To a veteran like myself, who have watched the books of forty seasons,
there is nothing so old as a new book. An astonishing sameness and want
of individuality pervades modern books. The ideas they contain do not
seem to have passed through the mind of the writer. They have not even
that originality--the only originality which John Mill in his modesty
would claim for himself--'which every thoughtful mind gives to its own
mode of conceiving and expressing truths which are common
property'--(_Autobiography_). When you are in London step into the
reading-room of the British Museum. There is the great manufactory out
of which we turn the books of the season. It was so before there was any
British Museum. It was so in Chaucer's time--
For out of the old fields, as men saith,
Cometh all this new corn from year to year,
And out of old books in good faith
Cometh all this new science that men lere.
It continued to be so in Cervantes' day. 'There are,' says he in _Don
Quixote_, 'men who will make you books and turn them loose in the world
with as much dispatch as they would do a dish of fritters.'
It is not, then, any wonder that De Quincy should account it 'one of the
misfortunes of life that one must read thousands of books only to
discover that one need not have read them'.... And I cannot doubt that
Bishop Butler had observed the same phenomenon when he wrote, in 1729:
'The great number of books of amusement which daily come in one's way,
have in part occasioned this idle way of considering things. By this
means time, even in solitude, is happily got rid of without the pain of
attention; neither is any part of it more put to the account of
idleness, one can scarce forbear saying is spent with less thought, than
great part of that which is spent in reading.'--MARK PATTISON.
_Fortnightly Review: Books and Critics._