by a fictitious and temporary stimulus, due to appeals to duty, or to that vague and confused idea that one should “improve one’s mind,” unaccompanied by any definite plan of ways and means.  There is no more powerful moral motor than duty, but it loses its force when we try to apply it to cases that lie without the province of ethics.  The man who has no permanent interest in historical literature, and who is impelled to begin a six-volume history because he conceives it to be his “duty” to read it, is apt to conclude, before he has finished the second volume, that his is a case where inclination (or in this instance disinclination) is the proper guide.

As a matter of fact, the formation of a cultivated and permanent taste for good reading is generally a matter of lifelong education.  It must be begun when the child reads his first book.  An encouraging sign for the future is the care that is now taken in all good libraries to supervise the reading of children and to provide for them special quarters and facilities.  A somewhat disheartening circumstance, on the other hand, is the multiplication of annotated and abbreviated children’s editions of all sorts of works that were read by the last generation of children without any such treatment.  This kind of boned chicken may be very well for the mental invalid, but the ordinary child prefers to separate his meat from the “drumstick” by his own unaided effort, and there is no doubt that it is better for him to do so.

In the following table, the average circulation of first volumes, second volumes, etc., is given for each of seven classes of works.  The falling off from volume to volume is noticeable in each class.  It is most marked in science, and least so, as might be expected, in fiction.  Yet it is remarkable that there should be any falling off at all in fiction.  The record shows that the proportion of readers who cannot even read to the end of a novel is relatively large.  These are doubtless the good people who speak of Dickens as “solid reading” and who regard Thackeray with as remote an eye as they do Gibbon.  For such “The Duchess” furnishes good mental pabulum, and Miss Corelli provides flights into the loftier regions of philosophy.

             Vol.  Vol.  Vol.  Vol.  Vol.  Vol.  Vol.  Vol.  Vol.  Vol.  Vol.  Vol. 
  CLASS I. II.  III.  IV.  V. VI.  VII.  VIII IX.  X. XI.  XII.

History 10.1 6.9 4.9 4.4 4.6 4.3 2.5 2.8 1.0 0.5 1.0 3.0
Biography 7.2 5.1 3.0 2.3 1.6 1.0 1.6 1.2 1.0 2. 
Travel 9.2 7.9
Literature 7.3 5.9 3.5 3.8 5.3 6.6 19.0 15.0 21.0
Arts 4.7 3.7 3.0
Sciences 5.2 2.7 1.5
Fiction 22.0 18.9 15.8 16. 26. 16.