It is not surprising to find that the most versatile of versatile Americans read De Foe’s “Essay on Projects,” which contains practical suggestions on a score of subjects, from banking and insurance to national academies. In Cotton Mather’s “Essays to do Good” is the germ perhaps of the sensible morality of Franklin’s “Poor Richard.” The story of how Franklin gave his nights to the study of Addison and by imitating the _Spectator_ papers taught himself to write, is the best of lessons in self-cultivation in English. The “Autobiography” is proof of how well he learned, not Addison’s style, which was suited to Joseph Addison and not to Benjamin Franklin, but a clear, firm manner of writing. In Franklin’s case we can see not only what he owed to books, but how one side of his fine, responsive mind was starved because, as he put it, more proper books did not fall in his way. The blind side of Franklin’s great intellect was his lack of religious imagination. This defect may be accounted for by the forbidding nature of the religious books in his father’s library. Repelled by the dull discourses, the young man missed the religious exaltation and poetic mysticism which the New England divines concealed in their polemic argument. Franklin’s liking for Bunyan and his confession that his father’s discouragement kept him from being a poet, “most probably,” he says, “a very bad one,” show that he would have responded to the right kind of religious literature, and not have remained all his life such a complacent rationalist. If it is clear that the purpose of reading is to put ourselves in communication with the best minds of our race, we need go no farther for a definition of “good reading.” Whatever human beings have said well in words is literature, whether it be the Declaration of Independence or a love story. Reading consists in nothing more than in taking one of the volumes in which somebody has said something well, opening it on one’s knee, and beginning. We take it for granted, then, that we know why we read. We shall presently discuss some books which we shall like to read. But before we come to an examination of certain kinds of literature and certain of its great qualities, we may ask one further question: How shall we read? One answer is that we should read with as much of ourselves as a book warrants, with the part of ourselves that a book demands. Mrs. Browning says: We get no good By being ungenerous, even to a book, And calculating profits--so much help By so much reading. It is rather when We gloriously forget ourselves, and plunge Soul-forward, headlong, into a book’s profound, Impassioned for its beauty, and salt of truth-- ’Tis then we get the right good from a book.