intention in both. The questions specially proposed to you in the
first, namely, How and What to Read, rose out of a far deeper one,
which it was my endeavour to make you propose earnestly to
yourselves, namely, WHY to Read. I want you to feel, with me, that
whatever advantages we possess in the present day in the diffusion
of education and of literature, can only be rightly used by any of
us when we have apprehended clearly what education is to lead to,
and literature to teach. I wish you to see that both well-directed
moral training and well-chosen reading lead to the possession of a
power over the ill-guided and illiterate, which is, according to the
measure of it, in the truest sense, KINGLY; conferring indeed the
purest kingship that can exist among men: too many other kingships
(however distinguished by visible insignia or material power) being
either spectral, or tyrannous;--spectral--that is to say, aspects
and shadows only of royalty, hollow as death, and which only the
"likeness of a kingly crown have on:" or else--tyrannous--that is to
say, substituting their own will for the law of justice and love by
which all true kings rule.

There is, then, I repeat--and as I want to leave this idea with you,
I begin with it, and shall end with it--only one pure kind of
kingship; an inevitable and eternal kind, crowned or not; the
kingship, namely, which consists in a stronger moral state, and a
truer thoughtful state, than that of others; enabling you,
therefore, to guide, or to raise them. Observe that word "State;"
we have got into a loose way of using it. It means literally the
standing and stability of a thing; and you have the full force of it
in the derived word "statue"--"the immovable thing." A king's
majesty or "state," then, and the right of his kingdom to be called
a state, depends on the movelessness of both:- without tremor,