t
get everything in a book without reading all of it; but it by no means
follows that the virtue of less than the whole is negligible.

So much for the direct effect of what one may thus take in, bit by bit.
The indirect effect is even more important. For by sampling a whole
literature, as he does, he not only gets a bird's-eye view of it, but he
finds out what lie likes and what he dislikes; he begins to form his
taste. Are you afraid that he will form it wrong? I am not. We are
assuming that the library where he browses is a good one; here is no
chance of evil, only a choice between different kinds of good. And even if
the evil be there, it is astonishing how the healthy mind will let it slip
and fasten eagerly on the good. Would you prefer a taste fixed by someone
who tells the browser what he ought to like? Then that is not the reader's
own taste at all, but that of his informant. We have too much of this sort
of thing--too many readers without an atom of taste of their own who will
say, for instance, that they adore George Meredith, because some one has
told them that all intellectual persons do so. The man who frankly loves
George Ade and can yet see nothing in Shakespeare may one day discover
Shakespeare. The man who reads Shakespeare merely because he thinks he
ought to is hopeless.

But what a triumph, to stand spell-bound by the art of a writer whose name
you never heard, and then discover that he is one of the great ones of the
world! Nought is comparable to it except perhaps to pick out all by
yourself in the exhibition the one picture that the experts have chosen
for the museum or to be able to say you liked olives the first time you
tasted them.

Who are your favorites? Did some one guide you to them or did you find
them yourselves? I will warrant that in many cases you discovered them and
that this is why you love them. I discovered DeQuincey's romances, Praed's
poetry, Beranger in French, Heine in German, "The Arabian nights",
Moliere, Irving's "Alhambra," hundreds of others probably. I am sure that
I love them all far more than if some one had told me they were good
books. If I had been obliged to read them in school and pass an
examination on them, I should have hated them. The teacher who can write
an examination paper on Gray's "Elegy", would, I firmly believe, cut up
his grandmother alive before the physiology class.

And next to the author or the book that you have discovered yourself comes
the