I
peruse with joy from end to end every week, can scarcely notice a new
edition of a classic without expressing, in a grieved and pessimistic
tone, the fear that more people buy these agreeable editions than read
them. And if it is so? What then? Are we only to buy the books that we
read? The question has merely to be thus bluntly put, and it answers
itself. All impassioned bookmen, except a few who devote their whole
lives to reading, have rows of books on their shelves which they have
never read, and which they never will read. I know that I have
hundreds such. My eye rests on the works of Berkeley in three volumes,
with a preface by the Right Honourable Arthur James Balfour. I cannot
conceive the circumstances under which I shall ever read Berkeley; but
I do not regret having bought him in a good edition, and I would buy
him again if I had him not; for when I look at him some of his virtue
passes into me; I am the better for him. A certain aroma of philosophy
informs my soul, and I am less crude than I should otherwise be. This
is not fancy, but fact.

Taking Berkeley simply as an instance, I will utilise him a little
further. I ought to have read Berkeley, you say; just as I ought to
have read Spenser, Ben Jonson, George Eliot, Victor Hugo. Not at all.
There is no "ought" about it. If the mass of obtainable first-class
literature were, as it was perhaps a century ago, not too large to be
assimilated by a man of ordinary limited leisure _in_ his leisure and
during the first half of his life, then possibly there might be an
"ought" about it. But the mass has grown unmanageable, even by those
robust professional readers who can "grapple with whole libraries."
And I am not a professional reader. I am a writer, just as I might be
a hotel-keeper, a solicitor, a doctor, a grocer, or an earthenware
manufacturer. I read in my scanty spare time, and I don't read in all
my spare time, either. I have other distractions. I read what I feel
inclined to read, and I am conscious of no duty to finish a book that
I don't care to finish. I read in my leisure, not from a sense of
duty, not to improve myself, but solely because it gives me pleasure
to read. Sometimes it takes me a month to get through one book. I
expect my case is quite an average case. But am I going to fetter my
buying to my reading? Not exactly! I want to have lots of books on my
shelves because I know they are good, because I know they would amuse
me, because I lik