from the works to which Englishmen and Scotchmen most naturally turn for refreshment,—­namely, those written in their own language?  Why should we associate them with the memory of hours spent in weary study; in the effort to remember for purposes of examination what no human being would wish to remember for any other; in the struggle to learn something, not because the learner desires to know it, because he desires some one else to know that he knows it?  This is the dark side of the examination system; a system necessary and therefore excellent, but one which does, through the very efficiency and thoroughness of the drill by which it imparts knowledge, to some extent impair the most delicate pleasures by which the acquisition of knowledge should be attended.

How great those pleasures may be, I trust there are many here who can testify.  When I compare the position of the reader of to-day with that of his predecessor of the sixteenth century.  I am amazed at the ingratitude of those who are tempted even for a moment to regret the invention of printing and the multiplication of books.  There is now no mood of mind to which a man may not administer the appropriate nutriment or medicine at the cost of reaching down a volume from his bookshelf.  In every department of knowledge infinitely more is known, and what is known is incomparably more accessible, than it was to our ancestors.  The lighter forms of literature, good, bad, and indifferent, which have added so vastly to the happiness of mankind, have increased beyond powers of computation; nor do I believe that there is any reason to think that they have elbowed out their more serious and important brethren.  It is perfectly possible for a man, not a professed student, and who only gives to reading the leisure hours of a business life, to acquire such a general knowledge of the laws of nature and the facts of history that every great advance made in either department shall be to him both intelligible and interesting; and he may besides have among his familiar friends many a departed worthy whose memory is embalmed in the pages of memoir or biography.  All this is ours for the asking.  All this we shall ask for, if only it be our happy fortune to love for its own sake the beauty and the knowledge to be gathered from books.  And if this be our fortune, the world may be kind or unkind, it may seem to us to be hastening on the wings of enlightenment and progress to an imminent millennium, or it may weigh us down with the sense of insoluble difficulty and irremediable wrong; but whatever else it be, so long as we have good health and a good library, it can hardly be dull.

THE BALLAD

(Popular or Communal)

BY F.B.  GUMMERE