e. History
and biography in the hands of their masters give a healthy stimulus to
the imagination, and tend to strengthen the character. The function of a
town library should be to supply reading improving and interesting, and
yet, in the best sense of the word, popular; and I maintain that this
can be done, without setting up a rival agency to the news-stand, the
book-club, and the weekly paper, for the circulation of the novels of
the day.

There is a saying of Dr. Johnson, to the effect, that, if a boy be let
loose in a library, he is likely to give himself a very fair education.
But, in accepting this dictum, we must remember the sort of library the
doctor had in his mind. As known to him, it was based upon solid volumes
of systematized information. Besides these were the noblest poems of the
world, a very few great romances, and ponderous tomes of controversial
theology; good, healthy food, and much of it attractive to an unpampered
boy-appetite.

But the range of a large library is by no means necessary to produce the
soundest educational results. Can it be doubted that familiar knowledge
of a small case of well-selected books--such, for instance, as the
modest stipend of a country clergyman easily collects--is better for boy
and girl than the liberty of devouring a thousand highly-flavored sweets
in the free library? At all events, a few old-fashioned people do not
question it. "A year ago," writes one of them, "Alice used to read
Irving and Spenser, and Tom was dipping into Gibbon and Shakespeare;
liking them well enough, yet preferring a game of base-ball to either,
as it was proper he should. But the town library was opened, and these
young people are found crouching over novels in out-of-the-way corners,
when they ought to be at play; or reading surreptitiously at night, when
they ought to be asleep." It is in vain to throw all the responsibility
upon parents. American parents are very busy, and somewhat careless.
Mrs. Fanny Firefly's highly-seasoned love-stories for girls, and Mr.
Samuel Sensation's boy-novels and spiced preparations of boned history,
are got up, like the port-wine drops of the confectioners, to tempt and
to sell. And they do their work. No one can examine the average boy and
girl of the period without being struck with their ignorance of the
great works of English literature which young people of a former
generation were accustomed to read with profit and delight.

The function of a town