images; how they stood by him in all vicissitudes, comforters in sorrow, nurses in sickness, companions in solitude, 'the old friends who are never seen with new faces; who are the same in wealth and in poverty, in glory and in obscurity.' The confidence with which he could rely upon intellectual pursuits for occupation and amusement, assisted him not a little to preserve that dignified composure with which he met his public career, and that spirit of cheerful and patient endurance which sustained him through the years of broken health and enforced seclusion. He had no pressing need to seek for excitement and applause abroad, when he had beneath his own roof a never-failing store of exquisite enjoyment. That invinci ble love for reading, which Gibbon declared he would not exchange for the treasure of India, was with Macaulay, a main element of happiness in one of the happiest lives that it

has ever fallen to the lot of a biographer to record." 1

1

Some idea of the quality of Macaulay's reading may be obtained from the following list of books he read in little over a year: “During the last thirteen months,” he says in a letter, "I have read Eschylus twice, Sophocles twice, Euripides twice, Pindar twice, Callimachus, Apollonius Rhodius, Quintus Calaber, Theocritus twice, Herodotus and Thucydides, almost all of Xenophon's works, almost all of Plato; Aristotle's Politics and a good deal of his Organon, besides dipping elsewhere in him; the whole of Plutarch's Lives, about half of Lucian, two or three books of Athenaeus, Plautus twice, Terence once, Lucretius twice, Catullus, Tibullus, Propertius; Lucan, Statius, Silius Italicus, Livy, Velleius Paterculus, Sallust, Cæsar, and lastly Cicero." All this reading was done while he was in India. In another letter he tells what he read on the Voyage thither: "I read insatiably; the Iliad and the Odyssey, Virgil, Horace, Cæsar's Commentaries, Bacon's De Augmentis, Dante, Petrarch, Ariosto, Tasso, Don Quixote, Gibbons' Rome, Mill's India, all the seventy volumes of Voltaire, Sismondi's History of France, and the seven thick volumes of the Biographia Britannica."

CHAPTER II

READING FOR WRITING AND INVESTI

GATION

To-day there is hardly any phase of modern life so widely spread as the habit of reading. The invention of printing, the more recent devices of linotype, the enormous printing presses, the letting down of national barriers, the universality of schools, has brought about a vast increase in the number of those able to read, has awakened curiosity, and has consequently led to an almost countless number of magazines, newspapers, short stories, novels, books of travel and other forms of so-called "popular literature." The present century is essentially a reading one; some would say with Croiset, speaking of the Alexandrian school, “le mal de cette génération est le trop de littérature." Many people look on reading as a virtue

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in and for itself; yet yet in many cases it may be only the indication of a lazy disposition. To spend hours over illustrated magazines, Sunday newspapers, and the majority of popular novels, has very little to do with the art of reading in its larger sense. The true readers have always been few in number and are probably not more numerous in proportion now than they have been in the past, in spite of the vast output of ephemeral literature and the consequent consumption thereof.

To profit by what we read we must use judgment in the selection of books; we must use them not merely for passing amusement or indulgence in idle or morbid curiosity, nor in scanning

the festering news we half despise,

Yet scramble for no less.

We should look on books and reading as a powerful instrument in forming character "for giving us men and women armed with

reason, braced by knowledge, clothed with steadfastness and courage, and inspired by that public spirit and public virtue which are the brightest ornaments of the mind of men." 1

The mere reading of many books is no more of lasting value than the casual visit to the famous galleries of Europe; unless indeed, we have the spirit of Schopenhauer, who frequented the galleries of Dresden chiefly "to learn the revelation they might have to give of the meaning of life, and the worth of things." In all times there have been men who have read much without profit, from the days of the Rhapsodes, who were "particular about the exact words of Homer,

'Cf. Epictetus: "Do you think I shall call you industrious because you pass your nights in studying and reading? By no means. I must know what is the object of all this study. If you are working for glory, I call you ambitious. If you are working for money I call you avaricious. But if you study in order to cultivate and form your reason, to accustom yourself to obey the laws of nature, to fulfil your duties, then only I call you industrious; for that is the only labor worthy of a man."