re serious classes of literature than
fiction, is that in the Scotch Universities there are what we have not
in England--well-attended chairs of literature, systematically and
methodically studied. Do not let it be supposed that I at all underrate
the value of fiction. On the contrary, when a man has done a hard day's
work, what can he do better than fall to and read the novels of Walter
Scott, or the Brontes, or Mrs. Gaskell, or some of our living writers. I
am rather a voracious reader of fiction myself. I do not, therefore,
point to it as a reproach or as a source of discouragement, that fiction
takes so large a place in the objects of literary interest. I only
suggest that it is much too large, and we should be better pleased if it
sank to about 40 per cent, and what is classified as general literature
rose from 13 to 25 per cent.

There are other complaints of literature as an object of interest in
this country. I was reading the other day an essay by the late head of
my old college at Oxford, that very learned and remarkable man Mark
Pattison, who was a booklover if ever there was one. He complained
that the bookseller's bill in the ordinary English middle class family
is shamefully small. It appeared to him to be monstrous that a man
who is earning L1000 a year should spend less than L1 a week on
books--that is to say, less than a shilling in the pound per annum. I
know that Chancellors of the Exchequer take from us 8d. or 6d. in the
pound, and I am not sure that they always use it as wisely as if they
left us to spend it on books. Still, a shilling in the pound to be
spent on books by a clerk who earns a couple of hundred pounds a year,
or by a workman who earns a quarter of that sum, is rather more, I
think, than can be reasonably expected. A man does not really need
to have a great many books. Pattison said that nobody who respected
himself could have less than 1000 volumes. He pointed out that you can
stack 1000 octavo volumes in a bookcase that shall be 13 feet by 10
feet, and 6 inches deep, and that everybody has that small amount of
space at disposal. Still the point is not that men should have a great
many books, but that they should have the right ones, and that they
should use those that they have. We may all agree in lamenting
that there are so many houses--even some of considerable social
pretension--where you will not find a good atlas, a good dictionary,
or a good cyclopaedia of reference. What is s