larger vision of life and the world. The true reader is not the special student, but the man who in the words of Plato, prizes those studies which result in his soul getting wisdom, soberness and righteousness. And such readers are not apt so much to be scholars in the technical sense, as men of letters, to use a term which is not often employed nowadays, but which once meant something definite. Such a reader was,—as we have seen,-Montaigne, who spent his days with the great writers, yet who looked with pity on the pituiteux savant who ruins his health for the bauble of praise; or Milton who read not as a theologian, but as a poet and scholar; or still more Emerson, a man far from being thorough in the modern sense, declaring that we ought not to read by

Then winter nights grow cheerful; keen delight
Warms every limb; and ah! When we unroll
Some old and precious parchment, at the sight
All heaven itself descends upon the soul.

Faust, Part I. (Swanwick.)

graphs that do not talk to us. And it was largely through his reading of great writers that Emerson built up that in life of his, which, in spite of the fact that was not a philosopher, or a leader of men, a great poet, or even a clear thinker and ex writer, has made him, together with Wor worth, the greatest intellectual force a spiritual influence in the nineteenth cent for the English speaking world. The t ideal of the scholar and the reader mel into one is given by Emerson in his o eloquent language: "Neither years

books have availed to extirpate a prejud rooted in me, that a scholar is the favorite heaven and earth, the excellency of

country, the happiest of men."

CHAPTER III

THE POWER OF A BOOK

PERHAPS there is no better way of learning what kind of reading is best than to see what books have won the love of the masters in the art of reading. And the striking fact in every case is the emphasis they put on a few of the world's greatest books. Says Lowell, "One is sometimes asked by young men to recommend to them a course of reading. My advice would always be to confine yourself to the supreme books in whatever literature; still better to choose some one great author and grow familiar with him."

The benefit of such intensive study of the perennial books is beyond all value; by going over them again and again we become thoroughly familiar with their contents, and we enjoy the most satisfactory of all reading.

"Happy," says Sainte-Beuve, "they who read, who reread; they who can follow their free inclinations among their books! There comes a season in life when, all work done, all active experience over, the keen joys remain of studying, of going to the depths of the things we know, the things we feel, just as we see and see again, with relish, the friends we love; pure delights of the heart and of the taste in their maturity. Then it is that the word classic takes its true meaning and defines itself for every man by his own irresistible predilection and choice." 1

Nor does the love for the great writers bring with it necessarily a neglect of the lesser men; for, as Lowell says: "You will find that in order to understand perfectly and weigh exactly any really vital piece of literature, you will be gradually and pleas

1 It was Sainte-Beuve who once declared that he had been doing all his life one and the same thing, reading the infinite book of the world and life.

antly persuaded to studies and explorations of which you little dreamed when you began, and will find yourself scholars before you are aware. And the moment you have an object and a centre, attention is quickened, the mother of memory; and whatever you acquire groups and arranges itself in an order which is lucid because it is everywhere in intelligent relation to an object of constant and growing interest."

1

It is this higher kind of reading that has aroused the personal love and passionate enthusiasm of the true readers. Whole anthologies have been made of things said in praise of books from the time of Cicero down to the present; perhaps the noblest of all enconiums being that of Richard de Bury, Bishop of Durham. "The glory of the world would perish in oblivion if God had not provided mortals with the remedies of books.

1 Delectant domi, non impediunt foris, pernoctant nobiscum, peregrinantur, rusticantur.