s problem to
be, not what to read, but what to resist reading.

Suppose, however, that the student finds himself already possessed of a
vague, general knowledge of literature, but nothing definite or
satisfying, nothing that inspires interest. He it is who may profitably
take up the first attractive unread book at hand; but he should endeavor
to read it, not as an isolated fragment of literature, but in its
relations. Suppose the book happens to be "Don Quixote." This is a work
written primarily to amuse. But if the reader throws himself into the
spirit of the book, he will not be content, for instance, with the mere
mention of the romances of chivalry which turned the poor knight's
brain. He will want to read about them and to read some of them
actually. He will be curious as to Charlemagne and his peers, Arthur and
his knights, and will seek to know their true as well as their fabulous
history. Then he will wonder who the Moors were, why they were banished,
and what was the result to Spain of this act in which even his liberal
and kindly author acquiesced. He will ask if antiquity had its romances
and if any later novelists were indebted to Cervantes. The answer to the
last query will bring him to Gil Blas in French literature and to the
works of the great English romancers of the eighteenth century. Fielding
will lead him to Thackeray, Smollett to Dickens, Dickens to Bret Harte,
and Bret Harte to Kipling. If he reads Cervantes in English, he will
have a choice of translations, and he will not fail to mark the
enormous difference in language, literary style, and ideals of rendering
between the three versions of Shelton in the seventeenth century,
Motteux in the eighteenth, and Ormsby in the nineteenth. If, like many
another, he becomes so interested in the great romance as to learn
Spanish for the sake of coming into direct communication with his
author, a whole new literature will be opened to him. Furthermore, in
the cognate languages which a mastery of Spanish will make easy for him,
a group of literatures will be placed at his command; and, while he
began with Cervantes, who threw open for him the portals of the middle
ages, we may leave him with Dante, looking before and after over all
human achievement and destiny.

All this the student will not do in one term nor in one year, but he
will have _found himself_ in the library, he will have acquired a bond
to culture that will not break as he steps out of his last