THROUGH LIBRARY WINDOWS 193 



true life is ever refreshing and inspiring. How 

 welcomely it comes after the tension of pro- 

 longed thought and overtaxing work. How it 

 takes heart and mind into some other world 

 and the new life there rests us like delightful 

 travel without any annoying circumstances of 

 dust or delay or noise or disagreeable people. 

 What a re-creation indeed ! To know the best 

 fiction is an education along the lines of largest 

 self-culture. 



When Carlyle's manuscript of the "French 

 Revolution" was partly destroyed by accident, 

 the great Scotchman, whose working power 

 was phenomenal, tells us he plunged vigorously 

 into Marryatt's novels for diversion and se- 

 cured it, and came again to his task with mind 

 rested and refreshed. Bismarck in his great 

 working days took to the novel at night and 

 read himself into mental restfulness. The same 

 was true of Gladstone in his hardest-worked 

 days, but his reading through years of cultiva- 

 tion was fiction and poetry and history and crit- 

 icism and the classics. It is sometimes one's se- 

 rious duty to leave the weightier books of one's 

 library untouched and devote oneself hearti- 

 ly to the brightest and most sparkling of novels. 

 But this is only occasional, for constant novel 

 reading even of the best, is dissipating. 



