Studious, persistent familiarity with noble letters will place you among the knowing, and it is worth all the effort it can possibly cost you. It will give you, if not the ideal education, a real education, broad, full, useful, enjoyable, a fortune which wealth could not buy. It will keep you from being a boor and make you a cultivated person instead. You may grow to be a connoisseur, a critic, an authority in some department of literature, philosophy, art or science. If you persist, though no degree ever crown your attainments, you may yet be able to instruct masters and doctors. Short of this, the possibilities of profit from reading are indefinitely rich and great. It is a sort of mental suicide if we neglect them.
In these last words, to make the argument specially strong, we have been supposing the case of the people who possess little or no school training. But such as have enjoyed that training, however long, ought nevertheless to appreciate the advantages of reading. If familiarity with books can not take the place of mental drill, no more, certainly, can mental drill take the place of familiarity with books. If you already possess a good foundation laid in school build upon it by reading. The chances of profiting in this way ought to impress you as much as if you had been less fortunate in respect to schooling.
The existence of low-cost editions and of excellent translations of good books, made accessible through free libraries and otherwise, is calculated to bring to bear upon us all a moving incentive to read. If we yield to this incentive, whoever we are and whatever mental advantages we may have enjoyed hitherto, the result will be invaluable mental cultivation and improvement.
Some one will interpose: "I do not love to read; it is a bore. I hate books. If I am to get good from reading you must tell me how I may develop interest in them."
How sad the confession that one does not love to read. Compare Edward Gibbon's avowal that he would not exchange his love of reading for all the gold of the Indies.
Two sorts of people avoid reading, those with very little intelligence and those possessing such unusual intelligence and originality that their minds keep busy without external stimulus. The dull ones can not perhaps be helped much; the others need only proper direction in order to find good reading a perpetual delight.
An intelligent person who dislikes reading is nearly sure to be deeply interested in something; in games, in hunting, in some kind of animals or sort of mechanism. Get a first-rate book discussing his hobby and see if you can not bait his taste therewith. Most likely he will read that and call for another and another. These book? will suggest still others and your man is a reader.
If all such traps fail, get your protégé to read a thrilling short
