Page:Poems and ballads (IA balladspoems00swinrich).pdf/258



"I say we have despised literature; what do we, as a nation, care How much do you think we spend altogether on our about books? libraries, public or private, as compared with what we spend on our horses? If a man spends lavishly on his library, you call him mad a bibliomaniac. But you never call one a horse-maniac, though men ruin themselves every day by their horses, and you do not hear of people Or, to go lower still, how much do ruining themselves by their books. you think the contents of the book-shelves of the United Kingdom, public and private, would fetch, as compared with the contents of its wineWhat position would its expenditure on literature take as comcellars? pared with its expenditure on luxurious eating? We talk of food for the mind, as of food for the body: now, a good book contains such food inexhaustible: it is provision for life, and for the best part of us; yet how long most people would look at the best book before they would give Though there have been men who the price of a large turbot for it! have pinched their stomachs and bared their backs to btiy a book, whose libraries were cheaper to them, I think, in the end, than most men's We are few of us put to such a trial, and more the pity; dinners are. for, indeed, a precious thing is all the more precious to us if it has been won by work or economy; and if public libraries were half as costly as public dinners, or books cost the tenth part of what bracelets do, even foolish men and women might sometimes suspect there was good in reading as well as in munching and sparkling; whereas the very cheapness of literature is making even wiser people forget that if a book is worth reading it is worth buying."—.