several young American poets,
whose work, seldom seen here, interests me, and I named their books. He
had never heard of them. This enthusiast did not even appear to have the
beginning of an idea that his was unforgivable ignorance seeing that he
knew more than a native ought to know about some of our taverns. Had he
been an Englishman and a friend of mine I should have told him that I
thought his love of letters was as spurious as the morality of the curate
who speaks in a trembling baritone about changes in the divorce laws,
but who accepts murder without altering the statutory smile of
benediction.

Literature would be lighter without that scroll work and top hamper. It
has nothing to do with its life. It is as helpful to us as wall-texts and
those wonders we know as works of Pure Thought. Let us remember all the
noble volumes of philosophy and metaphysics we ought to have read, to
learn how wonderfully far our brains have taken us beyond the relic of
Piltdown; and then recall what Ypres was like, and buy a teetotum
instead. That much is saved. Now we need not read them. If we feel
ourselves weakening towards such idleness, let us spin tops. If we had to
choose between Garvice and say Hegel or Locke for a niche in the Temple
of Letters, we should make an unintelligible blunder if we did not elect
Mr. Garvice without discussion. He is human, he is ingenuous and funny,
and the philosophers are only loosening with the insinuations of moth and
rust. The philosophers are like the great statesmen and the great
soldiers--we should be happier without them. If we are not happy and
enjoying life, then we have missed the only reason for it. If books do
not help us to this, if they even devise our thoughts into knots and put
straws in our hair, then they ought to be burned. It is true that some
of us may get pleasure from searching novels for solecisms and collecting
evidence by which shall be guessed the originals of the novelist's
characters, just as others extract amusement from puzzle pictures. But
book-worming has the same relation to literature, even when it is done by
a learned doctor in the Bodleian, as flies in a dairy with our milk
supply. If most of the books in the British Museum were destroyed, we
might still have a friend who would go with us to Amiens to get one more
dinner in a well-remembered room, and drink to the shades; we might
still, from the top of Lundy at dusk, watch the dim seas break into lilac
around