be
found that in all walks of life the men who most influenced their
generation despised superfluous knowledge. They learned thoroughly all
that they thought it necessary to learn within a very limited compass;
they learned, above all, to think; and they then were ready to speak
or act without reference to any authority save their own intellect. If
we turn to the great book-men, we find mostly a deplorable record of
failure and futility. Their lives were passed in making useless
comments on the works of others. Look at the one hundred and eighty
volumes of the huge catalogue in which are inscribed the names of
Shakspere's commentators. Most of these poor laborious creatures were
learned in the extreme, and yet their work is humiliating to read, so
gross is its pettiness, so foolish is its wire-drawn scholarship. Over
all the crowd of his interpreters the royal figure of the poet towers
in grand unlearned simplicity. He knew Plutarch, and he thought for
himself; his commentators knew everything, and did not think at all.
Compare the supreme poet's ignorance with the other men's extravagant
erudition! Think of the men whom I may call book-eaters! Dr. Parr was
a driveller; Porson was a sort of learned pig who routed up truffles
in the classic garden; poor Buckle became, through stress of books, a
shallow thinker; Mezzofanti, with his sixty-four languages and
dialects, was perilously like a fool; and more than one modern
professor may be counted as nothing else but a vain, over-educated
boor.

Another word, which may seem like heresy. I contend that the main
object of reading--after a basis of solid culture has been
acquired--is to gain amusement. No one was ever the worse for reading
good novels, for human fortunes will always interest human beings. I
would say keep clear of Sir John Lubbock's terrific library, and seek
a little for pleasure. You have authoritative examples before you.
Prince Bismarck, once the arbiter of the world, reads Miss Braddon and
Gaboriau; Professor Huxley, the greatest living biologist, reads
novels wholesale; the grim Moltke read French and English romances;
Macaulay used fairly to revel in the hundreds of stories that he read
till he knew them by heart. With these and a hundred other examples
before us, the humblest and most laborious in the community may
without scruple read the harmless tales of fictitious joys and
sorrows, after they have secured that narrow minute training which
alone gi