of printed stuff,” as Mr. Harrison calls it, should flow and still flow on until the catalogues of our libraries should make libraries themselves.  I am prepared, indeed, to express sympathy almost amounting to approbation for any one who would check all writing which was not intended for the printer.  I pay no tribute of grateful admiration to those who have oppressed mankind with the dubious blessing of the penny post.  But the ground of the distinction is plain.  We are always obliged to read our letters, and are sometimes obliged to answer them.  But who obliges us to wade through the piled-up lumber of an ancient library, or to skim more than we like off the frothy foolishness poured forth in ceaseless streams by our circulating libraries?  Dead dunces do not importune us; Grub Street does not ask for a reply by return of post.  Even their living successors need hurt no one who possesses the very moderate degree of social courage required to make the admission that he has not read the last new novel or the current number of a fashionable magazine.

But this is not the view of Mr. Harrison.  To him the position of any one having free access to a large library is fraught with issues so tremendous that, in order adequately to describe it, he has to seek for parallels in two of the most highly-wrought episodes in fiction:  the Ancient Mariner, becalmed and thirsting on the tropic ocean; Bunyan’s Christian in the crisis of spiritual conflict.  But there is here, surely, some error and some exaggeration.  Has miscellaneous reading all the dreadful consequences which Mr. Harrison depicts?  Has it any of them?  His declaration about the intellect being “gorged and enfeebled” by the absorption of too much information, expresses no doubt with great vigor an analogy, for which there is high authority, between the human mind and the human stomach; but surely it is an analogy which may be pressed too far.  I have often heard of the individual whose excellent natural gifts have been so overloaded with huge masses of undigested and indigestible learning that they have had no chance of healthy development.  But though I have often heard of this personage, I have never met him, and I believe him to be mythical.  It is true, no doubt, that many learned people are dull; but there is no indication whatever that they are dull because they are learned.  True dullness is seldom acquired; it is a natural grace, the manifestations of which, however modified by education, remain in substance the same.  Fill a dull man to the brim with knowledge, and he will not become less dull, as the enthusiasts for education vainly imagine; but neither will he become duller, as Mr. Harrison appears to suppose.  He will remain in essence what he always has been and always must have been.  But whereas his dullness would, if left to itself, have been merely vacuous, it may have become, under cureful cultivation, pretentious and pedantic.