tastes, dispositions, or lines of genius? I cannot tell. Perhaps they
could not tell themselves, not being skilled in self-analysis; and it is
by no means necessary that they should be able to tell. Perhaps we can set
down on paper what will be much better, the rules or the system by which
each of them may read well in the line of his own genius, and so find out,
before he has done with this life, what the line of that genius is, as far
as there is any occasion.

Do Not Try To Read Everything.

That is the first rule. Do not think you must be a Universal Genius. Do
not "read all Reviews," as an old code I had bade young men do. And give
up, as early as you can, the passion, with which all young people
naturally begin, of "keeping up with the literature of the time." As for
the literature of the time, if one were to adopt any extreme rule, Mr.
Emerson's would be the better of the two possible extremes. He says it is
wise to read no book till it has been printed a year; that, before the
year is well over, many of those books drift out of sight, which just now
all the newspapers are telling you to read. But then, seriously, I do not
suppose he acts on that rule himself. Nor need you and I. Only, we will
not try to read them all.

Here I must warn my young friend Jamie not to go on talking about
renouncing "nineteenth century trash."

It will not do to use such words about a century in which have written
Goethe, Fichte, Cuvier, Schleiermacher, Martineau, Scott, Tennyson,
Thackeray, Browning, and Dickens, not to mention a hundred others whom
Jamie likes to read as much as I do.