In the matter of books, too, the modern man and woman may well exercise a determined choice. There is so much printed nowadays between ornamental covers, that any one is liable to be misled by sheer bewilderment, and deliberate selection is necessary to save us from being mentally starved with plenty. We cannot always be reading to acquire positive knowledge; entertainment and self-oblivion are quite as legitimate motives for the hard worker as meditated self-improvement; but whether we read philosophy and history, or the novel, the poem, and the essay, it behooves us to read the best of its kind. From this standpoint the average book club is almost a positive curse. A weekly quota of books appears on our library tables, to be devoured in seven days. We read them because they come to us by lot, not because we have chosen them ourselves. There is published in every year of this publishing age a certain number of books of positive merit in the various departments of literature and thought, which a little intelligent inquiry would enable us to discover. By reading fewer books, and making sure that the serious ones were sound and the light or clever ones really diverting, the modern man and woman would be gainers both in time and approbation. In this connection let me head off again the sentimentalist and moralist by noting that old friends in literature are often more satisfying and engaging than new. Those of us who are in the thick of life are too apt to forget to take down from our shelves the comrades we loved when we were twenty-one--the essayists, the historians, the poets, and novelists whose delightful pages are the literature of the world. An evening at home with Shakespeare is not the depressing experience which some clever people imagine. One rises from the feast to go to bed with all one’s æsthetic being refreshed and fortified as though one had inhaled oxygen. What a contrast this to the stuffy taste in the roof of the mouth, and the weary, dejected frame of mind which follow the perusal of much of the current literature which cozening booksellers have induced the book club secretary to buy.