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, and he was a distinctly
tiresome talker. His idea of conversation was to ask you whether
you had read a number of modern novels. If he found one that you
had not read, he sketched the plot in an intolerably prolix manner,
so that it was practically impossible to fix the mind on what he
was saying. He seemed to have no preferences in literature
whatever; his one desire was to read everything that came out, and
his only idea of a holiday was to go up to London and get lists of
books from a bookseller. That is, of course, an extreme case; and I
cannot help feeling that he would have been nearly as usefully
employed if he had confined himself to counting the number of words
in the books he read. But, after all, he was interested and amused,