of our soul.

"The moment fiction becomes mendacious it is bad, for it induces us to
believe a lie. Fiction purely as fiction must be innocent and beautiful,
and its beauty must be more than skin deep. Every field of art is a
playground and we are extra pleased when the artist makes that field a
gymnasium also."

Cotton Mather's "Essay to do Good" read by the boy Franklin influenced
the latter's whole life. He advised everybody to read with a pen in hand
and to make notes of all they read.

James T. Fields visited Jesse Pomeroy, the boy murderer, in jail.
Pomeroy told him he had been a great reader of "blood and thunder"
stories; that he had read sixty dime novels about scalping and other
bloody performances; and he thought there was no doubt that these books
had put the horrible thoughts into his mind which led to his murderous
acts.

Many a boy has gone to sea and become a rover for life under the
influence of Marryat's novels. Abbott's "Life of Napoleon," read at the
age of seven years, sent one boy whom I knew to the army before he was
fourteen. Many a man has committed crime from the leavening, multiplying
influence of a bad book read when a boy. The chaplain of Newgate prison
in London, in one of his annual reports to the Lord Mayor, referring to
many fine-looking lads of respectable parentage in the city prison, said
that he discovered that "all these boys, without exception, had been in
the habit of reading those cheap periodicals" which were published for
the alleged amusement of youth of both sexes. There is not a police
court or a prison in this country where similar cases could not be
found. One can hardly measure the moral ruin that has been caused in
this generation by the influence of bad books.

In the parlor window of the old mossy vicarage where Coleridge spent his
dreamy childhood lay a well-thumbed copy of that volume of Oriental
fancy, the "Arabian Nights," and he has told us with what mingled desire
and apprehension he was wont to look at the precious book, until the
morning sunshine had touched and illuminated it, when, seizing it
hastily, he would carry it off in triumph to some leafy nook in the
vicarage garden, and plunge delightedly into its maze of marvels and
enchantments.

Beecher said that Ruskin's works taught him the secret of seeing, and
that no man could ever again be quite the same man or look at the world
in the same way after reading him. Samuel Drew said, "Locke's 'Essay on