And so our inimitable humorist has
made delightful fun of the solid books,--which no gentleman's library
should be without,--the Humes, Gibbons, Adam Smiths, which, he says, are
not books at all, and prefers some "kindhearted play-book," or at times
the _Town and County Magazine_. Poor Lamb has not a little to answer
for, in the revived relish for garbage unearthed from old theatrical
dungheaps. Be it jest or earnest, I have little patience with the
Elia-tic philosophy of the frivolous. Why do we still suffer the
traditional hypocrisy about the dignity of literature--literature, I
mean, in the gross, which includes about equal parts of what is useful
and what is useless? Why are books as books, writers as writers, readers
as readers, meritorious, apart from any good in them, or anything that
we can get from them? Why do we pride ourselves on our powers of
absorbing print, as our grandfathers did on their gifts in imbibing
port, when we know that there is a mode of absorbing print which makes
it impossible that we can ever learn anything good out of books?
Our stately Milton said in a passage which is one of the watchwords of
the English race, "as good almost kill a Man as kill a good Book.
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