and the like. But rather let us turn our attention
to the intellectual advantages accompanying the pursuit, since the
proper function of books is in the general case associated with
intellectual culture and occupation. It would seem that, according to a
received prejudice or opinion, there is one exception to this general
connection, in the case of the possessors of libraries, who are under a
vehement suspicion of not reading their books. Well, perhaps it is true
in the sense in which those who utter the taunt understand the reading
of a book. That one should possess no books beyond his power of
perusal--that he should buy no faster than as he can read straight
through what he has already bought--is a supposition alike preposterous
and unreasonable. "Surely you have far more books than you can read," is
sometimes the inane remark of the barbarian who gets his books, volume
by volume, from some circulating library or reading club, and reads them
all through, one after the other, with a dreary dutifulness, that he may
be sure that he has got the value of his money.

It is true that there are some books--as Homer, Virgil, Horace, Milton,
Shakespeare, and Scott--which every man should read who has the
opportunity--should read, mark, learn, and inwardly digest. To neglect
the opportunity of becoming familiar with them is deliberately to
sacrifice the position in the social scale which an ordinary education
enables its possessor to reach. But is one next to read through the
sixty and odd folio volumes of the Bollandist Lives of the Saints, and
the new edition of the Byzantine historians, and the State Trials, and
the Encyclopaedia Britannica, and Moreri, and the Statutes at large, and
the Gentleman's Magazine from the beginning, each separately, and in
succession? Such a course of reading would certainly do a good deal
towards weakening the mind, if it did not create absolute insanity.

But in all these just named, even in the Statutes at large, and in
thousands upon thousands of other books, there is precious honey to be
gathered by the literary busy bee, who passes on from flower to flower.
In fact, "a course of reading," as it is sometimes called, is a course
of regimen for dwarfing the mind, like the drugs which dog-breeders give
to King Charles spaniels to keep them small. Within the span of life
allotted to man there is but a certain number of books that it is
practicable to read through, and it is not possible to make