THE QUESTION OF READING. It is the pleasure, and not the profit, spiritual or temporal, of reading which most requires to be preached to the ordinary reader. All such pleasure ministers to the development of much that is best in us, mental and moral, and the charm is broken and the object lost if the remote consequence of profit is consciously pursued to the exclusion of the immediate end of enjoyment. To the ordinary reader, with ordinary capacity and leisure, reading is, or ought to be, not a business, but a means of pleasing himself by an honest diversion. It is not every one who is fitted by nature or inclination for a definite course of reading, or, indeed, for serious reading in any sense. The habit and power of reading with reflection, comprehension, and memory all alert and awake do not come by nature to us any more than many other sovereign virtues. We must have reading for recreation and amusement, as well as reading for instruction and business. One is agreeable, the other useful; and the human mind requires both. It indicates rather a practical than a philosophical way of thinking when we place the agreeable and useful in opposition to each other, and look upon one with a kind of contempt as compared with the other. Presuming that by the agreeable is meant nothing that violates law and duty and sound moral sentiment, but that which simply aims rather to produce delight than conviction, then reading as a mere relaxation of the mind is in reality a most desirable and a not too common form of mental appetite. Of most persons it is wrong to demand that they should read "to weigh and consider," or read "with method and to an end," for self-improvement or material reward. If we must concern ourselves with reading only what is important, and not waste our time upon what is insignificant, who shall determine the marks by which we shall recognize these differ ences? Reading, which is as light as chaff to one, may be as weighty as grain to another. The very sight of Locke or Adam Smith would compel some persons to draw their hands across their heads from sheer weariness, while to others they may be wellsprings of pure delight. Is the reading that gives pleasure, and so furnishes the whole intellectual life to numbers of people, to be discouraged because the matter it represents is insignificant? Or is it to be condemned because it stirs no depths and leaves nothing behind but, as is alleged, an "impotent voracity for novelty and desultory information?" We wish to dissent emphatically from the view of Lord Bolingbroke that, "he who fails to read with discernment will not be able to think, without which it is impertinent to read," and the opinion of James Russell Lowell that miscellaneous reading, "except for conscious pastime hebetates the brain and slackens the bowstring of the will, communicating as little intelligence as the messages that run along the telegraph wire do to the birds that perch on it." We prefer the contention that any method of reading is better than no habit of reading at all. It is a subject of astonishment that, instead of expanding to the utmost the employment of this pleasure-giving faculty, many persons set themselves to work to limit its exercise by all kinds of arbitrary rules and regulations. It is a strange aberration that makes us criticise persons for having sources of enjoyment in which we cannot share, and pursue with intolerant interference and unsparing derision all deviations from our own self-imposed standards. Some critics go so far as to assert that the gratification of the imagination is an object too trifling and insignificant for the employment of advanced reason, and that the allurements of reading should be used only to entice us to knowledge, and that it must be useful knowledge, meaning thereby usually that it must enable one to get on in one's business or profession. But even if they mean something higher than this-even if they mean that knowledge to be worth anything must subserve, ultimately if not immediately, the material or spiritual instincts of man kind-the doctrine is one which should be energetically repudiated. It is an equally pernicious maxim that the knowledge gathered from reading, freed from any persevering labor or exacting reflection, is worse than no knowledge at all. Southey tells us that in his walk one stormy day he met an old woman, to whom he made the rather obvious remark that it was dreadful weather. She answered philosophically that, in her opinion, "any weather is better than none." We should be inclined to say that any knowledge is better than none. A little knowledge is all that on most subjects any of us can hope to attain, and as a source, not of worldly profit, but of personal pleasure, it may be of infinite value to its possessor. There is a charm in desultory and miscellaneous reading, and it does not necessarily tend to enervate the mind, destroy masculine thinking, and "close it against what is spiritually sustaining." A habit of diffusive reading introduces the mind to a great variety of intellectual habits, and becomes a source of liberality by enabling one to sympathize with the opinions of others. In opening a wide sphere of satisfaction and pleasure to the mind there is no discredit of its highest energies or impairment of its noblest powers. We should adjust our reading not only to our time and inclination; but, whether the amount be large or small, it should be varied in its kind. The mind is not only relieved, but more stimulated and enriched by roaming at large in the fields of literature than if confined too long and too closely to any single spot. The flesh of animals that feed excursively is admitted to have a higher flavor than that of those cooped. up. May there not be the same difference between those who read as their taste prompts and those who are confined to stated tasks? We may, in fact, apply to reading Lord Brougham's wise saw on education, and say that "it is well to read everything of something, and something of everything." In this way we can ascertain the bent of our own tastes. We may read whatever our immediate inclination prompts. "Examine how your humor is inclined, And which the ruling passion of your mind; The best method of guarding against the danger of reading what is useless is to read only what is interesting, adopting the plan of Montaigne, "if one book does not please me, I take another." For it is a general rule, though not a universal one, that we profit little by that reading which we do not enjoy. Tranio, in "The Taming of the Shrew," gives much the same advice to his master, Lucentio: No profit grows where is no pleasure ta'en: In brief, sir, study what you most affect. Above all things, signpost reading is to be avoided; that is, securing from some adviser a list of books, mapping out a scheme of study, which is to be conscientiously pursued with a definite aim and fixed expectation. Such reading is usually done with an obstinate endeavor and painful expenditure of mental perspiration, until it cramps the understanding, chokes the imagination, and stupefies and darkens the mind. It is worse than no food at all, for it takes away appetite and affords no more nourishment than the Tartars found in the books they used to eat, believing they could inwardly digest their contents. The central good of reading is often destroyed by mechanical and harshly intellectualized study. He has only half learned the art of reading who has not added to it the even more refined accomplishment of skipping and skimming; and the first step has hardly been taken in the direction of making reading a pleasure until interest in the subject, and not a desire to complete an appointed task, is the prevailing motive of the reader. Dr. Johnson, being asked if he had read a new book that was being much admired, gave the reply: "I have looked into it." "What? have you not read it through?" returned the inquirer. Dr. Johnson, offended at being pressed to own his cursory mode of reading, tartly retorted: "No! sir, do you read books through?" Lord Bacon's dictum is well known: "Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested that is, some books are to be read only in parts, others to be read but not curiously, and some few to be read wholly and with diligence and attention; and some may be read by deputy." Of by far the larger number of current books it may be said it is probably better to read them quickly, dwelling only on the best and most important passages. There was a time when reading constituted a world of its own, and when that world and the world of men were as "kingdoms in oppugnancy." To be a man of reading was then looked upon almost as a monastic vocation. As late as 1778 referring to the general diffusion of knowledge, Dr. Johnson cited in proof thereof the fact that "all our ladies now read, which is a great extension." But the cloistral days of literature, the exclusive privileges of reading, are past. Of all the privileges we enjoy in this boasted century, there is none perhaps for which we ought to be more thankful than for the easy access to books. The multiplication and cheapening of books have brought the pleasures of reading to every man's door, until “a room without a book" well deserves the characterization of Cicero, "as a body without a soul." There is no occasion for the alarm, which some express, at the incessant accumulation of fresh books. Let the "cataract of printed stuff," as it is contemptuously designated, flow and still flow until the catalogues of our libraries make libraries themselves. Let bookmaking go on until the earth seem a mere standing ground for writers and printers, the sea ink, and the sky parchment. A love of reading has a most ennobling and refining tendency; it is a love which does not require justification, apology, or defense. It is essentially a pleasure which is not only good in itself, but enhances many others. By extending the range of our knowledge, by enlarging our powers of sympathy and appreciation, it adds incalculably to the pleasures of society, to the pleasures of travel, to the pleasures of |