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Locke or Brown, or Reid or Hamilton, or Bain or Paley. You will understand such authors best after you are interested in their subject. But in order to gain this interest, I warn you that much hard work lies before you. If you are not prepared for this, you had better seek pleasanter paths.

No pleasanter path could, perhaps, be chosen than a perusal of some of the books which go under the title of General Literature. This is a wide and a rich field. It is a study capable of the most flexible treatment. You may make it the instrument for understanding the genius and growth of the English language. Trench on the "Study of Words," or Morris's " English Grammar,” will send you far back to Piers Plowman and Chaucer, or to some of Arber's reprints, cheap and admirable in every respect, of classic but unread books. Or you may be led to look at the growth of thought, the propagation of ideas, the gradual development of style. Some history of English literature will then become a necessity. If Stopford Brooke's be too elementary and sketchy, you will find what you want in Morley or Chambers. Shaw and Marsh (Murray), Spalding and Angus, are, perhaps, too much of the school-book type for you. For freshness of view,

vivacity of style, and vigorous, humorous common sense, with a foreign flavour for condiment, read Taine's “History of English Literature”—that is, if you are not afraid of four volumes. The critics are worthy of your close attention. We have few better book-tasters than Matthew Arnold. His fastidiousness, which blunders in ¡practical politics, serves him in good stead in the exalted and undisturbed regions of literature. Leslie Stephen, Macaulay, Brimley, R. H. Hutton, P. Bayne, are critics whom I mention almost at random, because they happen to have come under my own eye.

But the true pleasure and profit are obtained when we get behind critics and historians to the authors themselves. Choose the best, and master what you read. Be an enthusiast, if you like, for a special author, and sustain the fever heat till you get an enthusiasm for another. This chapter is already too long, and so I will reserve a few observations for another.

THE BEST BOOK.

CHAPTER XX.

THE BEST BOOK.

THE Bible is the best book. Comparisons are sometimes drawn between it and the sacred books of other religions, but all such comparisons only serve to show the infinite superiority of the Bible. And yet it is often a very dull book to young people. Perhaps it has been used as a series of lessons or tasks, and consequently severe and even painful associations cling round it. But a little consideration will soon show that it is not to be judged by any such feelings as these. Its readers may be dull and insipid; but it will be admitted that every book is somewhat wearisome till we understand it. The dulness and insipidity of our minds are not to be charged to its pages. A treatise on chemistry is not very charming to the raw student. A prosaic soul cannot enjoy poetry, and finds the loftiest lines of Milton or Shakespeare an intolerable weariness. There must be

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