farce. Men are not all either knaves or heroes. Women are neither angels
nor furies. And yet if you depended upon much of the literature of the
day, you would get the idea that life, instead of being something
earnest, something practical, is a fitful and fantastic and extravagant
thing. How poorly prepared are that young man and woman for the duties
of to-day who spent last night wading through brilliant passages
descriptive of magnificent knavery and wickedness! The man will be
looking all day long for his heroine in the tin-shop, by the forge or in
the factory, in the counting-room, and he will not find her, and he will
be dissatisfied. A man who gives himself up to the indiscriminate
reading of novels will be nerveless, inane, and a nuisance. He will be
fit neither for the store, nor the shop, nor the field. A woman who
gives herself up to the indiscriminate reading of novels will be
unfitted for the duties of wife, mother, sister, daughter. There she is,
hair disheveled, countenance vacant, cheeks pale, hands trembling,
bursting into tears at midnight over the woes of some unfortunate. In
the day-time, when she ought to be busy, staring by the half-hour at
nothing; biting her finger-nails to the quick. The carpet that was plain
before will be plainer after having through a romance all night long
wandered in tessellated halls of castles, and your industrious companion
will be more unattractive than ever now that you have walked in the
romance through parks with plumed princesses or lounged in the arbor
with the polished desperado. O, these confirmed novel-readers! They are
unfit for this life, which is a tremendous discipline. They know not how
to go through the furnaces of trial where they must pass, and they are
unfitted for a world where every thing we gain we achieve by hard, long
continuing, and exhaustive work.

Again, abstain from all those books which, while they have some good
things about them, have also an admixture of evil. You have read books
that had the two elements in them--the good and the bad. Which stuck to
you? The bad! The heart of most people is like a sieve, which lets the
small particles of gold fall through, but keeps the great cinders.

Again, abstain from those books which are apologetic of crime. It is a
sad thing that some of the best and most beautiful bookbindery, and some
of the finest rhetoric, have been brought to make sin attractive. Vice
is a horrible thing, anyhow. It is born in