the Cleveland, Ohio, librarian, is an
admirably full means of keeping our keys to periodical literature up to
date. There are other indexes to periodicals, published monthly or
quarterly, too numerous to be noticed here. The annual _New York Tribune_
Index (the only daily journal, except the _London Times_, which prints an
index) is highly useful, and may be used for other newspapers as well,
for the most important events or discussions, enabling one to search the
dailies for himself, the date once being fixed by aid of the index.

Mention should also be made here of the admirably comprehensive annual
"_Rowell's Newspaper Directory_," which should rather be called the
"American Periodical Directory," since it has a classified catalogue of
all periodicals published in the United States and Canada.

CHAPTER 9.

THE ART OF READING.

"The true University of these days," says a great scholar of our century,
Thomas Carlyle, "is a collection of books, and all education is to teach
us how to read."

If there were any volume, out of the multitude of books about books that
have been written, which could illuminate the pathway of the unskilled
reader, so as to guide him into all knowledge by the shortest road, what
a boon that book would be!

When we survey the vast and rapidly growing product of the modern
press,--when we see these hosts of poets without imagination, historians
without accuracy, critics without discernment, and novelists without
invention or style, in short, the whole prolific brood of writers who do
not know how to write,--we are tempted to echo the sentiment of
Wordsworth:--

"The intellectual power, through words and things,
Goes sounding on a dim and perilous way."

The most that any one can hope to do for others is to suggest to them a
clue which, however feeble, has helped to guide his uncertain footsteps
through the labyrinthian maze of folly and wisdom which we call
literature.

The knowledge acquired by a Librarian, while it may be very wide and very
varied, runs much risk of being as superficial as it is diversified.
There is a very prevalent, but very erroneous notion which conceives of a
librarian as a kind of animated encyclopaedia, who, if you tap him in any
direction, from A to Z, will straightway pour forth a flood of knowledge
upon any subject in history, science, or literature. This popular ideal,
however fine in theory, has to undergo what commercial men call a heav