Let us turn our attention to the intellectual advantages accompanying
the pursuit, since the proper function of books is in the general case
associated with intellectual culture and occupation. It would seem that,
according to a received prejudice or opinion, there is one exception to
this general connexion, in the case of the possessors of libraries, who
are under a vehement suspicion of not reading their books. Well, perhaps
it is true in the sense in which those who utter the taunt understand
the reading of a book. That one should possess no books beyond his power
of perusal--that he should buy no faster than as he can read straight
through what he has already bought--is a supposition alike preposterous
and unreasonable. 'Surely you have far more books than you can read,' is
sometimes the inane remark of the barbarian who gets his books, volume
by volume, from some circulating library or reading club, and reads them
all through, one after the other, with a dreary dutifulness, that he may
be sure that he has got the value of his money.
It is true that there are some books--as Homer, Virgil, Horace, Milton,
Shakespeare, and Scott--which every man should read who has the
opportunity--should read, mark, learn, and inwardly digest.... But is
one next to read through the sixty and odd folio volumes of the
Bollandist _Lives of the Saints_, and the new edition of the Byzantine
historians, and the State Trials, and the _Encyclopaedia Britannica_,
and Moreri, and the Statutes at large, and the _Gentleman's Magazine_
from the beginning, each separately, and in succession? Such a course of
reading would certainly do a good deal towards weakening the mind, if it
did not create absolute insanity.
But in all these just named, even in the Statutes at large, and in
thousands upon thousands of other books, there is precious honey to be
gathered by the literary busy bee, who passes on from flower to flower.
In fact, 'a course of reading,' as it is sometimes called, is a course
of regimen for dwarfing the mind, like the drugs which dog-breeders give
to King Charles spaniels to keep them small. Within the span of life
allotted to man there is but a certain number of books that it is
practicable to read through, and it is not possible to make a selection
that will not, in a manner, wall in the mind from a free expansion over
the republic of letters. The being chained, as it were, to one intellect
in the perusal straight on of any large book, is a sort of mental
slavery superinducing imbecility. Even Gibbon's _Decline and Fall_,
luminous and comprehensive as its philosophy is, and rapid and brilliant
the narrative, will become deleterious mental food if consumed straight
through without variety. It will be well to relieve it occasionally with
a little Boston's _Fourfold State_, or Hervey's _Meditations_, or
Sturm's _Reflections for Every Day in the Year_, or _Don Juan_, or
Ward's _History of Stoke-Upon-Trent_.--J. H. BURTON. _The Book-Hunter._