The first thing necessary to the pleasure of reading is that when people are young they should acquire the habit of reading. This is becoming more and more difficult. Before I was aware of things in the world, the Penny Post had already begun to make a change adverse to reading, by consuming a vast amount of time in correspondence that was unnecessary, trivial or irksome. Railways have altered people's habits by making them move about much more. But railways have this compensating advantage that although they take people much away from home, a long railway journey affords a first-rate opportunity for reading. They were not, therefore, an unmixed disadvantage. But now things are changing. The motor-car is altogether unfavourable to reading. People consume more time in moving about than they did, and they consume it under conditions which, even for people with good eyes, must make reading difficult, if not impossible. The telephone is a deadly disadvantage; it minces time into fragments and frays the spirit. Wireless, with all its delights, is now being added as a distraction to divert people from time that might be given to the pleasure of reading. The cinematograph is another change in the same direction, and flying is becoming more and more common. All these things must make it more difficult for successive generations to acquire the habit of reading, and if that habit be acquired, to maintain it. Even before all these changes it was not easy to maintain the habit, but it could be done. There is a story of Auberon Herbert-I do not know whether it is true or not, but I do not mind connecting it with his name, because it is a story I think entirely 18

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to his credit, and which I always recall with a sense of satisfaction and encouragement. He was staying in his country home, and some visitors were announced. He received them with perfect good manners, and after a cordial welcome he said to them, "And now what would you like to do?we are reading." We need more and more of that spirit.

A further disadvantage to reading is the great development of picture papers. Picture papers are tending to divert people not only from reading, but from thought. Where one used to see people get into a railway carriage and settle down to a book, they now come with an armful of picture papers and look at the pictures with more or less transient amusement, one after the other, and so pass the time. I found the other day a person who during the war between the Turks and the Greeks expressed an opinion rather in favour of the Turks, because he or she (I will not reveal even the sex) said that, judging by the pictures in the papers, Mustapha Kemal looked rather a good sort of fellow.

In connection with this danger to reading I would like to quote to you what I consider a notable sonnet of Wordsworth, remarkable for the fact that it was written in 1846, when he was 76 years old, and that yet contains a good deal of his young fire, remarkable in that it was written when illustrated papers must have been in their infancy, and remarkable for the prescience with which he foresaw the danger to reading from the development of illustration, which was then so very little advanced. This is the sonnet:

"Discourse was deemed Man's noblest attribute,
And written words the glory of his hand;
Then followed Printing with enlarged command
For thought-dominion vast and absolute
For spreading truth, and making love expand.
Now Prose and verse sunk into disrepute
Must lacquey a dumb Art that best can suit
The taste of this once-intellectual Land.

A backward movement surely have we here,
From manhood,-back to childhood; for the age-
Back towards caverned life's first rude career.
Avaunt this vile abuse of pictured page!
Must eyes be all in all, the tongue and ear
Nothing? Heaven keep us from a lower stage."

There is a good deal of power in that sonnet, but the remarkable thing is its prescience. If these recent developments are endangering the pleasure of reading, as undoubtedly they are, by making it more and more difficult to acquire the habit, let me suggest one thing which may be a help to maintain it. It is this Plan reading beforehand; have always in mind three or four books which you have decided you wish to read; have the books at hand so that when the opportunity comes for reading the choice may be readily made; otherwise, you may be staying in a country house, and something, not reading, may have been planned for the afternoon; stormy weather causes that plan to be cancelled, and two or three hours are thrown into your lap—a little tumble-in of time an unlooked-for opportunity for reading. We may, any of us, with such an opportunity find ourselves in the middle of a good library, and yet, if we have not already thought to ourselves and

determined on some book which we wish to read, when the opportunity comes, the greater part of the time may be lost in the difficulty of making a choice. I offer this as a practical counsel, and it is easy to apply it. The Times Literary Supplement and any number of literary reviews are constantly recalling old books to mind, or suggesting new ones which we think we should like to read, and with this help it is very easy to have a plan ready which will secure that no opportunity for reading is lost when it occurs.

Now I pass on to consider one or two aspects of the actual pleasure of reading. Poetry, of course comes first and highest. I am not going to talk about the pleasure in pure poetry, because to all who have it, it is so well known that no words of mine will increase the pleasure. To those who have not got it, no words that I could utter would give it. I refer to the abiding pleasure that people who love poetry get from rhythm, the music of words, and imagery. As an illustration of what I mean I would give Keats's three odes, "To a Nightingale," "To a Grecian Urn," and "To Autumn," or the irresistible charm of the simplest songs of Shakespeare-such as "Fear no more the heat of the sun." Those I give as an instance of pleasure in pure poetry. Not everybody is open to it. Someone, and someone of considerable intelligence and intellectual attainment, once said to me (again I will not reveal even the sex) that the only effect produced upon him, or her, by poetry was to cause him, or her, to think how much better the thing could be expressed in prose. Imagine taking Keats's "Ode to Autumn"

and expressing it better in prose! But besides this there are further pleasures in poetry of a deeper kind, but less obvious. There is the poetry which presents to us great thought in words and in forms that not only stir the intellect, but rouse emotion. I will say nothing in that connection of Shakespeare, because I am going to take a smaller illustration. I do not talk about Shakespeare for fear of falling into platitude. When I went out of Office after eleven years of it, very tired, and for the time not fit for anything, I spent some weeks alone in the country. During that time I read, or re-read, several of Shakespeare's plays. The impression produced upon me by his incredible power and range was really that of awe; I felt almost afraid. to be alone in the room with him—as if I were in the presence of something supernatural. Therefore if I do not draw illustrations from Shakespeare, it is not from want of appreciation of his stature and genius. The instance I would take of poetry that deals with great thought, doing for us what is essential if our pleasure is to be really permanent, making our minds open on the infinite, making us think thoughts which we know are too great for any words to express, and bringing something, that before was beyond our comprehension, within the grasp of it. I will take an instance from another poet. I will ask you to think of Browning. In some passages it seems to me Browning is eminently successful in this power of bringing something of the infinite within our reach. He is not always successful. There are some passages in which, after we have disentangled laboriously the mass of words in order to discover