e point. Good books do not instruct us so much as
they persuade us; so that we come to be of the same mind as the great man
who had deliberated and debated the matter so thoroughly for us.
Perchance we disagree and take a different standpoint. Then can one
almost see the spirit of the sage chuckling with delight at having found
someone with whom to cross swords. '_I have made him think, I have made
him think_,' he repeats gleefully; and, sure of his point, he delights in
having held our attention so intently as to cause us to debate the issue
with ourselves.

It were foolish, however, to suppose that _all_ the great books of the
world are at once suitable to every reader. Time, above all other
considerations, decides what we shall read; and the book which makes its
greatest impression upon one man at thirty will fail to appeal to his
neighbour till he be fifty or more. 'A man loves the meat in his youth
that he cannot endure in his age,' says Benedick, and the converse is
equally true. What a mistaken notion it is that puts into the hands of
boys such classics as 'The Pilgrim's Progress' and 'Don Quixote'; for
they are books which a knowledge of the world and of human nature alone
can enable us to appreciate to the full. Their very foundations are built
upon the rock of experience, every page exhibits the thoughts and deeds
of men. No wonder that nine boys out of ten grow up with a dislike of
Bunyan and all his works, and a contempt for the adventures of the
immortal Don. Generally, however, all recollection of Quixote, except
that he had a rotten old horse and charged some windmills, has
(mercifully) disappeared long before the reader has attained his
eighteenth year.

In later life, perhaps, we take up these books again, and are surprised
to find that they have completely changed. There is hardly an incident in
them that we remember, and we marvel how such and such a glorious passage
could possibly have escaped us before. Our book-hunter's experience must
have been that of many others. Long after his school-days were ended he
took up, for the first time, 'The Adventures of Tom Sawyer.' How
wistfully he thought of the enjoyment that would have been his when at
school, had but some kind chance put into his hands this and similar
books in which boys, and real human boys, played the principal parts, not
strange outlandish men, the like of whom he had never met.

This unwise reading, this plunging, as it were, _in medias