As a matter of rude fact, there is much to make us question whether the spread of literature, as now understood, does awaken the diviner mind.  The numbers of the books that are taken out from public libraries are not all that we could wish.  I am not going to inflict many figures on you, but there is one set of these figures that distresses booklovers,—­I mean the enormous place that fiction occupies in the books that are taken out.  In one great town in the North prose fiction forms 76 per cent of all the books lent.  In another great town prose fiction is 82 per cent; in a third 84 per cent; and in a fourth 67 per cent.  I had the curiosity to see what happens in the libraries of the United States; and there—­supposing the system of cataloguing and enumeration to be the same—­they are a trifle more serious in their taste than we are; where our average is about 70 per cent, at a place like Chicago it is only about 60 per cent.  In Scotland, too, it ought to be said that they have a better average in respect to prose fiction.  There is a larger demand for books called serious than in England.  And I suspect, though I do not know, that one reason why there is in Scotland a greater demand for the more serious classes of literature than fiction, is that in the Scotch Universities there are what we have not in England—­well-attended chairs of literature, systematically and methodically studied.  Do not let it be supposed that I at all underrate the value of fiction.  On the contrary, when a man has done a hard day’s work, what can he do better than fall to and read the novels of Walter Scott, or the Brontes, or Mrs. Gaskell, or some of our living writers.  I am rather a voracious reader of fiction myself.  I do not, therefore, point to it as a reproach or as a source of discouragement, that fiction takes so large a place in the objects of literary interest.  I only suggest that it is much too large, and we should be better pleased if it sank to about 40 per cent, and what is classified as general literature rose from 13 to 25 per cent.

There are other complaints of literature as an object of interest in this country.  I was reading the other day an essay by the late head of my old college at Oxford, that very learned and remarkable man Mark Pattison, who was a booklover if ever there was one.  He complained that the bookseller’s bill in the ordinary English middle class family is shamefully small.  It appeared to him to be monstrous that a man who is earning L1000 a year should spend less than L1 a week on books—­that is to say, less than a shilling in the pound per annum.  I know that Chancellors of the Exchequer take from us 8d. or 6d. in the pound, and I am not sure that they always use it as wisely as if they left us to spend it on books.  Still, a shilling in the pound to be spent on books by a clerk who earns a couple of hundred pounds a year, or by a workman who earns a quarter of that sum, is rather more, I think, than can be reasonably expected.  A man does not really