Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 83.djvu/148

144 edition of some choice author. "A book of verses underneath the bough" or whereever else you camp is a fitting companion.

In urging this employment of spare fragments of time, we are not forgetting the need which all have of recreation. Our bodies must of course be rested when they are weary, and so must our minds. Time spent in reading when you are too tired to read is not saved, but lost. The most healthy person sometimes needs the fullest possible relief from mental exercise, and that during the day. For all this it is true that change of mental activity, as from our regular work to a delightful book, affords mental rest of a most valuable order. If your dinner is ten minutes late you need not take up Euclid or the "Principia." Use Thackeray, or even a comic paper.

A second precept toward utilizing one's reading opportunities is: Carefully select your matter. Here comes up the very important question, what to read. Answer: In the first place, negatively, it does not pay to spend much time upon newspapers or upon ordinary magazines. Not that one may not fish up from these great seas now and then a pearl; but that the average time and labor cost of such pearls is too great. Also eschew ordinary fiction and ordinary poetry, save now and then an hour when the mental alimentary canal, lacking tone, can keep down nothing but broth. Life is too short to read all that is truly excellent; it is certainly too short to read much of what is just passable.

Read more books and less periodical literature. A bad habit has arisen in this matter. The great ability, along with the timeliness, of many magazine pieces now, has had the unfortunate effect of turning readers from board to paper covers. A new book we ignore because Book Notes or the Critic or the Dial or the Outlook or some other sheet has had a review of it. But the best possible review of a book is no substitute for the book. As well dine upon odors from a hotel kitchen. Read all the reviews that appeared upon Lecky's "History of England in the Eighteenth Century"; then take time and go through the work itself. You will find it a new world. Equally great is the error men make in reading so few old books. A few years ago it was found, by questioning, that only one out of a class of a hundred and ten college seniors knew anything about Milton's prose works. Many who consider themselves fairly well read have never touched Bacon's "Essays" or the "Pilgrim's Progress." Such as do read many books, among them, too, books which came out before the Spanish War, often mistakenly avoid the most precious works because they are bulky. To master Masson's "Life of Milton" or Spedding's "Life of Bacon" is a liberal education. It is at once a wonder and a misfortune that so few essays are read now. The rage is all for poetry instead. Colleges and universities offer a hundred lectures on poetry to one on prose belles lettres. So far as one can observe, the noble essays of Hume,