cheapest, one of the least dependent on
age, seasons, and the varying conditions of life. It cheers the invalid
through years of weakness and confinement; illuminates the dreary hours
of the sleepless night; stores the mind with pleasant thoughts, banishes
ennui, fills up the unoccupied interstices and enforced leisures of an
active life; makes men for a time at least forget their anxieties and
sorrows, and if it is judiciously managed it is one of the most powerful
means of training character and disciplining and elevating thought. It
is eminently a pleasure which is not only good in itself but enhances
many others. By extending the range of our knowledge, by enlarging our
powers of sympathy and appreciation, it adds incalculably to the
pleasures of society, to the pleasures of travel, to the pleasures of
art, to the interest we take in the vast variety of events which form
the great world-drama around us.

To acquire this taste in early youth is one of the best fruits of
education, and it is especially useful when the taste for reading
becomes a taste for knowledge, and when it is accompanied by some
specialisation and concentration and by some exercise of the powers of
observation. 'Many tastes and one hobby' is no bad ideal to be aimed at.
The boy who learns to collect and classify fossils, or flowers, or
insects, who has acquired a love for chemical experiments, who has begun
to form a taste for some particular kind or department of knowledge, has
laid the foundation of much happiness in life.

In the selection of pleasures and the cultivation of tastes much wisdom
is shown in choosing in such a way that each should form a complement to
the others; that different pleasures should not clash, but rather cover
different areas and seasons of life; that each should tend to correct
faults or deficiencies of character which the others may possibly
produce. The young man who starts in life with keen literary tastes and
also with a keen love of out-of-door sports, and who possesses the means
of gratifying each, has perhaps provided himself with as many elements
of happiness as mere amusements can ever furnish. One set of pleasures,
however, often kills the capacity for enjoying others, and some which in
themselves are absolutely innocent, by blunting the enjoyment of better
things, exercise an injurious influence on character. Habitual
novel-reading, for example, often destroys the taste for serious
literature, and few thi