The Gentle Reader was always like that. Nothing daunted him. If no really great literature was available, then any honest book would serve his turn—let us say a dic-jon ary, a cook book, or even Martin Tapper's "Proverbial Philosophy." He was a veteran traveller on the high: seas and the rough roads of literature, and he could make himself comfortable almost anywhere and under any circumstances. One reason for his fortitude, no doubt, is to be seen in the fact that even the dullest book' reminded him here and there of brighter books that he had read, just as the dullest place will remind a seasoned traveller of places where he hag been in earlier years, attracting some of that by-one pleasure to the present moment. And again, just as you may speak freely to the globe-trotter about such places as Prague and Portland, the Thames and Yang ug, Ve~ suvius and Mount Rainier, assured that whatever you say of them will micer with intelligent recognition, 30 a writer of the old days of which T speaking might refer, casually and without hesitation, to Achilles sulking in his tent, to the farewell of Zineas and Dido, to the legend of Adonis or to that of Loki, quite [confident that he was speaking a language which would be unde stood. If a writer wished to met tion Malebolge, the "gentle reader" knew lifs Dante, and if there was occasion to speak of Vaucluse he did so with the certa: nty that his reader had been long acquainted with the poems of Petrarch, Such writers as Lump and De Quincey, Coleridge, Southey and Lander, not to mention even more erudite men of the seven. teenth century, made demands upon their readers which seem to us mod-ferns enormous and which no writer of our day who wished to be read and understood would dare to make, And it is certain, furthermore, that these demands were met, for Lamb. and De Quincey, Coleridge, Southey and Lander were read intelligently by thousands in their own time, 'They did not "write over peoples' heads," as we might at first supp dinary print, and our sentences have. been trimmed down from two. hundred-to twenty words. That there has been a gain this simplification no one' will deny, but 3 8 people have taken. numerable school and college "courses" in literature," but no. Gentle Reader was ever maida by any such mechanical process. ly 5 ai HY tee umes of Goethe's works quite through, in the original German, as Emerson once did at Carlyle's request. Where is the reader, finally, who, when confronted by an enol ious paragraph enclosed in one im. niense parenthesis, will not blench or turn aside to something that looks more exciting, or ever yawn, but will read right through that pars graph and that parenthesis until he comes to the end? If there be anyone capable of this last fest, then all cheerfully admit that there at least one Gentle Reader left in the world. For hirm—or her—anyone should be proud to write—o.s. in "ES. Monitor.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.