old rut and give them new
vigor. Before the advent of this class of journals there was
no organ among the conservative press to speak down to the
people. It was the consequence of a growing democracy and
had for its purpose the establishment of a press wherein the
laboring classes would have expression.

HOW TO ASSIMILATE THE BEST IN BOOKS.

John Morley, the English Statesman and
Scholar, Tells the Secret of Making
One's Reading Pay.

When a man knows books as thoroughly as John Morley knows them, his
opinions as to what and how to read are worth having. Mr. Morley has
revised and put together as an article for _The Critic_ several of his
extemporaneous addresses on books and reading. From this article the
following paragraphs have been culled and condensed with care to select
those passages which contain practical advice for people who desire to
make their reading count for something:

The object of reading is not to dip into everything that
even wise men have ever written. In the words of one of the
most winning writers of English that ever existed--Cardinal
Newman--the object of literature in education is to open the
mind, to correct it, to refine it, to enable it to
comprehend and digest its knowledge, to give it power over
its own faculties, application, flexibility, method,
critical exactness, sagacity, address, and expression.

Literature consists of all the books--and they are not so
many--where moral truth and human passion are touched with a
certain largeness, sanity, and attraction of form. Poets,
dramatists, humorists, satirists, masters of fiction, the
great preachers, the character-writers, the maxim-writers,
the great political orators--they are all literature in so
far as they teach us to know man and to know human nature.

What I venture to press upon you is that it requires no
preterhuman force of will in any young man or woman--unless
household circumstances are more than usually vexatious and
unfavorable--to get at least half an hour out of a solid
busy day for good and disinterested reading. Some will say
that this is too much to expect, and the first persons to
say it, I venture to predict, will be those who waste their
time most. At any rate, if I cannot get half an hour, I will
be content with a quarter.

Multiply the half-hour by three hundred and sixty-five