When I see a morning procession of pallid schoolboys staggering
to school under a load of text-books almost too heavy to be
held together by the strap that encircles them, or a bevy of
young girls, bound on the same educational errand, more pallid
and more exhausted by the eight or ten pounds of torture in
the shape of grammars, dictionaries, geographies, arithmetics,
geometries and philosophies, they, too, tug along the streets,
I wish their piles of knowledge might be reduced one-half, for
I can not but feel that with fewer books there would be more
culture, that too many studies produce too little scholarship,
and that the intellect which is forced will rarely be
expanded.--JAMES T. FIELDS.
(3081)
=Style=--See PERSONAL ELEMENT IN LITERATURE.