One effect of the modern habit of swift and careless reading is seen in the impatience with which anything is regarded which is not to be taken in at a glance. The modern reader is apt to insist that a book shall be like a theatre-poster. He must be able to take it all in with a look as he goes past it on a wheel, and if he cannot he declares that it is obscure. W. M. Hunt said, with bitter wisdom: "As print grows cheap, thinkers grow scarce." The enormous increase of books has bred a race of readers who seem to feel that the object of reading is not to read but to have read; not to enjoy and assimilate, but to have turned over the greatest possible number of authors. This idea of the study of literature is as if one selected as the highest social ideal the afternoon tea, where the visitor is presented to numberless strangers and has an opportunity of conversing rationally with nobody. A class of self-styled students of literature far more pernicious than even the record-breaking readers is that of the gossip-mongers. These are they who gratify an innate fondness of gossip and scandal under the pretext of seeking culture, and who feed an impertinent curiosity in the name of a noble pursuit. They read innumerable volumes filled with the more or less spicy details of authors; they perhaps visit the spots where the geniuses of the world lived and worked. They peruse eagerly every scrap of private letters, journals, and other personal matter which is available. For them are dragged to light all the imperfect manuscripts which famous novelists have forgotten to burn. For them was perpetrated the infamy of the publication of the correspondence of Keats with Miss Brawne; to them Mrs. Stowe appealed in her foul book about Byron, which should have been burned by the common hangman. It is they who buy the newspaper descriptions of the back bedroom of the popular novelist and the accounts of the misunderstanding between the poet and his washerwoman. They scent scandal as swine scent truffles, and degrade the noble name of literature by making it an excuse for their petty vulgarity. The race is by no means a new one. Milton complained of it in the early days of the church, when, he says:-- With less fervency was studied what St. Paul or St. John had written than was listened to one that could say: "Here he taught, here he stood, this was his stature, and thus he went habited," and, "O happy this house that harbored him, and that cold stone whereon he rested, this village where he wrought a miracle." Schopenhauer, too, has his indignant protest against this class:-- Petrarch's house in Arqua, Tasso's supposed prison in Ferrara, Shakespeare's house in Stratford, Goethe's house in Weimar, with its furniture, Kant's old hat, the autographs of great men,--these things are gaped at with interest and awe by many who have never read their works.