love or aptitude for meditation. A man with genial interest in his fellows, and in life as a whole, would not have walked the streets of London with a book in his hand; and a man with any faculty of meditative thought would scarcely have employed a long starlit night on the Irish Sea in a recitation of Milton.—W. J. Dawson, "The Makers of English Prose."
(271)
See Surprizes in Books.
Book, The Most Popular—See Bible,
Popularity of.
BOOKS AND WORTH
Browning would never write for a magazine.
He wrote: "I can not bring myself
to write for periodicals. If I publish a book,
and people choose to buy it, that proves they
want to read my work. But to have them
to turn over the pages of a magazine and
find me—that is to be an uninvited guest."
(272)
Books, Influence of—See Reformation.
Books Less Important than Things—See
Things not Books.
BOOKS, POISON IN
A gentleman in India went into his library
and took down a book from the shelves.
As he did so he felt a slight pain in his
finger like the prick of a pin. He thought
that a pin had been stuck by some careless
person in the cover of the book. But soon
his finger began to swell, then his arm, and
then his whole body, and in a few days he
died. It was not a pin among the books,
but a small and deadly serpent.
There are many books that contain
moral poison more deadly to character
than this serpent. (Text.)
(273)
BOOKS, THE SIZE OF
We are capable of believing, not only that
we love books which we do not love, but
that we have read books which we have not
read. A lifelong intimacy with their titles,
a partial acquaintance with modern criticism,
a lively recollection of many familiar quotations—these
things come in time to be
mistaken for a knowledge of the books
themselves. Perhaps in youth it was our
ambitious purpose to storm certain bulwarks
of literature; but we were deterred by their
unpardonable length. It is a melancholy
truth, which may as well be acknowledged
at the start, that many of the books best
worth reading are very, very long, and that
they can not, without mortal hurt, be
shortened. Nothing less than a shipwreck
on a desert island in company with Froissart's
"Chronicles" would give us leisure to
peruse this glorious narrative, and it is useless
to hope for such a happy combination of
chances. We might, indeed, be wrecked—that
is always a possibility—but the volume
saved dripping from the deep would be "Soldiers
of Fortune," or "Mrs. Wiggs of the
Cabbage Patch."—Agnes Repplier, "Compromises."
(274)
BOORISHNESS
Boorishness is a product of selfishness far
more than a product of ignorance; or at
least a product of that ignorance which is in
itself a product of selfishness. I was once
at a wedding breakfast in a rural community
in the West. The groom ate in silence
the food that was set before him, dispatched
his meal before the rest of us were more
than half through, pushed back his plate,
wiped his mouth with the back of his hand,
and turning to his bride, said, "Well, Sally,
you may as well get used to my way at the
beginning, and I always leave the table when
I have got through with my meal!" With
these words he went out to pick his teeth
on the door-steps, leaving his bride with a
flushed face and a pained heart, the object
of our commiseration. The man was a boor,
you say. True! What made him a boor?
The fact that he selfishly thought of his own
comfort. It never entered his head to inquire
whether his conduct would be agreeable
or painful to his bride.—Lyman Abbott,
The Chautauquan.
(275)
Borrowed Trouble—See Wait and See.
BORROWING HABIT ARRESTED
A wag has declared that there is one borrower
set down in every neighborhood; that
she either "leavens the whole lump" (being
of the fomenting class) or speedily moves
away. But he is mistaken; sometimes the
borrower gets converted. Here is the way
one woman managed it:
"Ma wants to know if you will loan her a cup of sugar?" asks Mrs. B.'s little girl.
"Why, certainly! But be sure to tell her not to return it," was the cheerful response of Mrs. Neighbor.
The next day the child reappeared with the
