READING. 
115 
tions, and let them swing round there till they are rusty, 
and not come down at all to bother honest men with 
their pranks. The next time the novelist rings the bell 
I will not stir though the meeting-house burn down. 
“The Skip of the Tip-Toe-Hop, a Romance of the 
Middle Ages, by the celebrated author of ‘ Tittle-Tol- 
Tan,’ to appear in monthly parts; a great rush; don’t 
all come together.” All this they read with saucer 
eyes, and erect and primitive curiosity, and with un¬ 
wearied gizzard, whose corrugations even yet need no 
sharpening, just as some little four-year-old bencher his 
two-cent gilt-covered edition of Cinderella, ■— without 
any improvement, that I can see, in the pronunciation, 
or accent, or emphasis, or any more skill in extracting 
or inserting the moral. The result is dulness of sight, 
a stagnation of the vital circulations, and a general de- 
liquium and sloughing off of all the intellectual facul¬ 
ties. This sort of gingerbread is baked daily and more 
sedulously than pure wheat or rye-and-Xndian in almost 
every oven, and finds a surer market. 
The best books are not read even by those who are 
called good readers. What does our Concord culture 
amount to ? There is in this town, with a very few ex¬ 
ceptions, no taste for the best or for very good books even 
in English literature, whose words all can read and 
spell. Even the college-bred and so called liberally 
educated men here and elsewhere have really little or 
no acquaintance with the English classics; and as for 
the recorded wisdom of mankind, the ancient classics 
and Bibles, which are accessible to all who will know 
of them, there are the feeblest efforts any where made 
to become acquainted with them. X know a woodchop- 
per, of middle age, who takes a French paper, not for 
