Note 8 — Chapter I

“I would rather be a poor man in a garret with plenty of books than a king who did not love reading.”—Macaulay. Sir John Herschell in like manner tells us—“Were I to pay for a taste that should stand me in stead under every variety of circumstances, and be a source of happiness and cheerfulness to me during life, and a shield against its ills, however things might go amiss and the world frown upon me, it would be a taste for reading. Give a man this taste and the means of gratifying it, and you can hardly fail of making him a happy man; unless, indeed, you put into his hands a most perverse selection of books. You place him in contact with the best society in every period of history—with the wisest, the wittiest, the tenderest, the bravest, and the purest characters who have adorned humanity. You make him a denizen of all nations, a contemporary of all ages. The world has been created for him.” But we must bear in mind, while we subscribe to the dictum of Carlyle, “Of all things which men do or make here below, by far the most momentous, wonderful, and worthy are the things we call books,” the wise line of Shakespeare: “Learning is but an adjunct to oneself,” lest haply we be classed with “the bookful blockhead” of Pope—ignorantly read, “with loads of learned lumber in his head.”