Milton's "Paradise Lost," are sealed books to a
larger portion of every community than are willing to acknowledge the
fact. "When a Boy," said John Quincy Adams, "I attempted ten times to
read Milton's 'Paradise Lost.' I was mortified, even to the shedding of
tears, that I could not conceive what it was that my father and mother
so much admired in that book. I smoked tobacco and read Milton at the
same time, and for the same motive: to find out what was the recondite
charm in them that gave my father so much pleasure. After making myself
sick four or five times with smoking, I mastered that accomplishment;
but I did not master Milton. I was nearly thirty years of age when I
first read 'Paradise Lost' with delight and astonishment."

If our objectors mourn over the standard of books which are read by the
public, they may be consoled by the fact that, as a rule, people read
books better than themselves, and hence are benefited by reading. A book
of a lower intellectual or moral standard than the reader's is thrown
aside in disgust, to be picked up and read by a person still lower in
the scale of mental and moral development.

I do not lament, or join in the clamor sometimes raised, over the
statistics of prose fiction circulated at public libraries. Why this
lamentation over one specific form of fiction? The writers of such prose
fiction as is found in our libraries were as eminent and worthy men and
women as the writers of poetical fiction, dramatic fiction, or, I might
add, the fiction which passes in the world as history and biography.
History professes to relate actual events, biography to describe actual
lives, and science to unfold and explain natural laws and physical
phenomena. Fiction treats these and other subjects, mental, moral,
sentimental, and divine, from an ideal or artistic standpoint; and the
great mass of readers prefer to take their knowledge in this form. More
is known to-day of the history and traditions of Scotland, and of the
social customs of London, from the novels of Sir Walter Scott and
Charles Dickens than from all the histories of those localities. Fiction
is the art element in literature, and the most enduring monuments of
genius in the literature of any people are works of the imagination.

It is said that there is much poor fiction, and the statement is true.
So there are many poor pictures and poor statues, wretched chromos and
more wretched plaster casts. That these productions find pur