um of sixpence a day for three
years you may become the possessor of a collection of books which,
for range and completeness in all branches of literature, will bear
comparison with libraries far more imposing, more numerous, and more
expensive.

I have mentioned the question of discount. The discount which you
will obtain (even from a bookseller in a small town) will be more than
sufficient to pay for Chambers's _Cyclopaedia of English Literature_,
three volumes, price 30s. net. This work is indispensable to a
bookman. Personally, I owe it much.

When you have read, wholly or in part, a majority of these three
hundred and thirty-five volumes, _with enjoyment_, you may begin to
whisper to yourself that your literary taste is formed; and you may
pronounce judgment on modern works which come before the bar of your
opinion in the calm assurance that, though to err is human, you do at
any rate know what you are talking about.

CHAPTER XIV

MENTAL STOCKTAKING

Great books do not spring from something accidental in the great
men who wrote them. They are the effluence of their very core, the
expression of the life itself of the authors. And literature cannot be
said to have served its true purpose until it has been translated into
the actual life of him who reads. It does not succeed until it becomes
the vehicle of the vital. Progress is the gradual result of the
unending battle between human reason and human instinct, in which the
former slowly but surely wins. The most powerful engine in this
battle is literature. It is the vast reservoir of true ideas and high
emotions--and life is constituted of ideas and emotions. In a world
deprived of literature, the intellectual and emotional activity of all
but a few exceptionally gifted men would quickly sink and retract to
a narrow circle. The broad, the noble, the generous would tend
to disappear for want of accessible storage. And life would be
correspondingly degraded, because the fallacious idea and the petty
emotion would never feel the upward pull of the ideas and emotions
of genius. Only by conceiving a society without literature can it be
clearly realised that the function of literature is to raise the plain
towards the top level of the peaks. Literature exists so that where
one man has lived finely ten thousand may afterwards live finely. It
is a means of life; it concerns the living essence.

Of course, literature has a minor function, that of passing the