Mr. Balfour's Rectorial address to the students of St. Andrews
on the pleasures of miscellaneous reading, and especially on the large part which the gratification of curiosity plays in the satisfactions of every educated man's life, was an exceedingly amusing one, but hardly calculated to satisfy the ambitious ideal of learning, as it is cherished in the minds of the professorial class. We imagine that some of his audience must have mentally accused him of poking fun at systematic study, and have felt more sympathy with that severe doctrine of Mr. Frederic Harrison,—that reading should be thorough, and con- fined to the most excellent books,—than with the taste for easy, skipping, skimming, slipshod, honey-sucking reading, which Mr. Balfour defended with so much humour, and, let us add, with not a little persiflage. For, after all, a University is not precisely the place where you should learn to suck the brains of a book that has both brains and platitude in it, and to evade the " padding " with as little waste of time on it as possible. Is not that rather the accomplishment of later life ? At the University, we take it, what a man has to learn is the art of reading so as to discipline the mind, and not for the mere purpose of feeding the curiosity. What Mr. Balfour said was really in the nature of supplementary advice to men who, after acquiring their mental discipline at the University, are entering upon life with something, perhaps, of the artificially induced humility of pupillage, and without the savoir fairs of the man of the world. But we have some fears that it would be accepted by many of the students of St. Andrews as a serious suggestion for sipping Homer without making a toil of a pleasure, and perhaps even for skimming the cream off Euclid and the Latin syntax.
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