hose meant for the scholar. The ordinary free library, in the
sense of Mr. Ewart's Act of Parliament of 1850, is a popular library
where a wearied population turns for distraction. Fiction plays a
large part. In some libraries 80 per cent. of the books in circulation
are novels. Hence Mr. Goldwin Smith's splenetic remark, 'People have
no more right to novels than to theatre-tickets out of the taxes.'
Quite true; no more they have--or to public gardens or to beautiful
pictures or to anything save to peep through the railings and down the
areas of Mr. Gradgrind's fine new house in Park Lane.

When we are considering popular libraries, it does not do to expect
too much of tired human nature. This popular kind of library was well
represented--perhaps a little over-represented, at the Conference. All
our American cousins are not Cutters and Pooles. There was Mr.
Crunden, who keeps the public library at St. Louis, U.S.A. He is all
against dull text-books. As a boy he derived his inspiration from
Sargent's _Standard Speaker_, and the interesting sketch he gives us
of his education makes us wonder whether amidst his multitudinous
reading he ever encountered Newman's marvellous description and
handling of the young and over-read Mr. Brown, which is to be found
under the heading 'Elementary Studies' in _Lectures and Essays on
University Subjects_.

I shuddered just a little on reading in Mr. Crunden's paper of the boy
who, before he was nine, had read Bulfinch's _Age of Chivalry_ and
_Age of Charlemagne_, Bryant's _Translation of the 'Iliad'_, a prose
translation of the _Odyssey_, Malory's _King Arthur, and several other
versions of the Arthurian legend_, Prescott's _Peru and Mexico_,
Macaulay's _Lays_, Longfellow's _Hiawatha_ and _Miles Standish_, the
Jungle Books, and other books too numerous to mention. A famous list,
but perilously long.

Mr. Crunden supports his case for varied reading by quotations from
all quarters--Dr. William T. Harris, President Eliot, Professor
Mackenzie, Charles Dudley Warner, Sir John Lubbock--but their scraps
of wisdom or of folly do not remove my uneasiness about the digestion
of the little boy who, before he was nine years old, had (not content
with Malory) read several versions of the Arthurian legend!

Ladies make excellent librarians, and have tender hearts for children,
and so we find a paper written by a lady librarian, entitled _Books
that Children Like_. She quotes some interesting lett