y
discount when reduced to practice. The librarian is a constant and busy
worker in far other fields than exploring the contents of books. His day
is filled with cataloguing, arranging and classifying them, searching
catalogues, selecting new books, correspondence, directing assistants,
keeping library records, adjusting accounts, etc., in the midst of which
he is constantly at the call of the public for books and information.
What time has he, wearied by the day's multifarious and exacting labors,
for any thorough study of books? So, when anyone begins an inquiry with,
"You know everything; can you tell me,"--I say: "Stop a moment;
omniscience is not a human quality; I really know very few things, and am
not quite sure of some of them." There are many men, and women, too, in
almost every community, whose range of knowledge is more extended than
that of most librarians.

The idea, then, that because one lives perpetually among books, he
absorbs all the learning that they contain, must be abandoned as a
popular delusion. To know a little upon many subjects is quite compatible
with not knowing much about any one. "Beware of the man of one book," is
an ancient proverb, pregnant with meaning. The man of one book, if it is
wisely chosen, and if he knows it all, can sometimes confound a whole
assembly of scholars. An American poet once declared to me that all
leisure time is lost that is not spent in reading Shakespeare. And we
remember Emerson's panegyric upon Plato's writings, borrowing from the
Caliph Omar his famous (but apocryphal) sentence against all books but
the Koran: "Burn all the libraries, for their value is in this book." So
Sheffield, duke of Buckingham:

"Read Homer once, and you can read no more,
For all books else appear so tame, so poor,
Verse will seem prose, but still persist to read,
And Homer will be all the books you need."

Of course I am far from designing to say anything against the widest
study, which great libraries exist to supply and to encourage; and all
utterances of a half-truth, like the maxim I have quoted, are
exaggerations. But the saying points a moral--and that is, the supreme
importance of thoroughness in all that we undertake. The poetical
wiseacre who endowed the world with the maxim, "A little learning is a
dangerous thing," does not appear to have reflected upon the logical
sequence of the dictum, namely: that if a little learning upon any
subject is dangerou