a corner. He hears Burke perorate, and Johnson dogmatise, and Scott tell
his border tales, and Wordsworth muse on the hillside, without the leave
of any man, or the payment of any toll. In the republic of letters there
are no privileged orders or places reserved. Every man who has written a
book, even the diligent Mr. Whitaker, is in one sense an author; "a
book's a book although there's nothing in't;" and every man who can
decipher a penny journal is in one sense a reader. And your "general
reader," like the grave-digger in Hamlet, is hail-fellow with all the
mighty dead; he pats the skull of the jester; batters the cheek of lord,
lady, or courtier; and uses "imperious Caesar" to teach boys the Latin
declensions.

But this noble equality of all writers--of all writers and of all
readers--has a perilous side to it. It is apt to make us indiscriminate
in the books we read, and somewhat contemptuous of the mighty men of the
past. Men who are most observant as to the friends they make, or the
conversation they share, are carelessness itself as to the books to whom
they entrust themselves, and the printed language with which they
saturate their minds. Yet can any friendship or society be more
important to us than that of the books which form so large a part of our
minds and even of our characters? Do we in real life take any pleasant
fellow to our homes and chat with some agreeable rascal by our
firesides, we who will take up any pleasant fellow's printed memoirs, we
who delight in the agreeable rascal when he is cut up into pages and
bound in calf?

If any person given to reading were honestly to keep a register of all
the printed stuff that he or she consumes in a year--all the idle tales
of which the very names and the story are forgotten in a week, the
bookmaker's prattle about nothing at so much a sheet, the fugitive