twelve hours every day during an entire year, and his general
knowledge of useful literature was quite remarkable. But, while
rejecting epigrammatic fireworks, I am bound to say that the habit of
reading has become harmful in many cases; it is a sort of intellectual
dram-drinking, and it enervates the mind as alcohol enervates the
body. If a man's function in life is to learn, then by all means let
him be learned. When Macaulay took the trouble to master thousands of
rubbishy pamphlets, poems, plays, and fictions, in order that he might
steep his mind in the atmosphere of a particular period in history, he
was quite justified. The results of his research were boiled down into
a few vivid emphatic pages, and we had the benefit of his labour. When
Carlyle spent thirteen mortal years in grubbing among musty German
histories that nearly drove him mad with their dulness, the world
reaped the fruit of his dreary toil, and we rejoiced in the witty,
incomparable life of Frederick II. When poor Emanuel Deutsch gave up
his brilliant life to the study of the obscurest chapters in the
Talmud, he did good service to the human race, for he placed before us
in the most lucid way a summary of the entire learning of a wondrous
people. It was good that these men should fulfil their function; it
was right on their part to read widely, because reading was their
trade. But there must be division of labour in the vast society of
human beings, and any man who endeavours to neglect this principle,
and who tries to fill two places in the social economy, does so at his
peril.

Living cheek by jowl with us, there are hundreds and thousands of
persons who are ruining their minds by a kind of literary debauch.
They endeavour to follow on the footsteps of the specialists; they
struggle to learn a little of everything, and they end by knowing
nothing. They commit mental suicide: and, although no disgrace