1 CHAPTER 1. THE CHOICE OF BOOKS. When we survey the really illimitable field of human knowledge, the vast accumulation of works already print1, and the ever-increasing flood of new books poured out by the modern press, the first feeling which is apt to arise. in the mind is one of dismay, if not of despair. We askwas sufficient for these things? What life is long enough-what intellect strong enough, to master even a t.the of the learning which all these books contain? But the reflection comes to our aid that, after all, the really important books bear but a small proportion to the mass. Most books are but repetitions, in a different form, of what has already been many times written and printed. The rarest of literary qualities is originality. Most writers are rere echoes, and the greater part of literature is the pouring out of one bottle into another. If you can get hold of the few really best books, you can well afford to be ignorant of all the rest. The reader who has mastered Kames's "Elements of Criticism," need not spend his time over the multitud.nous treatises upon rhetoric. He who has read Pitarch's Lives thoroughly has before him a gallery of heres which will go farther to instruct him in the elements of character than a whole library of modern biogrates The student of the best plays of Shakespeare may save his time by letting other and inferior dramatists alone. He whose imagination has been fed upon Homer, Dante, Milton, Burns, and Tennyson, with a few of the world's master-pieces in single poems like Gray's Elegy, may dispense with the whole race of poetasters. Until you |