Much depends upon _when_ and _where_ you read a book. In the five or six
impatient minutes, before the dinner is quite ready, who would think of
taking up the _Fairy Queen_ for a stop-gap, or a volume of Bishop
Andrewes' sermons?
Milton almost requires a solemn service of music to be played before you
enter upon him. But he brings his music, to which, who listens, had need
bring docile thoughts, and purged ears.
Winter evenings--the world shut out--with less of ceremony the gentle
Shakespeare enters. At such a season, the _Tempest_, or his own
_Winter's Tale_.--
These two poets you cannot avoid reading aloud--to yourself, or (as it
chances) to some single person listening. More than one--and it
degenerates into an audience.
Books of quick interest, that hurry on for incidents, are for the eye to
glide over only. It will not do to read them out. I could never listen
to even the better kind of modern novels without extreme irksomeness.
A newspaper, read out, is intolerable.--C. LAMB. _Detached Thoughts on
Books and Reading._