y that any reading was better than none, allaying the
crudeness of the statement by the Yankee proverb, which tells us that,
though 'all deacons are good, there's odds in deacons.' Among books,
certainly there is much variety of company, ranging from the best to the
worst, from Plato to Zola, and the first lesson in reading well is that
which teaches us to distinguish between literature and merely printed
matter. The choice lies wholly with ourselves. We have the key put into
our hands; shall we unlock the pantry or the oratory? There is a
Wallachian legend which, like most of the figments of popular fancy, has
a moral in it. One Bakala, a good-for-nothing kind of fellow in his way,
having had the luck to offer a sacrifice especially well pleasing to
God, is taken up into heaven. He finds the Almighty sitting in something
like the best room of a Wallachian peasant's cottage--there is always
something profoundly pathetic in the homeliness of the popular
imagination, forced, like the princess in the fairy tale, to weave its
semblance of gold tissue out of straw. On being asked what reward he
desires for the good service he has done, Bakala, who had always
passionately longed to be the owner of a bagpipe, seeing a half wornout
one lying among some rubbish in a corner of the room, begs eagerly that
it may be bestowed on him. The Lord, with a smile of pity at the
meanness of his choice, grants him his boon, and Bakala goes back to
earth delighted with his prize. With an infinite possibility within his
reach, with the choice of wisdom, of power, of beauty at his tongue's
end, he asked according to his kind, and his sordid wish is answered
with a gift as sordid. Yes, there is a choice in books as in friends,
and the mind sinks or rises to the level of its habitual society, is
subdued, as Shakespeare says of the dyer's hand, to what it works in.
Cato's advice, _cum bonis ambula_, consort with the good, is quite as
true if we extend it to books, for they, too, insensibly give away their
own nature to the mind that converses with them. They either beckon
upward or drag down. And it is certainly true that the material of
thought reacts upon the thought itself. Shakespeare himself would have
been commonplace had he been paddocked in a thinly shaven vocabulary,
and Phidias, had he worked in wax, only a more inspired Mrs. Jarley. A
man is known, says the proverb, by the company he keeps, and not only
so, but made by it. Milton makes hi