someone else likes it. It is not necessary to waste time on Shakespeare
if you have no taste for poetry or drama merely because so many others
like them; nor to pass a long time with Sir William Hamilton when
metaphysics are not to your taste. When you read a book by the page,
every few minutes looking ahead to see how many chapters there are
before the book will be finished, you had better stop reading it. There
was even a fashion in books that was absurd. People were bored to death
by literature in the fashion.

For a while we had a Tupper epidemic, and everyone grew busy writing
blank verse--very blank. Then came an epidemic of Carlyle, and everyone
wrote turgid, involved, twisted and breakneck sentences, each noun with
as many verbs as Brigham Young had wives. Then followed a romantic
craze, and everyone struggled to combine religion and romance, with
frequent punches at religion, and we prided ourselves on being sceptical
and independent in our literary tastes. My advice was simply to make up
one's mind what to read, and then read it. Life is short, and books are
many. Instead of making your mind a garret crowded with rubbish, make
it a parlour, substantially furnished, beautifully arranged, in which
you would not be ashamed to have the whole world enter.

There was so much in the world to provoke the soul, and yet all
persecution is a blessing in some way. The so-called modern literature,
towards the close of the nineteenth century, was becoming more and more
the illegitimate offspring of immaturity in thought and feeling. We were
the slaves of our newspapers; each morning a library was thrown on our
doorstep. But what a jumbled, inconsequent, muddled-up library! It was
the best that could be made in such a hurry, and it satisfied most of
us, though I believe there were conservative people who opened it only
to read the marriage and the death notices. The latter came along fast