I will not take up your time by explaining the various mechanical contrivances and aids to successful study.  They are not to be despised by those who would extract the most from books, Many people think of knowledge as of money.  They would like knowledge, but cannot face the perseverance and self-denial that go to the acquisition of it.  The wise student will do most of his reading with a pen or a pencil in his hand.

He will not shrink from the useful toil of making abstracts and summaries of what he is reading.  Sir William Hamilton was a strong advocate for underscoring books of study.  “Intelligent underlining,” he said, “gave a kind of abstract of an important work, and by the use of different coloured inks to mark a difference of contents, and discriminate the doctrinal from the historical or illustrative elements of an argument or exposition, the abstract became an analysis very serviceable for ready reference,"[1] This assumes, as Hamilton said, that the book to be operated on is your own, and perhaps is rather too elaborate a counsel of perfection for most of us.  Again, some great men—­Gibbon was one, and Daniel Webster was another, and the great Lord Strafford was a third—­always before reading a book made a short, rough analysis of the questions which they expected to be answered in it, the additions to be made to their knowledge, and whither it would take them.

[Footnote 1:  Veitch’s Life of Hamilton, pp. 314, 392.]

“After glancing my eye,” says Gibbon, “over the design and order of a new book, I suspended the perusal until I had finished the task of self-examination; till I had revolved in a solitary walk all that I knew or believed or had thought on the subject of the whole work or of some particular chapter:  I was then qualified to discern how much the author added to my original stock; and if I was sometimes satisfied by the agreement, I was sometimes armed by the opposition, of our ideas."[1]

[Footnote 1:  Dr. Smith’s Gibbon, i. 64.]

I have sometimes tried that way of steadying and guiding attention; and I commend it to you.  I need not tell you that you will find that most books worth reading once are worth reading twice, and—­what is most important of all—­the masterpieces of literature are worth reading a thousand times.  It is a great mistake to think that because you have read a masterpiece once or twice, or ten times, therefore you have done with it.  Because it is a masterpiece, you ought to live with it, and make it part of your daily life.  Another practice is that of keeping a commonplace book, and transcribing into it what is striking and interesting and suggestive.  And if you keep it wisely, as Locke has taught us, you will put every entry under a head, division, or subdivision.[1] This Is an excellent practice for concentrating your thought on the passage and making you alive to its real point and significance.  Here, however, the high authority of Gibbon is against us.  He refuses “strenuously to recommend.”  “The action of the pen,” he says, “will doubtless imprint an idea on the mind as well as on the paper; but I much question whether the benefits of this laborious method are adequate to the waste of time; and I must agree with Dr. Johnson (Idler, No. 74) that ’what is twice read is commonly better remembered than what is transcribed.’"[2]