Four hundred years after the first printed book was sent out by Caxton the country has begun to read. An extraordinary reflection that twelve generations should pass away presenting the impenetrable front of indifference to the printing-press! The invention which travelled so swiftly from shore to shore till the remote cities of Mexico, then but lately discovered, welcomed it, for four centuries failed to enter the English counties. This incredible delay must not be supposed to be due to any exceptional circumstances or to inquisitorial action. The cause is found in the agricultural character itself. There has never been any difficulty in obtaining books in the country other than could be surmounted with patience. It is the peculiarity of knowledge that those who really thirst for it always get it. Books certainly came down in some way or other to Stratford-on-Avon, and the great mind that was growing there somehow found a means of reading them. Long, long before, when the printed page had not been dreamed of, the Grecian student, listening at the school, made his notes on oyster-shells and blade-bones. But here the will was wanting. There was no prejudice, for no people admired learning more than the village people, or gave it more willing precedence. It was simple indifference, which was mistaken for a lack of intelligence, but it was most certainly nothing of the kind. How great, then, must be the change when at last, after four hundred years, the country begins to read! To read everything and anything! The cottagers in faraway hamlets, miles from a railway station, read every scrap of printed paper that drifts across their way, like leaves in autumn. The torn newspapers in which the grocer at the market town wraps up their weekly purchases, stained with tallow or treacle, are not burned heedlessly. Some paragraph, some fragment of curious information, is gathered from the pieces. The ploughman at his luncheon reads the scrap of newspaper in which his bread-and-cheese was packed for him. Men read the bits of paper in which they carry their screws of tobacco. The stone-pickers in spring in the meadows, often women, look at the bits of paper scattered here and there before putting them in their baskets. A line here and a line yonder, one to-day, one to-morrow, in time make material equal to a book. All information in our day filters through the newspapers. There is no subject you can name of which you may not get together a good body of knowledge, often superior, because more recent, than that contained in the best volumes, by watching the papers and cutting out the paragraphs that relate to it. No villager does that, but this ceaseless searching for scraps comes to something like the same thing in a more general manner.