to every book is for the most part to gain as little as possible from
any. A man aimlessly wandering about in a crowded city is of all men the
most lonely; so he who takes up only the books that he "comes across" is
pretty certain to meet but few that are worth knowing.

Now this danger is one to which we are specially exposed in this age.
Our high-pressure life of emergencies, our whirling industrial
organisation or disorganisation have brought us in this (as in most
things) their peculiar difficulties and drawbacks. In almost everything
vast opportunities and gigantic means of multiplying our products bring
with them new perils and troubles which are often at first neglected.
Our huge cities, where wealth is piled up and the requirements and
appliances of life extended beyond the dreams of our forefathers, seem
to breed in themselves new forms of squalor, disease, blights, or risks
to life such as we are yet unable to master. So the enormous
multiplicity of modern books is not altogether favourable to the knowing
of the best. I listen with mixed satisfaction to the paeans that they
chant over the works which issue from the press each day: how the books
poured forth from Paternoster Row might in a few years be built into a
pyramid that would fill the dome of St. Paul's. How in this mountain of
literature am I to find the really useful book? How, when I have found
it, and found its value, am I to get others to read it? How am I to keep
my head clear in the torrent and din of works, all of which distract my
attention, most of which promise me something, whilst so few fulfil that
promise? The Nile is the source of the Egyptian's bread, and without it
he perishes of hunger. But the Nile may be rather too liberal in his
flood, and then the Egyptian runs imminent risk of drowning.

And thus there never was a time, at least during the last two hundred
years, when the difficulties in the way of making an efficient use of