barbarism. It cannot be denied that it showed a certain ignorance of
the history of literature, which might be excused in a bushman, but
it is also proved, which is much more important, that he had the
smack of letters in him, for being turned loose without the guide of
any training in this wide field, he fixed as by instinct on the two
classics of the English tongue. With the help of all our education,
and all our reviews, could you and I have done better, and are we not
every day, in our approval of unworthy books, doing very much worse?
Quiet men coming home from business and reading, for the sixth time,
some noble English classic, would smile in their modesty if any one
should call them bookmen, but in so doing they have a sounder
judgment in literature than coteries of clever people who go crazy
for a brief time over the tweetling of a minor poet, or the
preciosity of some fantastic critic.

There are those who buy their right to citizenship in the
commonwealth of bookmen, but this bushman was free-born, and the sign
of the free-born is, that without critics to aid him, or the training
of a University, he knows the difference between books which are so
much printed stuff and a good book which is "the Precious life-blood
of a Master Spirit." The bookman will of course upon occasion trifle
with various kinds of reading, and there is one member of the
brotherhood who has a devouring thirst for detective stories, and has
always been very grateful to the creator of Sherlock Holmes. It is
the merest pedantry for a man to defend himself with a shamed face
for his light reading: it is enough that he should be able to
distinguish between the books which come and go and those which
remain. So far as I remember, The Mystery of a Hansom Cab and John
Inglesant came out somewhat about the same time, and there were those
of us who read them both; but while we thought the Hansom Cab a very