Someone had apparently been objecting to the creation of free libraries on the score that they were chiefly used by readers of fiction, and in support of such libraries Sir John Lubbock (not venturing to make so heterodox an assertion as that the perusal of fiction _per se_ is valuable and desirable) pleads that only sixty-five per cent. of the books borrowed were novels, and refers to the rapidity with which a novel can be 'run through,' as he phrases it, and proceeds, as an excuse for the perusal of fiction, to state that the English public chiefly derives its knowledge of history from novels and from Shakespeare's plays. This declaration, which is enough to make Mr Freeman turn in his grave, and Mr Froude writhe in his professorial chair, is, I believe, based on an exact truth, but it never appears to occur to the speaker that while the history to be learned from fiction and the drama is not of the purest kind, the fine art of an admirable book, as of an admirable play, contains many another lesson more valuable than even those of correct history to the reader who is capable of assimilating and appreciating it. Sir John Lubbock kindly adds that he should be 'very sorry to undervalue novels.' Sweet and gracious condescension! He would be sorry to 'undervalue' Boccaccio, Cervantes, Guerrazzi, Théophile Gautier, Merimée, Victor Hugo, Thackeray, Walter Scott, Fielding, Octave Feuillet, Georges Sand, and Bulwer Lytton! Admirable benevolence! A treatise on the ways of ants or bees must, of course, rank as an infinitely higher work than a mere study of the manners, characters, and passions of mankind. To peruse the former work is education; to read the latter work is recreation, not absolutely injurious, perhaps, but scarcely beneficial. Sir John Lubbock on an ant-hill has the sublimity of the scientist: Alphonse Daudet on human nature is a mere trumpery trifler. It does not appear even to occur to Sir John Lubbock that a fine novel contains intellectual qualities of the highest kind, and combines in itself the widest effects and the most delicate minutiæ of creative art. A fine novel should be no more 'run through' than the sculptures of the Vatican or the pictures of the Uffizi should be run through in ignorance and haste: common readers, like common tourists, may do so, but to do so is as gross and unpardonable an insult to the book as it is to the sculptures and the paintings.