Libraries are obviously of two kinds:  those intended for popular use and those meant for the scholar.  The ordinary free library, in the sense of Mr. Ewart’s Act of Parliament of 1850, is a popular library where a wearied population turns for distraction.  Fiction plays a large part.  In some libraries 80 per cent. of the books in circulation are novels.  Hence Mr. Goldwin Smith’s splenetic remark, ’People have no more right to novels than to theatre-tickets out of the taxes.’  Quite true; no more they have—­or to public gardens or to beautiful pictures or to anything save to peep through the railings and down the areas of Mr. Gradgrind’s fine new house in Park Lane.

When we are considering popular libraries, it does not do to expect too much of tired human nature.  This popular kind of library was well represented—­perhaps a little over-represented, at the Conference.  All our American cousins are not Cutters and Pooles.  There was Mr. Crunden, who keeps the public library at St. Louis, U.S.A.  He is all against dull text-books.  As a boy he derived his inspiration from Sargent’s Standard Speaker, and the interesting sketch he gives us of his education makes us wonder whether amidst his multitudinous reading he ever encountered Newman’s marvellous description and handling of the young and over-read Mr. Brown, which is to be found under the heading ‘Elementary Studies’ in Lectures and Essays on University Subjects.

I shuddered just a little on reading in Mr. Crunden’s paper of the boy who, before he was nine, had read Bulfinch’s Age of Chivalry and Age of Charlemagne, Bryant’s Translation of the ’Iliad’, a prose translation of the Odyssey, Malory’s King Arthur, and several other versions of the Arthurian legend, Prescott’s Peru and Mexico, Macaulay’s Lays, Longfellow’s Hiawatha and Miles Standish, the Jungle Books, and other books too numerous to mention.  A famous list, but perilously long.

Mr. Crunden supports his case for varied reading by quotations from all quarters—­Dr. William T. Harris, President Eliot, Professor Mackenzie, Charles Dudley Warner, Sir John Lubbock—­but their scraps of wisdom or of folly do not remove my uneasiness about the digestion of the little boy who, before he was nine years old, had (not content with Malory) read several versions of the Arthurian legend!

Ladies make excellent librarians, and have tender hearts for children, and so we find a paper written by a lady librarian, entitled Books that Children Like.  She quotes some interesting letters from children:  ’I like books about ancient history and books about knights, also stories of adventure, and mostly books with a deep plot and mystery about them.’  ’I do not like Gulliver’s Travels, because I think they are silly.’  ’I read Little Men.  I did not like this book.’  ‘I like Ivanhoe, by Scott, better than any.’  ’My favourite books are Tom Sawyer, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, and Scudder’s American History.  I like Tom Sawyer because he was so jolly, Uncle Tom because he was so faithful, and Nathan Hale because he was so brave.’  These are unbought verdicts no wise man will despise.