7. A hard discipline, no doubt, but not more hard than salutary.
Salutary in two ways. First, as a test of the student's own earnestness
of purpose. For in these days of revival of interest in our elder
literature, it has become much the custom for flippant persons, who are
covetous of being thought "well-read" by their less-enterprising
companions, to skim over the surface of the pages of the wisest and
noblest of our great teachers, either not understanding, or
misunderstanding them. "I have read Chaucer, Shakspere, Milton," is the
sublimely satirical expression constantly heard from the mouths of those
who, having read words set down by the men they name, have no more
capacity for reading the hearts of the men themselves, through those
words, than a blind man has for discerning the colour of flowers. As a
consequence of this flippancy of reading, numberless writers, whose
works have long been consigned to a well-merited oblivion, have of late
years been disinterred and held up for public admiration, chiefly upon
the ground that they are ancient and unknown. The man who reads for the
sake of having done so, not for the sake of the knowledge gained by
doing so, finds as much charm in these petty writers as in the greater,
and hence their transient and undeserved popularity. It would be well,
then, for every earnest student, before beginning the study of any one
having pretensions to the position of a master, and who is not of our
own generation, to ask himself, "Am I prepared thoroughly to sift out
and ascertain the true import of every allusion contained in this
volume?" And if he cannot honestly answer "Yes," let him shut the book,
assured that he is not impelled to the study of it by a sincere thirst
for knowledge, but by impertinent curiosity, or a shallow desire to
obtain undeserved credit for learning.
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