of a certain superabundance of mental force. If this force is used
up in social duties, in professional business, even in the pursuit
of a high degree of mental cultivation, originality must suffer;
and therefore a man whose aim is to write, ought resolutely to
limit his activities. What would be idleness in another is for him
a storing of forces; what in an ordinary man would be malingering
and procrastination, is for the writer the repose necessary to
allow his energies to concentrate themselves upon his chosen work.



June 8, 1889.


I have been looking at a catalogue, this morning, of the
publications of a firm that is always bringing out new editions of
old writers. I suppose they find a certain sale for these books, or
they would not issue them; and yet I cannot conceive who buys them
in their thousands, and still less who reads them. Teachers,
perhaps, of literature; or people who are inspired by local
lectures to go in search of culture? It is a great problem, this
accumulation of literature; and it seems to me a very irrational
thing to do to republish the complete works of old authors, who
perhaps, in the midst of a large mass of essentially second-rate
work, added half-a-dozen lyrics to the literature of the world. But
surely it is time that we began to select? Whatever else there is
time for in this world, there certainly is not time to read old
half-forgotten second-rate work. Of course people who are making a
special study of an age, a period, a school of writers, have to
plough through a good deal that is not intrinsically worth reading;