er. For myself, I have never found any royal road to
learning, have been a slow reader, and needed a re-reading, sometimes
more than one, to acquire any degree of mastery of a book. Macaulay used
to read his favorite Greek and Latin classics over and over again and
presumably always with care, but modern books he turned off with
extraordinary speed. Of Buckle's large volume of the "History of
Civilization" Macaulay wrote in his journal: "I read Buckle's book all
day, and got to the end, skipping, of course. A man of talent and of a
good deal of reading, but paradoxical and incoherent."[30] John Fiske, I
believe, was a slow reader, but he had such a remarkable power of
concentration that what he read once was his own. Of this I can give a
notable instance. At a meeting in Boston a number of years ago of the
Military Historical Society of Massachusetts, Colonel William R.
Livermore read a learned and interesting paper on Napoleon's Campaigns
in Northern Italy, and a few men, among whom were Fiske and John C.
Ropes, remained after supper to discuss the paper. The discussion went
well into details and was technical. Fiske had as much to say as any one
and met the military critics on their own ground, holding his own in
this interchange of expert opinions. As we returned to Cambridge
together, I expressed my surprise at his wide technical knowledge. "It
is all due to one book," he said. "A few summers ago I had occasion to
read Sir Edward Hamley's 'Operations of War' and for some reason or
other everything in it seemed to sink into my mind and to be there
retained, ready for use, as was the case to-night with his references to
the Northern Italian campaigns."

Outside of ordinary historical reading, a book occurs to me which is
well worth a historian's mastery. I am assuming that our hypothetical
student has read Goethe's "Faust," "Werther," and "Wilhelm Meister," and
desires to know something of the personality of this great writer. He
should, therefore, read Eckermann's "Conversations with Goethe," in
which he will find a body of profitable literary criticism, given out in
a familiar way by the most celebrated man then living. The talks began
when he was seventy-three and continued until near his death, ten years
later; they reveal his maturity of judgment. Greek, Roman, German,
English, French, Spanish, and Italian authors are taken up from time to
time and discussed with clearness and appreciation, running sometimes to
e