new courage and faith, soothe pain, give an ideal life to those whose homes are hard and cold, bind together distant ages and foreign lands, create new worlds of beauty, bring down truths from heaven-I give eternal blessings for this gift, and pray that we may use it aright, and abuse it not.

AUSTIN DOBSON. [Living.]
My Books.

But the row that I prize is yonder,
Away on the unglazed shelves,
The bulged and the bruised octavos,
The dear and the dumpy twelves,—
Montaigne with his sheepskin blistered,
And Howell the worse for wear,
And the worm-drilled Jesuit's Horace,
And the little old cropped Molière,-
And the Burton I bought for a florin,
And the Rabelais foxed and flea'd,-
For the others I never have opened,
But those are the ones I read.

Longman's Magazine, April, 1883.

ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON. [Living.]

Every book is, in an intimate sense, a circular-letter to the friends of him who writes it.

To treat all subjects in the highest, the most honourable, and the pluckiest spirit, consistent with the fact, is the first duty of a writer. In the humblest

sort of literary work, we have it in our power either to do great harm or great good. We may seek merely to please; we may seek, having no higher gift, merely to gratify the idle nine-days' curiosity of our contemporaries; or we may essay, however feebly, to instruct. In each of these we shall have to deal with that remarkable art of words, which, because it is the dialect of life, comes home so easily and powerfully to the minds of men; and since that is so, we contribute, in each of these branches, to build up the sum of sentiments and appreciations which goes by the name of Public Opinion or Public Feeling.

There are two duties incumbent upon any man who enters on the business of writing: truth to the fact and a good spirit in the treatment. Those who write have to see that each man's knowledge is, as near as they can make it, answerable to the facts of life; that he shall not suppose himself an angel or a monster; nor take this world for a hell; nor be suffered to imagine that all rights are concentred in his own caste or country, or all veracities in his own parochial creed. Each man should learn what is within him, that he may strive to mend; he must be taught what is without him, that he may be kind to others. It can never be wrong to tell him the truth; for in his disputable state, weaving as he goes his theory of life, steering himself, cheering or reproving others, all facts are of the first importance to his conduct; and even if a fact shall discourage or corrupt him, it is still best that he should know it; for it is in this world as it is, and not in a world made easy by educational suppres

sions, that he must win his way to shame or glory. In one word, it must always be foul to tell what is false; and it can never be safe to suppress what is true. The very fact that you omit may be what somebody was wanting, for one man's meat is another man's poison.

An author who reposes in some narrow faith, cannot, if he would, express the whole or even many of the sides of this various existence; for his own life being maim, some of them are not admitted in his theory, and were only dimly and unwillingly recognised in his experience. Hence the smallness, the triteness, and the inhumanity in works of merely sectarian religion ; and hence we find equal although unsimilar limitations in works inspired by the spirit of the flesh or the despicable taste for high society. So that the first duty of any man who is to write is intellectual. Designedly or not, he has so far set himself up for a leader of the minds of men ; and he must see that his own mind is kept supple, charitable, and bright. Everything but prejudice should find a voice through him; he should see the good in all things; where he has even a fear that he does not wholly understand, there he should be wholly silent; and he should recognise from the first that he has only one tool in his workshop, and that tool is sympathy.-Article in the Fortnightly Review, April, 1881: "The Morality of the Profession of Letters."

CHARLES F. RICHARDSON.

[Living.]

With young or old, there is no such helper towards the reading habit as the cultivation of this warm and

If a

undying feeling of the friendliness of books. parent, or a teacher, or a book, seems but a taskmaster; if their rules are those of a statute-book and their society like that of an officer of the law, there is small hope that their help can be made either serviceable or profitable. But with the growth of the friendly feeling comes a state of mind which renders all things possible. When one book has become a friend and fellow, the world has grown that much broader and more beautiful. Petrarch said of his books, considered as his friends: "I have friends, &c." *

The great secret of reading consists in this, that it does not matter so much what we read, or how we read it, as what we think and how we think it. Reading is only the fuel; and, the mind once on fire, any and all material will feed the flame, provided only it have any combustible matter in it. And we cannot tell from what quarter the next material will come. The thought we need, the facts we are in search of, may make their appearance in the corner of the newspaper, or in some forgotten volume long ago consigned to dust and oblivion. Hawthorne, in the parlour of a country inn, on a rainy day, could find mental nutriment in an old directory. That accomplished philologist, the late Lord Strangford, could find ample amusement for an hour's delay at a railway-station in tracing out the etymology of the names in Bradshaw. The mind that is not awake and alive will find a library a barren wilderness. Now, gather up the scraps and fragments of thought on whatever subject you may be studying,—

*The reader will find the passage quoted at page 10 of this volume.

for of course by a note-book I do not mean a mere receptacle for odds and ends, a literary dust-bin,—but acquire the habit of gathering everything whenever and wherever you find it, that belongs in your line or lines of study, and you will be surprised to see how such fragments will arrange themselves into an orderly whole by the very organizing power of your own thinking, acting in a definite direction. This is a true process of self-education; but you see it is no mechanical process of mere aggregation. It requires activity of thought,-but without that, what is any reading but mere passive amusement? And it requires method. I have myself a sort of literary book-keeping. I keep a day-book, and at my leisure I post my literary accounts, bringing together in proper groups the fruits of much casual reading.

A book that is worth reading all through, is pretty sure to make its worth known. There is something in the literary conscience which tells a reader whether he is wasting his time or not. An hour or a minute may be sufficient opportunity for forming a decision concerning the worth or worthlessness of the book. If it is utterly bad and valueless, then skip the whole of it, as soon as you have made the discovery. If a part is good and a part bad, accept the one and reject the other. If you are in doubt, take warning at the first intimation that you are misspending your opportunity and frittering away your time over an unprofitable book. Reading that is of questionable value is not hard to find out; it bears its notes and marks in unmistakable plainness, and it puts forth, all unwittingly, danger-signals of which the reader should take heed.