=Principles on which to select School-Books.=—In their power of giving impulse and stirring emotion is another use of books, the right books; but that is just the question—which _are_ the right books?—a point upon which I should not wish to play Sir Oracle. The ‘hundred best books for the schoolroom’ may be put down on a list, but not by me. I venture to propose one or two principles in the matter of school-books, and shall leave the far more difficult part, the application of those principles, to the reader. For example, I think we owe it to children to let them dig their knowledge, of whatever subject, for themselves out of the fit book; and this for two reasons: What a child _digs for_ is his own possession; what is poured into his ear, like the idle song of a pleasant singer, floats out as lightly as it came in, and is rarely assimilated. I do not mean to say that the lecture and the oral lesson are without their uses; but these uses are, to give impulse and to _order_ knowledge; and not to convey knowledge, or to afford us that part of our education which comes of fit knowledge, fitly given. Again, as I have already said, ideas must reach us directly from the mind of the thinker, and it is chiefly by means of the books they have written that we get into touch with the best minds. =Marks of a Fit Book.=—As to the distinguishing marks of a book for the schoolroom, a word or two may be said. A fit book is not necessarily a big book. John Quincy Adams, aged nine, wrote to his father for the fourth volume of Smollett for his private reading, though, as he owned up, his thoughts were running on birds’ eggs; and perhaps some of us remember going religiously through the many volumes of Alison’s _History of Europe_ with a private feeling that the bigness of the book swelled the virtue of the reader. But, now, big men write little books, to be used with discretion; because sometimes the little books are no more than abstracts, the dry bones of the subjects; and sometimes the little books are fresh and living. Again, we need not always insist that a book should be written by the original thinker. It sometimes happens that second-rate minds have assimilated the matter in hand, and are able to give out what is their own thought (only because they have _made_ it their own) in a form more suitable for our purpose than that of the first-hand thinkers. We cannot make any hard and fast rule—a big book or a little book, a book at first-hand or at second-hand; either may be right provided we have it in us to discern a _living_ book, quick, and informed with the ideas proper to the subject of which it treats.