Yet can any friendship or society be more
important to us than that of the books which form so large a part of our
minds and even of our characters? Do we in real life take any pleasant
fellow to our homes and chat with some agreeable rascal by our
firesides, we who will take up any pleasant fellow's printed memoirs, we
who delight in the agreeable rascal when he is cut up into pages and
bound in calf?
If any person given to reading were honestly to keep a register of all
the printed stuff that he or she consumes in a year--all the idle tales
of which the very names and the story are forgotten in a week, the
bookmaker's prattle about nothing at so much a sheet, the fugitive
trifling about silly things and empty people, the memoirs of the
unmemorable, and lives of those who never really lived at all--of what
a mountain of rubbish would it be the catalogue: Exercises for the eye
and the memory, as mechanical as if we set ourselves to learn the names,
ages, and family histories of every one who lives in our own street, the
flirtations of their maiden aunts, and the circumstances surrounding the
birth of their grandmother's first baby.
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