Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 17.djvu/66

 "Oh! but he was not quite sure; he was rather doubtful, he said, about one of the books."

"Not the Bible, I do hope?" said I fervently.

"No, about the other. He was not quite sure but that, instead of 'Gil Bias,' he ought to have selected 'Don Quixote.' Now, really that seems to me worse than 'Gil Bias.'"

"You mean less excellent," I rejoined; "you are too young to appreciate the full signification of 'Don Quixote.'"

The scoundrel murmured, "Do you mean to tell me that people read it when they are old?" but I pretended not to hear him. "We do not all of us," I went on, "know what is good for us. Sancho Panza's physician—"

"Oh! I know that physician—well, papa. I sometimes think, if it had not been for that physician, perhaps—"

"Hush!" I exclaimed authoritatively; "let us have no flippancy, I beg." And so, with a dead lift, as it were, I got rid of him. He left the room muttering, "But to read it through—three times, ten times, for all one's life?" And I was obliged to confess to myself that such a prolonged course of study, even of "Don Quixote," would have been wearisome.

Rabelais is another article of our literary faith that is certainly subscribed to much more often than believed in. In a certain poem of Mr. Browning's (I call it the "Burial of the Book," since the Latin name he has given it is unpronounceable, even if it were possible to recollect it), charmingly humorous, and which is also remarkable for impersonating an inanimate object in verse as Dickens does in prose, there occur these lines:

Yet I have known some wonder to be expressed (confidentially) as to where he found the "jolly chapter," and the looking for the beauties of Rabelais to be likened to searching in a huge bed of manure for a few heads of asparagus.

I have no quarrel with Bias and Company (though they stick at nothing, and will presently say that I don't care for these books myself), but I venture to think that they are wrong in making dogmas of what are, after all, but matters of literary taste; it is their vehemence and exaggeration which drive the weak to take refuge in falsehood.

A good woman in the country once complained of her step-son, "He will not love his learning, though I beats him with a jackchain"; and from the application of similar aids to instruction the same result takes place in London. Only here we dissemble and