It would be unsafe, perhaps, to predict that many who hear me will use this library in the spirit of Heinsius. But the love of books is one of the greatest blessings in life. Ouly you cannot love a book all at once; with

It

of Osymandyas-the king who gave ones and rich ones that know not this his name, as you may remember, to happiness."" Shelley's sonnet - were inscribed the Greek words yuxñç larpeiov, which mean "the sanatorium of the soul." For the soul may be valetudinarian like the body; and, like the body, it has need of a bracing discipline. You can never cure any human ill by preaching books, as with men and women, love against it; you must supplant it by is the privilege of long intimacy. some wholesome vital influence. The is only when books have been read "expulsive power of a new affection," and re-read, and, as it were, clasped to as Cardinal Newman has called it in the heart, that they become in Macauone of his sermons, is the only means lay's words, "the old friends who are of driving out old affections. No doubt never seen with new faces; who are he was thinking of religion, and he the same in wealth and poverty, in meant that one religious faith can be glory and in obscurity." To know even eradicated only by another; it is proof one book in this way is to gain a spiritagainst mere denial. But one taste or ual revelation. It is thus that the habit also yields only to another; it is study of the Bible, even as literature, not destroyed but supplanted. And if has so profoundly affected English life you would draw men away from the and thought; for it often seems to me public-house or the "bucket-shop," that the most sharply drawn of all and from such associations as are con- dividing lines in English history is genial to these places, you must awaken between reading and non-reading Enin them higher tastes and aspirations, and of these the love of reading is the chief. May I commend to you a passage taken from a book which is not so popular nowadays as it was once, Burton's "Anatomy of Melancholy"? You know he treats first of the causes of melancholy among men, and then of its cure; he says, "So sweet is the delight of study the more learning they have (as he that hath a dropsy, the more he drinks the thirstier he is), the more they covet to learn, and the last day is prioris discipulus," and then he relates the following story, which is worth remembering: "Heinsius, the keeper of the library at Leyden in Holland, was mewed up in it all the year long; and that, which to my thinking would have bred a loathing, caused in him a greater liking. I no sooner (saith he) come into the library, but I bolt the door to me, excluding lust, ambition, avarice, and all such vices, whose name is idleness, the mother of ignorance and melancholy herself, and in the very lap of eternity, amongst so many divine souls, I take my seat with so lofty a spirit and sweet content that I pity all our great

gland, or, in other words, between
England without the Bible and En-
gland with it. Our forefathers were
contented with one
book; we are
sometimes not contented with many.
Gibbon says, in his autobiography, that
he would not "exchange his early and
invincible love of reading for the treas-
ures of India." But modern education
has so far equalized the social classes
of the community that the pleasure of
reading, which at the beginning of this
century was enjoyed by a small culti-
vated minority, has already become, or
is fast becoming, the boon of all.

Did it ever occur to you to realize what a change the universality of reading and writing, which has only come to be true since the Education Act of 1870, has made in the English-speaking world? It is not the only change which distinguishes the nineteenth century from all the preceding centuries; for I suppose (to take one example) there is no reflection more curious than that the means of locomotion should have remained practically the same from the time of the Pharaohs until the reign of King George the Fourth, and then should have been

An hour a day

is three years; this makes twentyseven years sleeping, nine years dressing, nine years at table, six years playing with children, nine years walking, drawing, and visiting, six years shopping, and three years quarrelling."

revolutionized in a day. But fifty the following manner. years ago a girl who left her village in the country for domestic service was cut off from her home, her family, and all the associations of her past life; she could not write to her parents, nor they to her; and if they did write, or get somebody to write for them, it was impossible for her to read their It may be permitted me to hope that letter; she might be ill, she might be you will not spend your life—at least ruined, she might be dead, and the the ladies will not altogether in this probability was that nobody who felt a way, partly because you will enjoy the natural interest in her story would benefits, moral as well as intellectual, know anything about her. How differ- of this library. Yet, however economent it all is now, when, by the gentle ical of your time you may be, it will be arts of reading and writing, and espe- a practical difficulty for you or for any cially of photography, that beneficent one in the present day to cope with the means of keeping the memory of our vast and ever-increasing mass of literabsent friends and children alive within ature. It is perhaps three thousand our hearts, there is not an incident of years since the invention or use of her life, wherever she may be, but it writing, and during that time the writis familiarly known to all the members ers of many nations and many ages of her family! Dreary indeed was the have been pouring out books, until the old age of the poor fifty years ago, stream of literature has swollen into a without books, without newspapers, cataract -a very Niagara of books without any broadening interests. But which sweeps, or threatens to sweep, to-day, even where the parents cannot away the delights of civilization before read, their children are their inter- it. The reader of to-day aspires to preters of human things, and whatever know something of the thoughts which pain the parents may feel, as is not un- the wisest of men in all the periods natural, in the consciousness of their of history have expressed upon the own inferiority, is more than compensated by their honest pride in their children's culture.

You, ladies and gentlemen, to whom this library will offer in future the resources of its many thousand volumes, will all be readers; and I do not see how I can better utilize the few minutes in which I have the honor of addressing you than by trying to give you such advice as will help you to read wisely. For most of those who employ this library will not be students; they will not have unlimited time for reading books; it is perhaps only for a brief hour, when the toil of the day is done, that they will think of getting literary information. Sydney Smith said once: "Live always in the best company when you read. No one in youth thinks on the value of time. Do you ever reflect how you pass your life? If you live to seventy-two, which I hope you may, your life is spent in

most vital subjects of human interest. He cannot, therefore, acquiesce in narrow reading. He must read widely, not in English only, but in many languages, or in translations from them. He must cultivate a cosmopolitan literary spirit. But life is short; and alas! art is long, and is becoming longer; the number of books which a busy man can read in a year can hardly at the most exceed fifty; and, considering what a strain is now put on the most absorbing literary appetite, I am at a loss to see how any man who lives at the end of the twentieth century will deserve to be called educated at all. For books do not become shorter as they become more numerous, it rather seems that they increase in bulk and volume; for Gibbon wrote the history of the "Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire," a period of fifteen hundred years, in eight octavo volumes, and a living his

torian occupies the same number of volumes with the history of less than thirty years in England alone.

how they

For in all

There are two perfectly different ways of reading a book. It is curious that we often speak of reading as if it were always the same thing. But nobody, after consideration, will maintain that it is possible or necessary to read "The Proverbs of Solomon " and "King Solomon's Mines" in the same way. Bacon, in his essay upon studies, puts the matter clearly: "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." It is fair to say that there will be a great saving of time, if the number of books which require to be "chewed and digested" is made as small as possible.

read; they must be told ought to read, and what. life it is not the work which men have In these circumstances, looking to to do that makes the difference, it is the accumulating mass of literature the way in which they do it. A man which is new, busy men have hit upon may do little or nothing and be always various methods of arriving by a kind at work, or he may administer an emof short-cut at literary knowledge. pire and be at leisure. Let me supOne method has been to choose an pose, then, that you have an hour a arbitrary number of the best books, day, and no more, to expend upon and to concentrate attention upon literature. them. Sir John Lubbock is, I think, responsible for the original list of The Hundred Books which are most widely approved, and he, if any one, is competent to make the selection; but the number has been found too large, or it has not been always accepted, and so it has been reduced by various authorities until it has come to be supposed that there is no difficulty in determining a number, however small, of the best books in the world, and I remember that a lady wrote to me not long ago asking me to name the three best books, exclusive of the Bible. Then, again, it has been thought possible to acquire an insight into literature by selections or extracts from famous books, or by abridgments of them. It sometimes happens that a person reads a review of a book and imagines he has done as much as if he had read the book itself. I do not deny that the habit of conBut upon the whole I would venture to centrating the full power of the mind give you a serious warning against all upon every chapter and page of a book extracts and abridgments, whatever is a discipline of very high value. The they may be. The author of a book study of books written in a foreign lanhas a right to demand that, if it is read, guage, whether ancient or modern, it should be read as he wrote it; it is forms this habit, and is principally valnot the same book when it is cut up or uable as forming it. In fact, it may boiled down. And as to reviews, they be doubted if a person ever reads his are not the book at all; they are no own language in such a way as to apmore the book than a man's clothes are preciate its full meaning. But the the man himself; and, if you have great majority of books in a public ever written a book and seen it re- library do not require and do not deviewed, it is only too likely that you have experienced a sense of astonishment at observing that, though you may not have possessed a complete knowledge of the subject with which it deals, yet at least you knew more than the reviewer.

There is an art of reading, I think, as well as an art of writing. It is not enough that people should be told to

serve to be so read. In looking at some statistics of the books taken out of one of the public libraries by the working classes, I notice that the class of books which is in most request is novels, and the class which is in least request is sermous. It is not for me, being a clergyman, to declare with what degree of attention sermons ought to be read. But I confidently say that

It

nearly all novels admit of light and cal's "Pensées ;" in political science, rapid reading. Where the point of a Aristotle's "Politics," Montesquieu's book lies in its narrative rather than in " 'L'Esprit des Lois," and Adam its style or substance, the process of Smith's "Wealth of Nations;" in sci"tearing out its heart," as it has been ence, Bacon's "Novum Organum," called, is the secret of alleviating labor. Newton's "Principia" (if it be intelliTo some extent the same is true of gible to you), and Darwin's "Origin history, and especially of that fascinat- of Species "- these are all or nearly ing form of history — biography. You all the books that have been "epochdo not want to know or remember all making," and to read these will be to the incidents; you want to grasp the enter, however humbly, into the temple general contour of the country (if I of knowledge and truth. may use a geographical expression), There is an exhilaration in the thornot to be able to name every height ough study of noble literature. and valley in it. Nor must it be for- gives tone and courage to the mind. gotten that you have made an acquisi- The famous novelist, George Eliot, tion of knowledge which is well worth says it was her wont to seek inspiration having, if your reading enables you for her writings by daily intercourse not, indeed, to produce your facts at an with the good and great writers of the instant's call, but to discover where past. May you learn the satisfaction they are to be found and what they of living, if but for an hour each day, are, when leisure is given you. It ap- in the company of the good and great! pears to me, then, that one book in For the last word that I will say in twenty should be read scrupulously; the hope of enabling you to make the the rest may be read, so to say, currente | best use of the library which is now oculo. But it is more important to read opened, is that you will do well if you wisely than to read widely. Intellectual health, like physical, depends not upon the amount of food consumed, but upon the digestion. And, if it be necessary to decide what books are they that should be read not with the eye only but with the soul, they will be such books as, in the German phrase, have been "epoch-making," and have exercised a lasting influence upon the current of human thought. They are not many, but in them is contained the essence of all literature. In religion, the Bible, and these two books which are most closely founded upon it, the "De Imitatione Christi" and "The Pilgrim's Progress;" in poetry, the writings, or some at least of the writings, of the four great masters Homer, Dante, Shakespeare, Goethewho guard the portals of human sentiment for all time; in history, Thu- SOME years ago I had charge of a cydides and Gibbon as respectively postal division on the western coast, illustrating the perfection of historical parts of which had seldom, if ever, science in miniature and on a scale been visited by a European officer. of majestic dignity; in philosophy, The people were for the most part simPlato's "Republic," which by the gen-ple folk and very superstitious. One ius of the late master of Balliol has morning I received information that a been made an English classic, and Pas- considerable sum of money, forming

read something that is worth reading every day of your lives. One hour a day amounts to many weeks in a lifetime; and it is not by doing great things now and then, but by doing something continually, that the best and most lasting results are attained. "The modern university," says Mr. Carlyle somewhere, "is a library." It is a university in which you all may graduate. It is a home which stands above the stress and pain of evil days. For literature, like virtue, is its own reward; and none but they to whom that reward has been given know or imagine how unspeakably great it is.

From The Times of India. TRIAL BY ORDEAL.

among grains of uncooked rice and cut limes, the whole sprinkled with red

the door and the men entered one at a time. As each one appeared the Brahmin seized his hands and raised them to his forehead, and then allowed him to pass on and join his fellows. Coming to Rama he went through the same pantomime, but instead of allowing him to pass on bade him to stand aside. When the last man had gone through the ordeal the Brahmin turned to Rama and said quietly, "Tell the sahib how you stole the money.

part of the contents of the mail from a head to a sub-office, had been stolen on the road. The whole affair was powder. A curtain was drawn across wrapped in mystery. The only clue the police had been able to obtain was that one runner, whom we shall call Rama, had since the theft paid off certain debts in the village which had long pressed upon him; but there were no other suspicious circumstances, and the man had done ten years' good service. As a last resource it was determined to resort to trial by ordeal, and for this purpose an aged Brahmin, who was supposed to possess occult powers and to be in daily communion with the gods, was consulted, and readily undertook to discover the thief. All the runners, a goodly array of sturdy Mahratta peasants, were summoned to the office; and under the guidance of a cheyla, or disciple of the old Brahmin, we all proceeded to the small, deserted temple of Mahadeo, situated at some distance from the village. It was a desolate spot and bore an evil reputation. The temple, owing to some desecration in the past, had been abandoned, and was almost buried among weeds and tangled brushwood.

The hour selected was about 6 P.M., and the long twilight shadows gave the place a weird, uncanny look. The old Brahmin was awaiting us, and as we approached appeared to be busy muttering incantations. The runners all seemed to be more or less under the spell of the hour, but the look of real fright on Rama's face was quite distinct.

To my utter amazement Rama fell on his knees, confessed that he was the thief, and offered to show where he had hid the balance of the money. He had succeeded in opening the mail bag without seriously disturbing the seals; the postmaster had not really examined them, and so their having been manipulated had escaped notice. Needless to say, the Brahmin was rewarded and poor Rama was sent to repent at leisure in the district jail. Now the natural question is, "How was it done?" Very simply. temple, the lonely glen, the uncanny hour, the incantations, all were mere accessories to appeal to the superstitions of the ignorant peasants. The "magic wand" was thickly smeared with strongly scented sandalwood oil. Rama's guilty conscience prevented him from touching it, as he firmly believed the wand would stick to his hands, and his, of course, was the only hand that did not smell of the oil.

The

From The Cornhill Magazine. AN ELIZABETHAN ZOOLOGIST.

The Brahmin, having finished his incantations, arose and, addressing the men, said: "You are about to face the gods; to the innocent the trial will be nothing, but to the guilty much. In the temple a magic wand has been placed on the altar. Each of you must A GLANCE at Mr. Topsel's account of go in turns, take up the wand and turn certain animals which are not to be round three times, repeating the name found in our zoological gardens, and of Mahadeo; the wand will stick to the which have been overlooked by ninehand of the guilty one." By this time teenth-century naturalists, may not be it was nearly dark; I glanced in without interest even for the sceptical through the door of the temple. A modern reader. He describes several solitary oil buttee threw a fitful light on varieties of apes which were quite unthe altar, on which an ordinary bamboo known to Darwin, notably the satyr stick about two feet long reposed and the sphinx. Satyrs, he tells us,