t were easier, perhaps, in one sense, to tell what not to read, than to
recommend what is best worth reading. In the publishing world, this is
the age of compilation, not of creation. If we seek for great original
works, if we must go to the wholesale merchants to buy knowledge, since
retail geniuses are worth but little, one must go back many years for his
main selection of books. It would not be a bad rule for those who can
read but little, to read no book until it has been published at least a
year or two. This fever for the newest books is not a wholesome condition
of the mind. And since a selection must indispensably be made, and that
selection must be, for the great mass of readers, so rigid and so small,
why should precious time be wasted upon the ephemeral productions of the
hour? What business, for example, has one to be reading Rider Haggard, or
Amelie Rives, or Ian Maclaren, who has never read Homer, or Dante, or
even so much as half-a-dozen plays of Shakespeare?

One hears with dismay that about three-fourths of the books drawn from
our popular libraries are novels. Now, while such aimless reading, merely
to be amused, is doubtless better than no reading at all, it is
unquestionably true that over-much reading of fiction, especially at an
early age, enervates the mind, weakens the will, makes dreamers instead
of thinkers and workers, and fills the imagination with morbid and unreal
views of life. Yet the vast consumption of novels is due more to the
cheapness and wide diffusion of such works, and the want of wise
direction in other fields, than to any original tendency on the part of
the young. People will always read the most, that which is most put
before them, if only the style be attractive. The mischief that is done
by improper books is literally immeasureable. The superabundance of cheap
fictions in the markets creates and supplies an appetite which should be
directed by wise guidance into more improving fields. A two-fold evil
follows upon the reading of every unworthy book; in the first place, it
absorbs the time which should be bestowed upon a worthy one; and
secondly, it leaves the mind and heart unimproved, instead of conducing
to the benefit of both. As there are few books more elevating than a
really good novel, so there are none more fruitful of evil than a bad
one.

And what of the newspaper? it may be asked. When I consider for how much
really good literature we are beholden to the daily and