thinking necessitated by the old, or gas-lamp, style is not productive
of sounder results. The cloyed and congested mind resulting from the
free run of these grocers' shops to omnivorous appetites (and all
young readers are omnivorous) bids fair to produce a race of literary
resurrection-men: a result from which we may well pray to be spared.
Of all forms of lettered effusiveness that which exploits the original
work of others and professes to supply us with right opinions
thereanent is the least wanted. And whether he take to literary
expression by pen or only wag the tongue of him, the grocer's boy of
letters is sure to prove a prodigious bore. The Free Library, if it be
fulfilling the programme of its advocates, is breeding such as he by
scores.

But after all there is balm in Gilead; and much joy and consolation
may be drawn from the sorrowful official reports, by which it would
appear that the patrons of these libraries are confining their
reading, with a charming unanimity, exclusively to novels. And indeed
they cannot do better; there is no more blessed thing on earth than a
good novel, not the least merit of which is that it induces a state of
passive, unconscious enjoyment, and never frenzies the reader to go
out and put the world right. Next to fairy tales -- the original
world-fiction -- our modern novels may be ranked as our most precious
possessions; and so it has come to pass that I shall now cheerfully
pay my five shillings, or ten shillings, or whatever it may shortly
be, in the pound towards the Free Library: convinced at last that the
money is not wasted in training exponents of the subjectivity of this
writer and the objectivity of that, nor in developing fresh imitators
of dead discredited styles, but is righteously devoted to the support
of wholesome, honest, unpretending novel-reading.