Sir Matthew White Ridley, the Home Secretary, made a speech
at Newcastle on Wednesday which contained, what we should on such a subject have deemed hopeless, a new thought. He said, of coarse, the regular things about books being friends that never quarrelled with us—they very often bore us though—and the like; but he said also that the habit of reading became more valuable as the business of life became more subdivided. The grooving of all business tended, especially among workers, to narrowness ; and for that, discursive reading, even the reading of fiction, was the best corrective. That is a wise saying as well as a true one, and is probably the reason why, as a rule, the wen of monotonous life love books so much more than the men of action. M. Paul Bourget, in his recent travels in America, noted with surprise that the country farmers there, who lead singularly dull lives, betrayed a passionate desire to read and hear new or striking ideas. They look to a kind of culture to relieve monotony.
Previous page
