Page:The library a magazine of bibliography and library literature, Volume 6.djvu/372

 360 The Library. sufficiently established as a powerful educational force, and does not need my advocacy, or that I should take up your time by discussing its merits. In districts where the population is chiefly of an artisan class, it is not of much use to arrange for a series of dry discourses on the higher branches of knowledge, or a course of oral biblio- graphy. It is necessary, as I have said, to gild the philosophic pill, and I have known occasions when the pill has been nearly all gilding, and I have not discovered that the audience has ound fault with that arrangement. If that be thought a crime, I fear not a few books must be weeded out of our libraries which would come under the same category. Once in a way, the lecture may give place to a musical or elocutionary entertain- ment, without detracting more from the dignity of the library with which it is associated than the issue of " Three Men in a Boat," or the works of Artemus Ward from that institution. It may attract some persons to the lectures who never came before, and some of these may ultimately be attracted to become borrowers from the public library, or students within the walls of its reference department, who might otherwise never have known the pleasures of reading, or fed on the dainties that are bred in a book. If only such a result as this can be occasionally brought about by the establishment of a course of free lectures, this step will be fully justified. But I believe that the lecture movement will be found to be the missing link between the long rows of little-used books which lie on the shelves of many libraries, and the large mass of people who have never yet learned how rich a treasure- house they possess in their free library. ROBERT K. DENT.