ON EARLY READING

From ‘Edward Gibbon’

In school work Gibbon had uncommon difficulties and unusual deficiencies; but these were much more than counterbalanced by a habit which often accompanies a sickly childhood, and is the commencement of a studious life,—­the habit of desultory reading.  The instructiveness of this is sometimes not comprehended.  S. T. Coleridge used to say that he felt a great superiority over those who had not read—­and fondly read—­fairy tales in their childhood:  he thought they wanted a sense which he possessed, the perception, or apperception—­we do not know which he used to say it was—­of the unity and wholeness of the universe.  As to fairy tales, this is a hard saying; but as to desultory reading, it is certainly true.  Some people have known a time in life when there was no book they could not read.  The fact of its being a book went immensely in its favor.  In early life there is an opinion that the obvious thing to do with a horse is to ride it; with a cake, to eat it; with sixpence, to spend it.  A few boys carry this further, and think the natural thing to do with a book is to read it.  There is an argument from design in the subject:  if the book was not meant for that purpose, for what purpose was it meant?  Of course, of any understanding of the works so perused there is no question or idea.  There is a legend of Bentham, in his earliest childhood, climbing to the height of a huge stool, and sitting there evening after evening, with two candles, engaged in the perusal of Rapin’s history; it might as well have been any other book.  The doctrine of utility had not then dawned on its immortal teacher; cui bono was an idea unknown to him.  He would have been ready to read about Egypt, about Spain, about coals in Borneo, the teak-wood in India, the current in the River Mississippi, on natural history or human history, on theology or morals, on the state of the Dark Ages or the state of the Light Ages, on Augustulus or Lord Chatham, on the first century or the seventeenth, on the moon, the millennium, or the whole duty of man.  Just then, reading is an end in itself.  At that time of life you no more think of a future consequence—­of the remote, the very remote possibility of deriving knowledge from the perusal of a book, than you expect so great a result from spinning a peg-top.  You spin the top, and you read the book; and these scenes of life are exhausted.  In such studies, of all prose, perhaps the best is history:  one page is so like another, battle No. 1 is so much on a par with battle No. 2.  Truth may be, as they say, stranger than fiction, abstractedly; but in actual books, novels are certainly odder and more astounding than correct history.