If we look through the long list of English literary celebrities, we cannot but be struck with the large proportion of those who have received little or no regular education in their early days, and whose opportunities of study have been of the scantiest. Ben Jonson working as a bricklayer with his book in his pocket: Wm. Cobbett reading his hard-earned 'Tale of a Tub' under the haystack, or mastering his grammar when he was a private soldier on the pay of 6d. a day; when 'the edge of my berth or that of my guard-bed was my seat to study in; my knapsack was my bookcase; a bit of board lying on my lap was my writing table, and the task did not demand anything like a year of my life:' Gifford, as a cobbler's apprentice, working out his problems on scraps of waste leather; or Bunyan, confined for twelve years in Bedford jail with only his Bible and 'Foxe's Book of Martyrs,' are but a few among scores of instances which will immediately suggest themselves. There are many persons who are possessed with a strange and unaccountable conviction, that to read a book and to write a book are processes which require little, if any, previous training or preparation. The one error is sufficiently obvious to all who pay any attention to the great mass of cheap literature which is pouring from our printing-presses; the other is less easy of detection. 'The first lesson in reading is that which teaches us to distinguish between literature and merely printed matter,' is the admirable maxim laid down by Mr. Lowell, and this is one of the essential points in which the personal influence of an experienced friend is of inestimable value. As the latent beauties of some great masterpiece of art unfold themselves to our eye under the guidance of a Kugler or a Ruskin, and we are thus enabled to detect their presence or their absence in the works of other hands and other schools, so in the masterpieces of literature the realization of the points, wherein the chief merits of each lie, places us in a position to form a standard--to possess a talisman, which shall enable us unerringly to detect the true from the false. Mrs. Knowles said of Dr. Johnson, 'He knows how to read better than any one; he gets at the substance of a book directly; he tears the heart out of it.' This faculty, which was exhibited in a marvellous degree also in Southey and Macaulay, is as rare as it is enviable; but there are not a few who erroneously suppose themselves to be possessed of it. The hurried, careless, method of reading is one of the chief dangers a student should guard against. In studying a work of biography, for example--but above all in studying the classics--the first requisite, and one which is, as we have said, sadly overlooked in public school teaching, is the acquisition of a simple, general outline of the period to which the work relates. In the fashionable phrase of the day, the books so read are frequently not in correspondence with their environment. To him whose