Mr. Morley remarked on the comparative indifference be- trayed towards
literature, as compared with science and the more or less technical instruction which helps men in practical life, and he does not wonder at this. Men will more or less prefer studies which tend to their own advancement in life. But for himself, he held Dr. Arnold's view,—" If I had to choose, I would rather that a son of mine believed that the sun went round the earth, than that he should be entirely deficient in knowledge of beauty, of poetry, of moral truth." We should think so, indeed. "Entirely deficient" in such knowledge is, indeed, spiritual and moral idiocy ; while ignorance of such a fact as the rotation of the earth round the sun is, to ninety-nine men out of a hundred, of no importance at all. Mr. Morley commented on and regretted the enormous proportion of fiction in demand in the popular libraries, though he confessed himself a " voracious " novel-reader. Some people, he remarked,—even among the educated,—are born with an "incapacity for reading," and that is not, perhaps, very surprising, if we consider that literary tastes can hardly have been transmitted in any great force for more than some ten generations at most, even of well-descended families, while restless out-of-door tastes must have been trans- mitted to us for some hundreds of generations. Most books worth reading once are, said Mr. Morley, worth reading twice; while the masterpieces of literature are worth reading " a thousand times." He thought the lists of the beet books in the world,—a hundred in number,—much too long. A prig had been defined as " an animal overfed for its size," and to stuff a man with extracts from the hundred beat books in the world would lead to an immense quantity of overfeeding. That is very true; but, as a matter of fact, we doubt whether one prig in ten is made one by too much stuffing with knowledge. It is the didactic impulse,—an impulse which you often see in the ignorant, and comparatively seldom in men of real learning,— that is chiefly in the ascendant in the prig. The true inflating gas in the prig is the self-confidence of temperament, much oftener than the conceit of knowledge.
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