COUNTRY LITERATURE. 231 



which have expired, are now often met with, there 

 really seems no difficulty in this. Sixpence, a shilling, 

 eighteenpence ; nothing must be more than two shil- 

 lings, and a shilling should be the general maximum. 

 For a shilling how many clever little books are on 

 sale on London bookstalls ! If so, why should not 

 other books adapted to the villager's wishes be on sale 

 at a similar price in the country ? Something might, 

 perhaps, be learned in this direction from the Ameri- 

 can practice. Books in America are often sold for a 

 few cents ; good-sized books too. Thousands of books 

 are sold in France at a franc twopence less than the 

 maximum of a shilling. The paper is poor, the print- 

 ing nothing to boast of, the binding merely paper, but 

 the text is there. All the villager wants is the text. 

 Binding, the face of the printing, the quality of the 

 paper to these outside accidents he is perfectly in- 

 different. If the text only is the object, a book can 

 be produced cheaply. On first thoughts, it appeared 

 that much might be effected in the way of reprinting 

 extracts from the best authors, little handbooks which 

 could be sold at a few pence. Something, indeed, 

 might i be done in this way. But upon the whole 

 I think that as a general rule extracts are a 

 mistake. There is nothing so unsatisfactory as an 

 extract. You cannot supply the preceding part nor 

 the following with success. The extract itself loses 

 its force and brilliance because the mind has not been 

 prepared to perceive it by the gradual approach the 

 author designed. It is like a face cut out of a large 

 picture. The face may be pretty, but the meaning is 

 lost. Such fragments of Shakspeare, for instance, as 



