fall from the table of truth. They delve and tend but a plot in that
vast and teeming kingdom, whilst those whom active life leaves with but
a few cramped hours of study can hardly come to know the very vastness
of the field before them, or how infinitesimally small is the corner
they can traverse at the best. We know all is not of equal value. We
know that books differ in value as much as diamonds differ from the sand
on the seashore, as much as our living friend differs from a dead rat.
We know that much in the myriad-peopled world of books--very much in all
kinds--is trivial, enervating, inane, even noxious. And thus, where we
have infinite opportunities of wasting our efforts to no end, of
fatiguing our minds without enriching them, of clogging the spirit
without satisfying it, there, I cannot but think, the very infinity of
opportunities is robbing us of the actual power of using them. And thus
I come often, in my less hopeful moods, to watch the remorseless
cataract of daily literature which thunders over the remnants of the
past, as if it were a fresh impediment to the men of our day in the way
of systematic knowledge and consistent powers of thought, as if it were
destined one day to overwhelm the great inheritance of mankind in prose
and verse.

I remember, when I was a very young man at college, that a youth, in no
spirit of paradox, but out of plenary conviction, undertook to maintain
before a body of serious students, the astounding proposition that the
invention of printing had been one of the greatest misfortunes that had
ever befallen mankind. He argued that exclusive reliance on printed
matter had destroyed the higher method of oral teaching, the
dissemination of thought by the spoken word to the attentive ear. He
insisted that the formation of a vast literary class looking to the
making of books as a means of making money, rather than as a social
duty, had multiplied books for the sake of the writers rather than for