The opportunity offered for cultivating acquaintance with good books is not the least reason for spending four years in a college atmosphere. In the year 1700, when William and Mary were on the throne of England, James Pierpont selected eleven trustees, nine of whom were graduates of Harvard, who, it is recorded, met at Branford, Connecticut. Each of the eleven brought a number of books, and, laying them on the table, said, “I give these books for the foundation of a college in this colony.” This was the early foundation of Yale. The influence of such foundations upon the ideals of American students has been considerable. Many a man has discovered in college what Thackeray meant when he wrote to his mother in 1852, “I used, you know, to hanker after Parliament, police magistracies, and so forth; but no occupation I can devise is so profitable as that which I have at my hand in that old inkstand.” Robert Louis Stevenson--and who can forget him in thinking of books?--said twenty years after his school-days, “I have really enjoyed this book as I--almost as I used to enjoy books when I was going twenty to twenty-three; and these are the years for reading. Books,” he continued, “were the proper remedy: books of vivid human import, forcing upon the minds of young men the issues, pleasures, business, importance, and immediacy of that life in which they stand; books of smiling, or heroic temper, to excite or to console; books of a large design, shadowing the complexity of that game of consequences to which we all sit down, the hanger-back not least.” HOW TO INTEREST STUDENTS IN GOOD READING Some critics tell us that the undergraduate of to-day reads only his required books, and talks nothing but athletics. One gets the impression that the average college man feels about his prescribed work in literature much as D. G. Rossetti felt about his father’s heavy volumes. “No good for reading.” The fault is not wholly with the undergraduate. There is need for a change of method in interesting students in books. Too early specialization has frustrated the student’s literary tendencies. College men are forced into “original research” before they know the meaning of the word bibliography. They rarely read enough of any one great author to enter into real friendship with him. Classroom study is often microscopic. Literature is made easy for the student by the innumerable sets of books giving dashes of the world’s best literature, and chosen from an utterly different point of view than the student would take were he to make his own choice, thus often prejudicing him against an author whom he might otherwise have loved.