professions it is possible to find uncharitable specialists who
despise persons of hazy and leisurely views. But my own impression
is that it is a rare type among University Dons; I think that it is
far commoner at the University to meet men of great attainments
combined with sincere humility and charity, for the simple reason
that the most erudite specialist at a University becomes aware both
of the wide diversity of knowledge and of his own limitations as
well.

Personally, direct bookish talk is my abomination. A knowledge of
books ought to give a man a delicate allusiveness, an aptitude for
pointed quotation. A book ought to be only incidentally, not
anatomically, discussed; and I am pleased to be able to think that
there is a good deal of this allusive talk at the University, and
that the only reason that there is not more is that professional
demands are so insistent, and work so thorough, that academical
persons cannot keep up their general reading as they would like to
do.

And then we come to what I have called, for want of a better word,
the ethical motive for reading; it might sound at first as if I
meant that people ought to read improving books, but that is
exactly what I do not mean. I have very strong opinions on this
point, and hold that what I call the ethical motive for reading is
the best of all--indeed the only true one. And yet I find a great
difficulty in putting into words what is a very elusive and
delicate thought. But my belief is this. As I make my slow
pilgrimage through the world, a certain sense of beautiful mystery
seems to gather and grow. I see that many people find the world
dreary--and, indeed, there must be spaces of dreariness in it for