That long experience was burned into their natures; and to lay too much stress on any new book or idea gave them an instinctive pang. They could not bear to linger over it, once the light had died out of it and its leading had become a highway-mark for the passerby. To utter or admire the obvious or commonplace was counted one of the gravest offences against the commonweal; it awakened a look of pity in the eyes of the listener as for one who was smitten with an incurable disease. A repetition of the offence would lead to drastic measures with the victim. He was haled before the medicists, and his system was minutely examined for the source of the malady, and for weeks was he kept under medical supervision; no labour or watching or remedial pain was spared till the source of offending was scourged out of the constitution of the sufferer. As a rule it was found on investigation that the infection had come from some book, whose spirit and precepts had become incorporated in the past of the race and could give no more vitality to it. It was good enough for children and youth, who were passing through the primitive stages of development; to them it was fresh and new for a time, and was even the source of life and vigour. But once out of the valley of memories the men and women who could read it with any pleasure were considered unhealthy and atavistic, and were sent to hospital for treatment. The symptoms of the malady of the commonplace were well known and most patent,--loquacity, fondness for confidential communications and mysterious suggestions under solemn conditionings, or even oaths of silence, bustling idleness, feeble smiles of impotent superiority, jocular dogmatism, assumption of wisdom, and excessive vanity. If the disease had not been so infectious and stealthy in its spread, it would never have been treated so seriously and so promptly; for it was seldom malignant, in its earlier appearances at least; only when it became morbid, and took the shape of injured feeling at unrecognised genius, resulting at times in jealousy and slander, or conspiracy and rebellion, or when it grew masterful and acquired a sense of its own infallibility and omnipotence, resulting generally in petty spite and persecution, was there any deadly virus in it. It was its epidemic character that made it most formidable, and necessitated a system of moral quarantine. Special precautions were taken in permitting the use of the sacred books of the past, and of antiquated or superseded ideas. They were only useful for teaching the young reverence for great thoughts and great thinkers, and for leading the mature to estimate their own achievements modestly, when they saw the rapid antiquation of even the most striking books.