weekly press, how
indispensable is its function as purveyor of the news of the world, how
widely it has been improved in recent years, I cannot advise quarreling
with the bridge that brings so many across the gulf of ignorance. Yet the
newspaper, like the book, is to be read sparingly, and with judgment. It
is to be used, not abused. I call that an abuse which squanders the
precious and unreturning hours over long chronicles of depravity. The
murders, the suicides, the executions, the divorces, the criminal trials,
are each and all so like one another that it is only a wanton waste of
time to read them. The morbid style in which social disorders of all
kinds are written up in the sensational press, with staring headlines to
attract attention, ought to warn off every healthy mind from their
perusal. Every scandal in society that can be brought to the surface is
eagerly caught up and paraded, while the millions of people who lead
blameless lives of course go unnoticed and unchronicled. Such journals
thus inculcate the vilest pessimism, instead of a wholesome and honest
belief in the average decency of human nature. The prolixity of the
narrative, too, is always in monstrous disproportion to its importance.
"Does not the burning of a metropolitan theatre," says a great writer,
"take above a million times as much telling as the creation of a world?"
Here is where the art of skipping is to be rigorously applied. Read the
newspaper by headlines only,--skipping all the murders, all the fires,
all the executions, all the crimes, all the news, except the most
important and immediately interesting,--and you will spend perhaps
fifteen or twenty minutes upon what would otherwise occupy hours. It is
no exaggeration to say that most persons have spent time enough over the
newspapers, to have given them a liberal education.

As all readers cannot have the same gifts, so all cannot enjoy the same
books. There are those who can see no greatness in Shakespeare, but who
think Tupper's Proverbial Philosophy sublime. Some will eagerly devour
every novel of Miss Braddon's, or "The Duchess," or the woman calling
herself "Ouida," but they cannot appreciate the masterly fictions of
Thackeray. I have known very good people who could not, for the life of
them, find any humor in Dickens, but who actually enjoyed the strained
wit of Mrs. Partington and Bill Nye. Readers who could not get through a
volume of Gibbon will read with admiration a so-call