books were greater than they are to-day, when the obstacles were more
real between readers and the right books to read, when it was
practically so troublesome to find out that which it is of vital
importance to know; and that not by the dearth, but by the plethora of
printed matter. For it comes to nearly the same thing whether we are
actually debarred by physical impossibility, from getting the right book
into our hand, or whether we are choked off from the right book by the
obtrusive crowd of the wrong books; so that it needs a strong character
and a resolute system of reading to keep the head cool in the storm of
literature around us. We read nowadays in the market-place--I would
rather say in some large steam factory of letter-press, where damp
sheets of new print whirl round us perpetually--if it be not rather some
noisy book-fair where literary showmen tempt us with performing dolls,
and the gongs of rival booths are stunning our ears from morn till
night. Contrast with this pandemonium of Leipsic and Paternoster Row the
sublime picture of our Milton in his early retirement at Horton, when,
musing over his coming flight to the epic heaven, practising his
pinions, as he tells Diodati, he consumed five years of solitude in
reading the ancient writers--"_Et totum rapiunt me, mea vita,
libri_."[27]

Who now reads the ancient writers? Who systematically reads the great
writers, be they ancient or modern, whom the consent of ages has marked
out as classics: typical, immortal, peculiar teachers of our race? Alas!
the _Paradise Lost_ is lost again to us beneath an inundation of
graceful academic verse, sugary stanzas of ladylike prettiness, and
ceaseless explanations in more or less readable prose of what John
Milton meant or did not mean, or what he saw or did not see, who married
his great-aunt, and why Adam or Satan is like that, or unlike the other.
We read a perfect library about the _Paradise Lost_, but the _Paradise