In reading the recently published letters of Edward Fitzgerald, we cannot fail to be struck with the amount of unmixed pleasure he derived from his books, merely because he approached them with such instinctive honesty and singleness of purpose. He was perfectly frank in his satisfaction, and he was wholly innocent of any didactic tendency. Those subjects which he confessed he enjoyed because he only partly understood them, “just as the old women love sermons,” he refrained from interpreting to his friends; those “large, still books,” like “Clarissa Harlowe,” for which he shared all Tennyson’s enthusiasm, he forbore to urge upon less leisurely readers. And what a world of meaning in that single line, “For human delight, Shakespeare, Cervantes, and Scott”! For human delight! The words sound like a caress; a whole sunny vista opens before us; idleness and pleasure lure us gently on; a warm and mellow atmosphere surrounds us; we are invited, not driven, to be happy. I cannot but compare Fitzgerald reading Scott, “for human delight,” in the quiet winter evenings, with a very charming old gentleman whom I recently saw working conscientiously--so I thought--through Tolstoï’s “Peace and War.” He sighed a little when he spoke to me, and held up the book for inspection. “My daughter-in-law sent it to me,” he explained resignedly, “and said I must be sure and read it. But,”--this with a sudden sense of gratitude and deliverance,--“thank Heaven! one volume was lost on the way.” Now we have Mr. Andrew Lang’s word for it that the Englishmen of to-day, “those poor islanders,” indeed, are better acquainted with “Anna Karenina” than with “The Fortunes of Nigel,” and we cannot well doubt the assertion, in view of the too manifest regret with which it is uttered. But then nobody reads “The Fortunes of Nigel” because he has been told to read it, nor because his neighbors are reading it, nor because he wants to say that he has read it. The hundred and one excellent reasons for becoming acquainted with Tolstoï or Ibsen resolve themselves into a single motive when we turn to Scott. It is “for human delight” or nothing. And if, even to children, this joy has grown somewhat tasteless of late years, I fear the reason lies in their lack of healthy unconsciousness. They are taught so much they did not use to know about the correct standing of authors, they are so elaborately directed in their recreations as well as in their studies, that the old simple charm of self-forgetful absorption in a book seems well-nigh lost to them. It is not very encouraging to see a bright little girl of ten making believe she enjoys Miss Austen’s novels, and to hear her mother’s complacent comments thereon, when we realize how exclusively the fine, thin perfection of Miss Austen’s work appeals to the mature observation of men and women, and how utterly out of harmony it must be with the crude judgment and expansive ideality of a child.