need to have a great many books.  Pattison said that nobody who respected himself could have less than 1000 volumes.  He pointed out that you can stack 1000 octavo volumes in a bookcase that shall be 13 feet by 10 feet, and 6 inches deep, and that everybody has that small amount of space at disposal.  Still the point is not that men should have a great many books, but that they should have the right ones, and that they should use those that they have.  We may all agree in lamenting that there are so many houses—­even some of considerable social pretension—­where you will not find a good atlas, a good dictionary, or a good cyclopaedia of reference.  What is still more lamentable, in a good many more houses where these books are, they are never referred to or opened.  That is a very discreditable fact, because I defy anybody to take up a single copy of the Times newspaper and not come upon something in it, upon which, if their interest in the affairs of the day were active, intelligent, and alert as it ought to be, they would consult an atlas, dictionary, or cyclopaedia of reference.

No sensible person can suppose for a single moment that everybody is born with the ability for using books, for reading and studying literature.  Certainly not everybody is born with the capacity of being a great scholar.  All people are no more born great scholars like Gibbon and Bentley, than they are all born great musicians like Handel and Beethoven.  What is much worse than that, many come into the world with the incapacity of reading, just as they come into it with the incapacity of distinguishing one tune from another.  To them I have nothing to say.  Even the morning paper is too much for them.  They can only skim the surface even of that.  I go further, and frankly admit that the habit and power of reading with reflection, comprehension, and memory all alert and awake, does not come at once to the natural man any more than many other sovereign virtues come to that interesting creature.  What I do venture to press upon you is, that it requires no preterhuman force of will in any young man or woman—­unless household circumstances are more than usually vexatious and unfavourable—­to get at least half an hour out of a solid busy day for good and disinterested reading.  Some will say that this is too much to expect, and the first persons to say it, I venture to predict, will be those who waste their time most.  At any rate, if I cannot get half an hour, I will be content with a quarter.  Now, in half an hour I fancy you can read fifteen or twenty pages of Burke; or you can read one of Wordsworth’s masterpieces—­say the lines on Tintern; or say, one-third—­if a scholar, in the original, and if not, in a translation—­of a book of the Iliad or the Aeneid.  I do not think that I am filling the half-hour too full.  But try for yourselves what you can read in half an hour.  Then multiply the half-hour by 365, and consider what treasures you might have laid by at the end of the year; and what happiness, fortitude, and wisdom they would have given you during all the days of your life.