If I were to pray for a taste which should stand me in stead under every
variety of circumstances, and be a source of happiness and cheerfulness
to me through life, and a shield against its ills, however things might
go amiss, and the world frown upon me, it would be a taste for reading.
I speak of it of course only as a worldly advantage, and not in the
slightest degree as superseding or derogating from the higher office and
surer and stronger panoply of religious principles--but as a taste, an
instrument and a mode of pleasurable gratification. Give a man this
taste, and the means of gratifying it, and you can hardly fail of making
a happy man, unless, indeed, you put into his hands a most perverse
selection of books. You place him in contact with the best society in
every period of history--with the wisest, the wittiest--with the
tenderest, the bravest, and the purest characters who have adorned
humanity. You make him a denizen of all nations--a contemporary of all
ages. The world has been created for him.--SIR J. HERSCHEL. _Address to
the Subscribers to the Windsor Public Library._