namely, a tendency to make you fitter for your everyday duties. The great end of life, after all, is not to think, but to act; not to be learned, but to be good and noble. Accordingly, the crowning merit of a book must always be its practical usefulness. It may be a work of fiction, diverting your thoughts from the chaos of business, and allowing your mind to recover its elasticity and its tone; or a history, bringing before you high examples for your imitation; or a poem, elevating and refining your taste, and filling your imagination with beautiful forms the work of a Christian philosopher, rousing you, as with the blast of a trumpet, from self-indulgence to self-sacrifice. If it makes you more cheerful, or more amiable, or more sympathetic, or more appreciative of what is beautiful, or more resolute to follow what is good and noble, then the highest purpose of a book is gained.

; or

These, then, are the three requisites which every suitable book must have. If in any particular class of works you find not one or two but all of these three requisites, then you may safely conclude that you have come upon your special line of reading. All you have to do is to follow it perseveringly. The

region into which you have entered may at first seem strange and somewhat dull, but it will always be growing more familiar and more pleasant, until you will feel yourself thoroughly in your element. And do not fear lest you should become contracted in your knowledge. Every line of study must meet and cross some other lines; and thus, while you will be acquiring a particular knowledge of your own department, you will be forming a general knowledge of other departments.

II. We have now seen what books each of us ought to read. Let us now see how we ought to

read them.

Different men have different ways of reading books. One man, believing that there is some mystic virtue in the mere printed letters themselves, dozes over a few pages of a volume, and fancies that he gains wisdom by following a plan that is often recommended to those whose brains are perplexed, namely, the plan of 'sleeping upon a subject.' Another, bent upon making a display, charges his mind with some particular information (just as he would charge a musket with shot), and, when the occasion comes,

fires it off, and remains as empty as he was before. Another, a perfect literary glutton, reads books on all subjects and in all languages, and burdens his mind with so many facts of different kinds that it reels and vacillates, and is unfit for the particular duties of life. His friends admiringly call him a dungeon of learning;' and indeed so he is, for everything that comes out of him is musty, and mouldy, and useless. He is, in fact,

'A bookful blockhead, ignorantly read,

With loads of learned lumber in his head.

The method of reading that we would recommend is very definite, and consists of several distinct steps.

1. Before you begin to peruse a book, know something about the author. When you read a work written by a person you know, you are far more interested in it than in a stranger's book. You imagine you hear him speaking, and you see more in many of the allusions than you would otherwise have done. We would therefore advise you to get, if possible, a biographical notice of the writer whose work you are about to study. were, be introduced to him.

You will thus, as it You will become ac

quainted with his life, his character, and the circumstances amid which he composed the book; and you will therefore read his pages with far more pleasure and intelligence. When we read, for instance, the life of Burns, and see how sorely he was tossed by passion and mischance, what a depth of pathos appears in the following lines :—

'Then gently scan your brother man,
Still gentler sister woman;

Though they may gang a kennin' wrang,
To step aside is human.

'One point must still be greatly dark,
The moving why they do it;
And just as lamely can ye mark
How far perhaps they rue it.

'Who made the heart, 'tis He alone
Decidedly can try us;

He knows each chord-its various tone,
Each spring-its various bias.

'Then at the balance let's be mute,

We never can adjust it;

What's done we partly may compute,

But know not what's resisted.'

2. Read the preface carefully. Most people skip the preface; but we would make the perusal of it the test of an accomplished reader. In it the author

takes us, as it were, into his confidence, and describes to us his motives for writing the book, and his reasons for making it what it is. In this way he awakens our interest, and gives us a foretaste of the volume itself. For example, we are much more deeply impressed with the truthfulness of Nicholas Nickleby after we have read in the preface that several Yorkshire schoolmasters claimed to be the original of Squeers, that one meditated raising an action of damages against Dickens, that another was bent upon going to London to cudgel him, and that a third said, 'It must be me, for the character is so like me.' An Italian writer calls the preface the sauce of the book. We would rather liken it to what is called an appetizer.

3. Take a comprehensive survey of the table of contents. If the preface is the appetizer, the table of contents is the bill of fare. It gives us a full plan of the feast that is to follow, and enables us to determine what articles we should avoid, and for what articles we should reserve our energies. It is like the map of a journey, showing us through what tracts our way lies, and to what destination it will lead us.