But I think that as one grows older one may take out a licence, so to speak, to read less.  One may go back to the old restful books, where one knows the characters well, hear the old remarks, survey the same scenes.  One may meditate more upon one’s stores, stroll about more, just looking at life, seeing the quiet things that are happening, and beaming through one’s spectacles.  One ought to have amassed, as life goes on and the shadows lengthen, a good deal of material for reflection.  And, after all, reading is not in itself a virtue; it is only one way of passing the time; talking is another way, watching things another.  Bacon says that reading makes a full man; well, I cannot help thinking that many people are full to the brim when they reach the age of forty, and that much which they afterwards put into the overcharged vase merely drips and slobbers uncomfortably down the side and foot.

The thing to determine then, as one’s brain hardens or softens, is what the object of reading is.  It is not, I venture to think, what used to be called the pursuit of knowledge.  Of course, if a man is a professional teacher or a professional writer, he must read for professional purposes, just as a coral insect must eat to enable it to secrete the substances out of which it builds its branching house.  But I am not here speaking of professional studies, but of general reading.  I suppose that there are three motives for reading—­the first, purely pleasurable; the second, intellectual; the third, what may be called ethical.  As to the first, a man who reads at all, reads just as he eats, sleeps, and takes exercise, because he likes it; and that is probably the best reason that can be given for the practice.  It is an innocent mode of passing the time, it takes one out of oneself, it is amusing.  Of course, it can be carried to an excess; and a man may become a mere book-eater, as a man may become an opium-eater.  I used at one time to go and stay with an old friend, a clergyman in a remote part of England.  He was a bachelor and fairly well off.  He did not care about exercise or his garden, and he had no taste for general society.  He subscribed to the London Library and to a lending library in the little town where he lived, and he bought too, a good many books.  He must have spent, I used to calculate, about ten hours of the twenty-four in reading.  He seemed to me to have read everything, old and new books alike, and he had an astonishing memory; anything that he put into his mind remained there exactly as fresh and clear as when he laid it away, so that he never needed to read a book twice.  If he had lived at a University he would have been a useful man; if one wanted to know what books to read in any line, one had only to pick his brains.  He could give one a list of authorities on almost every subject.  But in his country parish he was entirely thrown away.  He had not the least desire to make anything of his stores, or to write.  He had not the art of expression,