converge, like the paths that carry us over the surface of the globe on
which we live. Many a reader has learned more of past times from good
biographies, than from any formal history; and it is a fact that many owe
to the plays of Shakespeare and the novels of Walter Scott nearly all the
knowledge which they possess of the history of England and Scotland.

It is unhappily true that books do not teach the use of books. The art of
extracting what is important or instructive in any book, from the mass
of verbiage that commonly overlays it, cannot be learned by theory.
Invaluable as the art of reading is, as a means of enlightenment, its
highest uses can only be obtained by a certain method of reading, which
will separate the wheat from the chaff. Different readers will, of
course, possess different capacities for doing this. Young or
undisciplined minds can read only in one way,--and that way is, to
mentally pronounce every word, and dwell equally upon all the parts of
every sentence. This comes naturally in the first instance, from the mere
method of learning to read, in which every word is a spoken symbol, and
has to be sounded, whether it is essential to the sense, or not. This
habit of reading, which may be termed the literal method, goes with most
persons through life. Once learned, it is very hard to unlearn. There are
multitudes who cannot read a newspaper, even, without dwelling upon every
word, and coming to a full stop at the end of every sentence. Now this
method of reading, while it may be indispensable to all readers at some
time, and to some readers at all times, is too slow and fruitless for the
student who aims to absorb the largest amount of knowledge in the
briefest space of time. Life is too short to be wasted over the rhetoric
or the periods of an author whose knowledge we want as all that concerns
us.

Doubtless there are classes of literature in which form or expression
predominates, and we cannot read poetry, for example, or the drama, or
even the higher class of fiction, without lingering upon the finer
passages, to get the full impression of their beauty. In reading works of
the imagination, we read not for ideas alone, but for expression also,
and to enjoy the rhythm and melody of the verse, if it be poetry, or, if
prose, the finished rhetoric, and the pleasing cadence of the style. It
is here that the literary skill of an accomplished writer, and all that
we understand by rhetoric, becomes impor