n more than the
first--and yet we find ourselves (we are all alike) painfully
pshaw-ing over some new and uncut barley sugar in rime, which a man in
the street asked us if we had read, or it may be some learned
lucubration about the site of Troy by some one we chanced to meet at
dinner. It is an unwritten chapter in the history of the human mind,
how this literary prurience after new print unmans us for the
enjoyment of the old songs chanted forth in the sunrise of human
imagination. To ask a man or woman who spends half a lifetime in
sucking magazines and new poems to read a book of Homer would be like
asking a butcher's boy to whistle "Adelaida." The noises and sights
and talk, the whirl and volatility of life around us, are too strong
for us. A society which is forever gossiping in a sort of perpetual
"drum" loses the very faculty of caring for anything but "early
copies" and the last tale out. Thus, like the tares in the noble
parable of the Sower, a perpetual chatter about books chokes the seed
which is sown in the greatest books in the world.

I speak of Homer, but fifty other great poets and creators of eternal
beauty would serve my argument as well. Take the latest perhaps in the
series of the world-wide and immortal poets of the whole human
race--Walter Scott. We all read Scott's romances, as we have all read
Hume's "History of England," but how often do we read them, how
zealously, with what sympathy and understanding? I am told that the
last discovery of modern culture is that Scott's prose is commonplace;
that the young men at our universities are far too critical to care
for his artless sentences and flowing descriptions. They prefer Mr.
Swinburne, Mr. Mallock, and the euphuism of young Oxford, just as some
people prefer a Dresden shepherdess to the Caryatides of the
Erechtheum, pronounce Fielding to be low, and Mozart to be _passe_. As
boys love lollipops, so these juvenile fops love to roll phrases
about under the tongue, as if phrases in themselves had a value apart
from thoughts, feelings, great conceptions, or human sympathy.

For Scott is just one of the poets (we may call poets all the great
creators in prose or in verse) of whom one never wearies, just as one
can listen to Beethoven or watch the sunrise or the sunset day by day
with new delight. I think I can read the "Antiquary," or the "Bride of
Lammermoor," "Ivanhoe," "Quentin Durward," and "Old Mortality," at
least once a year afresh. Now Scot