THE JOURNAL OF THE 

 BEDFORD LITERARY AND SCIENTIFIC INSTITUTE AND GENERAL LIBRARY. 



LITERATURE 



SCIENCE 



ARCH>COLOGY 



ART 



"POSCES LIBRUM CUM LUMINE." HOR. 



Vol. I. No. 2. 



JUNE, 1891. 



Price Twopence. 



^ENTLE Reader, and all you that love the Library and its treasures, the 

 summer is with us, and our hearts are warming and expanding under 

 its genial influence. Let us not at such a season forget that there is 

 laid upon us here in Bedford a deeper obligation to consider what we read, and 

 how we read, and to what purposes we read, than in almost any other town of 

 the size in England. 



We live and move amid a population in which youth and its conditions are 

 everywhere supreme. In nearly every house and street and quarter of the town 

 we meet with youthful faces. Walk abroad wellnigh when we will, the air is 

 filled with the merry voices of the young. The multiplicity of sights and sounds 

 about us is one in speaking to us of growth and hope and promise. We live 

 in a perpetual rush of Spring. 



Surely, therefore, when we seek a refuge from the burden of the day in the 

 cool recesses of the Library, the thought of those without should still be present 

 to our minds, and set us thinking whether we cannot carry back with us to our 

 homes and occupations something of the spirit of our reading, to inspire and 

 stimulate and run like leaven in the minds of our sons and daughters, our 

 brothers and sisters. 



Let us not be satisfied when we have satisfied ourselves. The opportunity is 

 ours. Let us use it. Better far, in moulding the impressionable mind of youth, 

 better oftentimes than all the mechanism of education and all the appliances 

 of lectures and learned societies, is the word in season, the passing hint, the com- 

 mon-place suggestion. Nothing is common-place to the young ; to them all things 

 are new, and the early love of books has many a time made routine less irksome, 

 and turned many a heart from indolence and evil. 



