It has long been a favorite rule with me, a rule which I have never lost sight of, however imperfectly I have carried it out:  Try to know enough of a wide range of subjects to profit by the conversation of intelligent persons of different callings and various intellectual gifts and acquisitions.  The cynic will paraphrase this into a shorter formula:  Get a smattering in every sort of knowledge.  I must therefore add a second piece of advice:  Learn to hold as of small account the comments of the cynic.  He is often amusing, sometimes really witty, occasionally, without meaning it, instructive; but his talk is to profitable conversation what the stone is to the pulp of the peach, what the cob is to the kernels on an ear of Indian corn.  Once more:  Do not be bullied out of your common sense by the specialist; two to one, he is a pedant, with all his knowledge and valuable qualities, and will “cavil on the ninth part of a hair,” if it will give him a chance to show off his idle erudition.

I saw attributed to me, the other day, the saying, “Know something about everything, and everything about something.”  I am afraid it does not belong to me, but I will treat it as I used to treat a stray boat which came through my meadow, floating down the Housatonic,—­get hold of it and draw it ashore, and hold on to it until the owner turns up.  If this precept is used discreetly, it is very serviceable; but it is as well to recognize the fact that you cannot know something about everything in days like these of intellectual activity, of literary and scientific production.  We all feel this.  It makes us nervous to see the shelves of new books, many of which we feel as if we ought to read, and some among them to study.  We must adopt some principle of selection among the books outside of any particular branch which we may have selected for study.  I have often been asked what books I would recommend for a course of reading.  I have always answered that I had a great deal rather take advice than give it.  Fortunately, a number of scholars have furnished lists of books to which the inquirer may be directed.  But the worst of it is that each student is in need of a little library specially adapted to his wants.  Here is a young man writing to me from a Western college, and wants me to send him a list of the books which I think would be most useful to him.  He does not send me his intellectual measurements, and he might as well have sent to a Boston tailor for a coat, without any hint of his dimensions in length, breadth, and thickness.

But instead of laying down rules for reading, and furnishing lists of the books which should be read in order, I will undertake the much humbler task of giving a little quasi-medical advice to persons, young or old, suffering from book-hunger, book-surfeit, book-nervousness, book-indigestion, book-nausea, and all other maladies which, directly or indirectly, may be traced to books, and to which I could give Greek or Latin names if I thought it worth while.