upied no time with a review of literature in his address, and
he slept without being noticed through mine (which is all I ask of a
chairman), and so it may seem ungrateful, but in spite of "_that_" and
any books, even Spenser and Chaucer, which _that_ might have contained,
this Maecenas of an evening was not a bookman.

It is said, and now I am going to turn the application of a pleasant
anecdote upside down, that a Colonial squatter having made his pile and
bethinking himself of his soul, wrote home to an old friend to send him
out some chests of books, as many as he thought fit, and the best that he
could find. His friend was so touched by this sign of grace that he
spent a month of love over the commission, and was vastly pleased when he
sent off, in the best editions and in pleasant binding, the very essence
of English literature. It was a disappointment that the only
acknowledgment of his trouble came on a postcard, to say that the
consignment had arrived in good condition. A year afterwards, so runs
the story, he received a letter which was brief and to the point. "Have
been working over the books, and if anything new has been written by
William Shakespeare or John Milton, please send it out." I believe this
is mentioned as an instance of barbarism. It cannot be denied that it
showed a certain ignorance of the history of literature, which might be
excused in a bushman, but it is also proved, which is much more
important, that he had the smack of letters in him, for being turned
loose without the guide of any training in this wide field, he fixed as
by instinct on the two classics of the English tongue. With the help of
all our education, and all our reviews, could you and I have done better,
and are we not every day, in our approval of unworthy books, doing very
much worse? Quiet men coming home from business and reading, for the
sixth time, some noble English classic, would smile in their modesty if
any one should call them bookmen, but in so doing they have a sounder
judgment in literature than coteries of clever people who go crazy for a
brief time over the tweetling of a minor poet, or the preciosity of some
fantastic critic.

There are those who buy their right to citizenship in the commonwealth of
bookmen, but this bushman was free-born, and the sign of the free-born
is, that without critics to aid him, or the training of a University, he
knows the difference between books which are so much printed s