In our age of free libraries and cheap editions of good books anyone who has time and disposition may become not merely a reader of literature, but a student of literature. The difference is not great, perhaps not important; it seems to be only a matter of attitude and method. The reader opens any book that falls in his way or to which he is led for any reason, tries a page or two of it, and continues or not, at pleasure. The student opens a book which he has deliberately sought and brings to it not only the tastes and moods of the ordinary reader, but a determination to know the book, however much or little it may please him. He is impelled not only to know the book, with his critical faculties more or less consciously awake, but to know the circumstances under which the book was written, and its relation to other books. One may read “Hamlet” ten times and know much of it by heart and still not be a _student_ of “Hamlet,” much less a student of Shakespeare. The student feels it necessary to know the other plays of Shakespeare, some of the other Elizabethan dramatists, a little of the history and biography of Shakespeare’s time, and something, too, of the best critical literature that “Hamlet” has inspired in the past two centuries. The study of literature implies order and method in the selection of books, and orderly reading in turn implies enough seriousness and willful application to turn the act of reading, in part, from play to work. Well, then, it is better to be a student of literature than a mere reader. Ideally that is true; if there were years enough in a human life we should like to be students of everything under the sun. But the conditions of life limit the mere reader on one side and the student on the other, and it is a question which one is ultimately richer in mind. A mere reader will read “Hamlet” until he can almost imagine himself standing on the stage able to speak the lines of any part. The student of literature will read “Hamlet” thoroughly, investigate its real or supposed relation to the rest of the Shakespearian plays, toil through a large volume of learned notes and opinions, read fifty other Elizabethan tragedies and a half dozen volumes on the life and works of Shakespeare. He is on the way to becoming a student of Shakespeare. But while he is struggling with the learned notes, the mere reader is reading, say, Henley’s poems; while the student is reading the lesser plays of Shakespeare, the mere reader is enjoying Browning’s tragedies; while the student of “Hamlet” is making the acquaintance of fifty tragedies by Chapman, Beaumont and Fletcher, Jonson, Marlowe, Webster--less than ten of which are masterpieces--the idle reader is wandering through Sterne’s “Tristram Shandy,” ten modern novels, the seventh book of “Paradise Lost” (that noble Chant of Creation), a beautiful new edition of the poems of George Herbert, and some quite unrelated bits of prose and verse that happen to attract his eye. Which