476 JOHN CAMERON-MARK PATTISON.

Choose the thinker who forces you to wrestle with him-lifts you off your feet-but to set you down on a higher level than you stood on before you grappled with him. A hundred writers that you can at a hop, step, and jump, lightly overleap, will not so avail to make you a philosophical acrobat, as one that you will, even at the hundredth attempt, find too high for you to leap over. In phrase without figure, read only what you can see into the heart of without opening your eyes, and in a short time the embossed book for the blind will be the best book for you. What you can read when yawning will surely leave you sounder asleep than it found you.-Phases of Thought, by John Cameron, author of "The Notabilities of Wakefield;" "" Discourses;" "Yarns by a Manchester Spinner;" "Clouds and Sunshine;" "The Trial of the Manchester Bards;" "The Old Piano;" &c.

MARK PATTISON. [Living.]

Those who most read books don't want to talk about them. The conversation of the man who reads to any purpose will be flavoured by his reading; but it will not be about his reading. The people who read in order to talk about it, are people who read the books of the season because they are the fashion-books which come in with the season and go out with it. "When

a new book comes out I read an old one," said the poet Rogers. And Lord Dudley-the great Lord Dudley, not the present possessor of the title-writes to the Bishop of Llandaff: "I read new publications

unwillingly. In literature I am fond of confining myself to the best company, which consists chiefly of my old acquaintance with whom I am desirous of becoming more intimate. I suspect that nine times out of ten it is more profitable, if not more agreeable, to read an old book over again than to read a new one for the first time. Is it not better to try to elevate and endow one's mind by the constant study and contemplation of the great models, than merely to know of one's own knowledge that such a book a❜nt worth reading?"—(Lord Dudley's Letters.) We wear clothes of a particular cut because other people are wearing them. That is so. For to differ markedly in dress and behaviour from other people is a sign of a desire to attract attention to yourself, and is bad taste. Dress is social, but intellect is individual; it has special wants at special moments. The tendency of education through books is to sharpen individuality, and to cultivate independence of mind, to make a man cease to be "the contented servant of the things that perish. '

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. You would think they were all written by the same man. 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, p. 119). 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. We are all there at work for Smith and Mudie. It was so before there was any British Museum. It was so in Chaucer's time— "For out of the olde fieldes, as men saythe, Cometh all this newe corn from yere to yere, And out of olde bookes in good faithe

Cometh all this newe science that men lere."

It continued to be so in Cervantes' day. "There are," says Cervantes in Don Quixote (32), "men who will make you books and turn them loose in the world with as much despatch as they would do a dish of fritters."

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It is not, then, any wonder that De Quincey should account it (Life of De Quincey, i. 385) one of the misfortunes of life that one must read thousands of books only to discover that one need not have read them," or that Mrs. Browning should say, "The ne plus ultra of intellectual indolence is this reading of books. It comes next to what the Americans call whittling." And I cannot doubt that Bishop Butler had observed the same phenomenon which has been my subject to-night when he wrote, in 1729, a century and a half ago (Preface to Sermons, p. 4): "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."-Books and Critics. A Lecture delivered October 29th, 1877. Printed in Fortnightly Review, vol. xxii. p. 659.

JOHN MORLEY [Living.]

The love of literature awakens every faculty, refines every sentiment, and elevates every emotion; while wealth is hard to acquire, and when acquired is difficult to keep, and, when both gained and retained, is apt to fret away the soul of the possessor in sordid care, while honours and worldly fame are quite attainable without conferring any substantial satisfaction upon those who have grasped them,—while even domestic felicity may by force of circumstances become a source of poignant grief, and leave us environed by the blackness of inconsolable sorrow; while all these are fleeting and unsubstantial, the sober pleasures of knowledge abide with us so long as intellect itself remains, and give us employment and consolation even when evil days come, and years draw nigh when we say, There is no pleasure in them.

I do not advise the general student to take for his motto the inscription which Zacharias Ursinus of Heidelberg, had painted in forbidding letters over the door of his study :-"My friend, whoever you are, if you come here, please either go away again, or give me some help in my study." But it is well for him to

recognise at the outset that no solid advance, even in general learning, can be made by the cleverest man without some surrender of social joys, and without the endurance of much painful labour. The labour will in time cease to be painful, and will assuredly produce a more than adequate reward; but the toil of him who goes forth with harrow, plough, and seed-basket, in order that he may eventually reap a material harvest, is not more unavoidable to the husbandman, than are the self-denial and the plodding which lead to the mental harvest of matured views, expanded emotions, and enlarged principles, to the student who would ponder over in the closet what may make him an intelligent actor in human affairs.

Professor Max Muller, in considering the diametrically opposed doctrines of Adam Smith and Leibnitz, makes the following admirable observations :-"There are two ways of judging former philosophers. One is to put aside their opinions as simply erroneous when they differ from our own. Another way is to

try to enter fully into the opinions of those from whom we differ-to make them, for a time at least, our own, till at last we discover the point of view from which each philosopher looked at the facts before him, and catch the light in which he regarded them. We shall then find that there is much less of downright error in the history of philosophy, than is commonly supposed; nay, we shall find nothing so conducive to a right appreciation of truth, as a right appreciation of the error by which it is surrounded."