'What shall I read?' There are few questions more frequently asked than this; few, perhaps, to which a thoughtless answer is more frequently given. Coming from one of that large class to which Lord Iddesleigh has given the name of 'indolent readers,' it might be assumed to be lightly asked, and might be as lightly answered by the recommendation of some three-volume novel, or the more fashionable shilling's-worth of gruesome mystery; but if the enquirer be a young book-lover, a worthy answer is far to seek. The diagnosis and opinion of the physician do not present greater difficulties, and in many cases are not attended by more momentous results. To turn a juvenile adrift in Sir John Lubbock's list would be to prescribe an exclusive diet of richly seasoned dishes and rare wines to a convalescent patient--to feed him on strong meats, on cavaire and truffles, and to omit the simple, wholesome, homely fare on which, in his condition, health and efficient progress must in the main depend. How often has the young enquirer been imbued with a distaste for solid literature by being compelled to read 'masterpieces' long before he was able to appreciate their value, or even to comprehend their history! The system at many of our schools is much to blame in this respect. There are, we believe, comparatively few boys who acquire, until they seek it for themselves, even the roughest general outline of the world's history, to which their various episodic studies may be applied, so that each may fall into its proper place and order. 'Periods' and 'Epochs' are studied minutely and painfully, without any knowledge of the grand structure of which they form but a single fragment; and history is too often divorced from geography. A schoolboy is set to work on a play of Aristophanes before he has made acquaintance with the social and political movements of which Pericles and Cleon were the representatives. He reads his Bible and his Homer, his Virgil and Horace, his Caesar and Livy, but probably with the vaguest ideas of their relations to one another, or their respective positions in the world's chronology. Or it may be that the whole of one term is devoted to one or two books of 'the Iliad' and 'the Odyssey,' 'the AEneid' or the 'Odes,' which are ground out line by line and word by word, all the interest and flavour of the complete work being inevitably and hopelessly dissipated in the process. Even 'the college prizeman, and the college tutor cannot read a chorus in the Trilogy but what his mind instinctively wanders on optatives, choriambi, and that happy conjecture of Smelfungus in the antistrophe.'[100] But certain books having to be got up for an examination by the cramming process, the receptacle for all this erudition only looks forward to the time when he may throw his Classics behind the fire for ever. No book with the least pretention to permanent value can be read purely by and for itself; inevitably it must draw on