ies of Literature, iii. 339.]

Of course any one ambitious of enlightening the world on either the
political or the literary history of Rome at the commencement of the
empire, must be as thoroughly acquainted with every word of Cicero as
the writer of the Times leader on a critical debate is with the
newly-delivered speeches. The more fortunate vagabond reader, too,
lounging about among the Letters, will open many little veins of curious
contemporary history and biography, which he can follow up in Tacitus,
Sallust, Caesar, and the contemporary poets. Both are utterly different
from the stated-task reader, who has come under a vow to work so many
hours or get through so many pages in a given time. _They_ are drawn by
their occupation, whether work or play; _he_ drives himself to his. All
such work is infliction, varying from the highest point of martyrdom
down to tasteless drudgery; and it is as profitless as other
supererogatory inflictions, since the task-reader comes to look at his
words without following out what they suggest, or even absorbing their
grammatical sense, much as the stupid ascetics of old went through their
penitential readings, or as their representatives of the present day,
chiefly of the female sex, read "screeds of good books," which they have
not "the presumption" to understand. The literary Bohemian is sometimes
to be pitied when his facility of character exposes him to have a
modification of this infliction forced upon him. This will occur when he
happens to be living in a house frequented by "a good reader," who
solemnly devotes certain hours to the reading of passages from the
English or French classics for the benefit of the company, and becomes
the mortal enemy of every guest who absents himself from the torturing
performance.

As to collectors, it is quite true that they do not in general read
their books successively straight through, and the practice of desultory
reading, as it is sometimes termed, must be treated as part of their
case, and if a failing, one cognate with their habit of collecting. They
are notoriously addicted to the practice of standing arrested on some
round of a ladder, where, having mounted up for some certain book, they
have by wayward chance fallen upon another, in which, at the first
opening, has come up a passage which fascinates the finder as the eye of
the Ancient Mariner fascinated the wedding-guest, and compels him to
stand there poised on his uneasy perch a