But it is quite possible to hold that any work recommended by Mr. Harrison is worth repeated reading, and yet to reject utterly the theory of study by which these recommendations are prefaced.  For Mr. Harrison is a ruthless censor.  His index expurgatorius includes, so far as I can discover, the whole catalogue of the British Museum, with the exception of a small remnant which might easily be contained in about thirty or forty volumes.  The vast remainder he contemplates with feelings apparently not merely of indifference, but of active aversion.  He surveys the boundless and ever-increasing waste of books with emotions compounded of disgust and dismay.  He is almost tempted to say in his haste that the invention of printing has been an evil one for humanity.  In the habits of miscellaneous reading, born of a too easy access to libraries, circulating and other, he sees many soul-destroying tendencies; and his ideal reader would appear to be a gentleman who rejects with a lofty scorn all in history that does not pass for being first-rate in importance, and all in literature that is not admitted to be first-rate in quality.

Now, I am far from denying that this theory is plausible.  Of all that has been written, it is certain that the professed student can master but an infinitesimal fraction.  Of that fraction the ordinary reader can master but a very small part.  What advice, then, can be better than to select for study the few masterpieces that have come down to us, and to treat as non-existent the huge but undistinguished remainder?  We are like travelers passing hastily through some ancient city; filled with memorials of many generations and more than one great civilization.  Our time is short.  Of what may be seen we can only see at best but a trifling fragment.  Let us then take care that we waste none of our precious moments upon that which is less than the most excellent.  So preaches Mr. Frederic Harrison; and when a doctrine which put thus may seem not only wise but obvious, is further supported by such assertions that habits of miscellaneous reading “close the mind to what is spiritually sustaining” by “stuffing it with what is simply curious,” or that such methods of study are worse than no habits of study at all because they “gorge and enfeeble” the mind by “excess in that which cannot nourish,” I almost feel that in venturing to dissent from it, I may be attacking not merely the teaching of common sense but the inspirations of a high morality.

Yet I am convinced that for most persons the views thus laid down by Mr. Harrison are wrong; and that what he describes, with characteristic vigor, as “an impotent voracity for desultory information,” is in reality a most desirable and a not too common form of mental appetite.  I have no sympathy whatever with the horror he expresses at the “incessant accumulation of fresh books.”  I am never tempted to regret that Gutenberg was born into the world.  I care not at all though the “cataract