percentage of books are not worth reading at all. The really vital books
for us we also know to be a very trifling portion of the whole. And yet
we act as if every book were as good as any other, as if it were merely
a question of order which we take up first, as if any book were good
enough for us, and as if all were alike honourable, precious, and
satisfying. Alas! books cannot be more than the men who write them; and
as a fair proportion of the human race now write books, with motives and
objects as various as human activity, books, as books, are entitled _à
priori_, until their value is proved, to the same attention and respect
as houses, steam-engines, pictures, fiddles, bonnets, and other products
of human industry. In the shelves of those libraries which are our
pride, libraries public or private, circulating or very stationary, are
to be found those great books of the world _rari nantes in gurgite
vasto_,[26] those books which are truly "the precious life-blood of a
master-spirit." But the very familiarity which their mighty fame has
bred in us makes us indifferent; we grow weary of what every one is
supposed to have read; and we take down something which looks a little
eccentric, some worthless book, on the mere ground that we never heard
of it before.

Thus the difficulties of literature are in their way as great as those
of the world, the obstacles to finding the right friends are as great,
the peril is as great of being lost in a Babel of voices and an
ever-changing mass of beings. Books are not wiser than men, the true
books are not easier to find than the true men, the bad books or the
vulgar books are not less obtrusive and not less ubiquitous than the bad
or vulgar men are everywhere; the art of right reading is as long and
difficult to learn as the art of right living. Those who are on good
terms with the first author they meet, run as much risk as men who
surrender their time to the first passer in the street; for to be open