education at all in the public school or university sense, and he began
to work for his living at an early age. Yet, not only is he, perhaps,
the most eminent of living journalists, but his knowledge of books is,
if not more profound than that of any other man in England, certainly
wider in range, for it is not limited to any country or language. By his
own unaided efforts he has gained not only knowledge, but style and
judgment. To listen to his talk on literature is not merely to yield
oneself to the spell of the magician, but to feel that the critic has
got his estimate of values right.

Reading, indeed, is the real source both of education and of style.
Read what you like, not what somebody else tells you that you ought to
like. That reading alone is valuable which becomes part of the reader's
own mind and nature, and this can never be the case if the matter is not
the result of self-selection, but forced on the student from outside.

Read anything and read everything--just as a man with a sound digestion
and a good appetite eats largely and indifferently of all that is set
before him. The process of selection and rejection, or, in other words,
of taste, will come best and naturally to any man who has the right kind
of brains in his head. Some books he will throw away; others he will
read over and over again. My education owes much to Scott and Stevenson,
stealthily removed from my father's library and read in the hayloft when
I should have been in school.

As a partiality for the right kind of literature grows on a man he is
unconsciously forming his mind and his taste and his style, and by a
natural impulse and no forced growth the whole world of letters is his.

There are, of course, in addition, certain special branches of