in the meantime. Any literary work which conveys faithful
facts or pleasing impressions is a service to the public. It

is even a service to be thankfully proud of having rendered.
The slightest novels are a blessing to those in distress, not

chloroform itself a greater. Our fine old sea-captain's life
was justified when Carlyle soothed his mind with THE KING'S

OWN or NEWTON FORSTER. To please is to serve; and so far
from its being difficult to instruct while you amuse, it is

difficult to do the one thoroughly without the other. Some
part of the writer or his life will crop out in even a vapid

book; and to read a novel that was conceived with any force
is to multiply experience and to exercise the sympathies.

Every article, every piece of verse, every essay, every
ENTRE-FILET, is destined to pass, however swiftly, through

the minds of some portion of the public, and to colour,
however transiently, their thoughts. When any subject falls

to be discussed, some scribbler on a paper has the invaluable
opportunity of beginning its discussion in a dignified and

human spirit; and if there were enough who did so in our
public press, neither the public nor the Parliament would

find it in their minds to drop to meaner thoughts. The
writer has the chance to stumble, by the way, on something

pleasing, something interesting, something encouraging, were
it only to a single reader. He will be unfortunate, indeed,

if he suit no one. He has the chance, besides, to stumble on
something that a dull person shall be able to comprehend; and

for a dull person to have read anything and, for that once,
comprehended it, makes a marking epoch in his education.

Here, then, is work worth doing and worth trying to do well.
And so, if I were minded to welcome any great accession to

our trade, it should not be from any reason of a higher wage,
but because it was a trade which was useful in a very great

and in a very high degree; which every honest tradesman could
make more serviceable to mankind in his single strength;

which was difficult to do well and possible to do better
every year; which called for scrupulous thought on the part

of all who practised it, and hence became a perpetual
education to their nobler natures; and which, pay it as you

please, in the large majority of the best cases will still be
underpaid. For surely, at this time of day in the nineteenth

century, there is nothing that an honest man should fear more
timorously than getting and spending more than he deserves.

CHAPTER III - BOOKS WHICH HAVE INFLUENCED ME (14)
THE Editor (15) has somewhat insidiously laid a trap for his

correspondents, the question put appearing at first so
innocent, truly cutting so deep. It is not, indeed, until

after some reconnaissance and review that the writer awakes
to find himself engaged upon something in the nature of

autobiography, or, perhaps worse, upon a chapter in the life
of that little, beautiful brother whom we once all had, and

whom we have all lost and mourned, the man we ought to have
been, the man we hoped to be. But when word has been passed

(even to an editor), it should, if possible, be kept; and if
sometimes I am wise and say too little, and sometimes weak

and say too much, the blame must lie at the door of the
person who entrapped me.

The most influential books, and the truest in their
influence, are works of fiction. They do not pin the reader

to a dogma, which he must afterwards discover to be inexact;
they do not teach him a lesson, which he must afterwards

unlearn. They repeat, they rearrange, they clarify the
lessons of life; they disengage us from ourselves, they

constrain us to the acquaintance of others; and they show us
the web of experience, not as we can see it for ourselves,

but with a singular change - that monstrous, consuming EGO of
ours being, for the nonce, struck out. To be so, they must

be reasonably true to the human comedy; and any work that is
so serves the turn of instruction. But the course of our

education is answered best by those poems and romances where
we breathe a magnanimous atmosphere of thought and meet

generous and pious characters. Shakespeare has served me
best. Few living friends have had upon me an influence so

strong for good as Hamlet or Rosalind. The last character,
already well beloved in the reading, I had the good fortune

to see, I must think, in an impressionable hour, played by
Mrs. Scott Siddons. Nothing has ever more moved, more

delighted, more refreshed me; nor has the influence quite
passed away. Kent's brief speech over the dying Lear had a

great effect upon my mind, and was the burthen of my
reflections for long, so profoundly, so touchingly generous

did it appear in sense, so overpowering in expression.
Perhaps my dearest and best friend outside of Shakespeare is

D'Artagnan - the elderly D'Artagnan of the VICOMTE DE
BRAGELONNE. I know not a more human soul, nor, in his way, a

finer; I shall be very sorry for the man who is so much of a
pedant in morals that he cannot learn from the Captain of

Musketeers. Lastly, I must name the PILGRIM'S PROGRESS, a
book that breathes of every beautiful and valuable emotion.

But of works of art little can be said; their influence is
profound and silent, like the influence of nature; they mould

by contact; we drink them up like water, and are bettered,
yet know not how. It is in books more specifically didactic

that we can follow out the effect, and distinguish and weigh
and compare. A book which has been very influential upon me

fell early into my hands, and so may stand first, though I
think its influence was only sensible later on, and perhaps

still keeps growing, for it is a book not easily outlived:
the ESSAIS of Montaigne. That temperate and genial picture

of life is a great gift to place in the hands of persons of
to-day; they will find in these smiling pages a magazine of

heroism and wisdom, all of an antiquestrain; they will have
their 'linen decencies' and excited orthodoxies fluttered,

and will (if they have any gift of reading) perceive that
these have not been fluttered without some excuse and ground

of reason; and (again if they have any gift of reading) they
will end by seeing that this old gentleman was in a dozen

ways a finer fellow, and held in a dozen ways a nobler view
of life, than they or their contemporaries.

The next book, in order of time, to influence me, was the New
Testament, and in particular the Gospel according to St.

Matthew. I believe it would startle and move any one if they
could make a certain effort of imagination and read it

freshly like a book, not droningly and dully like a portion
of the Bible. Any one would then be able to see in it those

truths which we are all courteouslysupposed to know and all
modestly refrain from applying. But upon this subject it is

perhaps better to be silent.
I come next to Whitman's LEAVES OF GRASS, a book of singular

service, a book which tumbled the world upside down for me,
blew into space a thousand cobwebs of genteel and ethical

illusion, and, having thus shaken my tabernacle of lies, set
me back again upon a strong foundation of all the original

and manly virtues. But it is, once more, only a book for
those who have the gift of reading. I will be very frank - I

believe it is so with all good books except, perhaps,
fiction. The average man lives, and must live, so wholly in

convention, that gunpowder charges of the truth are more apt
to discompose than to invigorate his creed. Either he cries

out upon blasphemy and indecency, and crouches the closer
round that little idol of part-truths and part-conveniences

which is the contemporary deity, or he is convinced by what
is new, forgets what is old, and becomes truly blasphemous

and indecent himself. New truth is only useful to supplement
the old; rough truth is only wanted to expand, not to

destroy, our civil and often elegant conventions. He who
cannot judge had better stick to fiction and the daily