For the Reasoning powers, the noblest in the scale of human faculties, it may be fairly doubted whether the modern increase of Knowledge has done much to strengthen them, when we find ourselves still unprotected by common sense against such absurdities as those which find currency amongst us. Men are treated amongst us like fowls, crammed to the crop with facts, facts, facts, till their digestion of them is impaired. As to the Imagination, books are like the stepping-stones whereon fancy trips across an otherwise impassable river to gather flowers on the further bank. But it may be questioned whether the reading eye ever really does the same work as the hearing ear. The voice of tradition bears, as no book can do, the burden of the feelings of generations. A ballad learned orally from our mother’s lips seems to have far other meaning when we recall it, perchance long years after that sweet voice has been silent, than the stanzas we perused yesterday through our spectacles in a volume freshly reviewed in the _Times_. Such are the somewhat dubious results of book-lore on the faculties exercised in its acquisition. It is almost needless to remark that there are also certain positive vices frequently engendered by the same pursuit. Bacon’s noble apophthegm, that “a little knowledge leads to atheism, but a great deal brings us back to God,” needs for commentary that “a little” must be taken to signify what many people think “much.” Read in such a sense, it applies not only to religious faith, but to faith in everything, and most particularly to faith in Knowledge itself. Nobody despises books so much as those who have read many of them, except those still more hopeless infidels who have written them. Watch the very treatment given to his library by a bookworm. Note how the volumes are knocked about, and left on chairs, and scribbled over with ill-penned notes, and ruthlessly dog’s-eared and turned down on their faces on inky tables, and sat upon in damp grass under a tree! Contrast this behavior towards them with the respectful demeanor of unlettered mortals, who range the precious and well-dusted tomes like soldiers on drill on their spruce shelves; nobody pushed back out of the line, nobody tumbling sideways against his neighbor, nobody standing on his head! History is not jumbled ignominiously with romance; moral treatises are not made sandwiches of (as we have beheld) between the yellow covers of Zola; and “Sunday books” have a prominent pew all to themselves, where they are not rubbed against by either profane wit or worldly wisdom. Such is the different appreciation of literature by those to whom it is very familiar and by those to whom it preserves still a little of the proverbial magnificence of all unknown things.