the varied pleasures of the fashionable life, the
intellectual life can offer you but one satisfaction, for all its
promises are reducible simply to this, that you shall come at last,
after infinite labour, into contact with some great _reality_; that you
shall know and do in such sort that you will feel yourself on firm
ground, and be recognised--probably not much applauded, but yet
recognised--as a fellow-labourer by other knowers and doers. Before you
come to this, most of your present accomplishments will be abandoned by
yourself as unsatisfactory and insufficient, but one or two of them will
be turned to better account, and will give you, after many years, a
tranquil self-respect, and, what is still rarer and better, a very deep
and earnest reverence for the greatness which is above you. Severed from
the vanities of the illusory, you will live with the realities of
knowledge as one who has quitted the painted scenery of the theatre to
listen by the eternal ocean or gaze at the granite hills.'[11]

'Reading, with me, incites to reflection instantly. I cannot separate
the origination of ideas from the reception of ideas. The consequence
is, as I read I always begin to think in various directions, and that
makes my reading slow.'[12]

'When a particular object has to be attained, reading cannot be too
special. There is an enormous waste of intelligence through a neglect of
this fact, but otherwise reading should "come by nature." When I look
through the list of The Best Hundred Books, I cannot help saying to
myself, "Here are the most admirable and varied materials for the
formation of a prig."'[13]

'Let us not be afraid of using a dictionary. _A_ dictionary? A dozen; at
all events, until Dr. Murray's huge undertaking is finished. And even
then, for no one dictionary will help us through some authors--say,
Chaucer, or Spenser, or Sir Thomas Browne. Let us use our full lexicon,
and Latin dictionary, and French dictionary, and Anglo-Saxon dictionary,
and etymological dictionary, and dictionaries of antiquity, and
biography, and geography, and concordances, anything and everything that
will throw light on the meanings and histories of words.'[14]

'To master a book, perhaps the best possible way is to write an essay
in refutation of it. You may be bound few things will escape you then.
The next best way may perhaps be to edit and annotate it for students,
though, if some recent hebdomadal animadversions upon certain