of the two has pursued the happier, wiser course? Each has spent his time well, and each, if there were more time, might profitably follow the other’s course in addition to his own. Intensive, orderly reading, like that of the _student_, tends to make the mind methodical and certainly furnishes it with a coherent body of related ideas on which to meditate. Extensive reading, such as we assume the _reader’s_ will be, seems to engender superficiality, and yet such is the nature of books and human thought that scattered reading may disclose unexpected and vital relations of idea. Greater effort of will is required to keep the student on his narrower course, and effort of will is profitable to the spirit. On the other hand, the mind is likely to have keener appetite for what it meets on a discursive course, and it assimilates and absorbs more exhaustively what it approaches with natural, unforced interest. “It is better,” says Johnson, “when a man reads from immediate inclination.” It would be educational anarchy to depreciate orderly intensive study of any subject, and we shall presently consider some helpful introductions to the methodical study of literature. But I believe that human nature and human conditions favor the unmethodical reader, and that he, on the whole, discovers the best uses of books in the world as it is. For in the world as it is, we have in adult life thirty, forty, fifty years in which to read books. If we consider everything a book from the little volume which occupies half an hour to the Bible which cannot be read through once intelligently in under six months, we see that three books a week is a liberal number for an assiduous reader. So that in a lifetime one cannot expect to know more than five or six thousand books. Five thousand, or two thousand, or one thousand are plenty for a life of wisdom and enjoyment. The five thousand or the one thousand books of the discursive reader are likely to be at least as good a collection as the five thousand or the one thousand of the student of literature. Reader and student are both restricted to a small picking from the vineyard of books. The ordinary reader will have spent a third of his reading hours on books that have meant little to him. The student will have spent a third of his time in digging through sapless, fiberless volumes. But the free wandering reader is not disturbed by the number of books he has read in vain or by the vast number of interesting books he has not read at all; whereas the student of literature is lured by his ideal of exhaustive knowledge to hurry through books that he “ought to know,” and in desperation is tempted to insincere pretensions.