in a very different sense from what we mean by this. What we
call Greeks and Romans are chiefly the citizens of Athens and Rome,
and here again those who could produce or who could read such works as
the Dialogues of Plato or the Epistles of Horace constituted a very
small intellectual aristocracy indeed. What we call history--the
memory of the past--has always been the work of minorities. Millions
and mi