I know, I know! I'm coming to that: there are plenty of other people who have this ridiculous reading-in-bed idea. There, for instance, is Richard Le Gallienne. I had a letter from him awhile ago, in which he remarked that it was his practice to do most of his reading in bed. Then I had a letter recently from Meredith Nicholson, in which there was some such absurd phrase as "going to bed and reading until the cock crows." Also I one time read an essay, a very pleasant essay outside the mistaken notion of its main theme, by Michael Monahan, which was largely about the pleasure of reading in bed. Spoke of the delights of being tucked in, with what satisfaction you got the light just right, and all that. It must, of course, be acknowledged that all these gentlemen are, if perverse in their method, persons of some reading. However, a fact such as that, an accident as you might say, cannot be permitted to upset the course of a profound argument. Why! as to that, a suspicion just occurs to me that maybe someone could dig up Lamb, Hazlitt, Mark Twain, Coleridge, Leigh Hunt, Cowper (perhaps all of them, and more) to the effect that it is pleasant to read in bed. Didn't Thackeray have some nonsense about "bedside books"? _I_ haven't time to refute each of these persons separately. It is sufficient, I take it, to roll into one point of attack all this bed-reading heresy, from whatever quarters it comes, and put an end to that. Understand me; I have no complaint against the reading in bed of persons confined there through physical disability. The world war which brought more people to bed for indefinite periods than any other matter since time began thereby probably got more souls into the way of reading than seventeen times several hundred schools ever did. All of them, however, would find that they were much better off in the matter of reading when they had got out of bed. What I say is that, in a manner of speaking, there is no use in taking the air in a wheel-chair if you can take it on horseback. Why do a thing in a halfway fashion when you can go to it right? Another thing. There are people (I've seen them at it) who read on porches. Sometimes in swings, rocking to and fro. Even in hammocks, slung above the ground from trees. On trains, too. I have (with my own ears) heard people say that they would "take a book" and go out into the park, or into the woods, or out in a boat, or up on the mountain, or by the sea, or any conceivable place except where one should go to read. All of these ways of reading are worse, if anything can be worse than that, than reading in bed. Because in bed you do, at least, have your mind sandwiched within doors. You do not feel the surge and rumble of the world--the sound and movement of the things of which literature is made; but any contact with which (at the moment of reading) is destructive to the illusion which it is the province of literature to create.