. A child's guide to reading . d to like. In time I did learnto like it, but I did not outgrow Dickens. A personwho can read A Christmas Carol aloud to the endand keep his voice steady is, I suspect, not a safeperson to trust with ones purse or ones honor. It is not necessary to argue about the value ofliterature or even to define it. One way of bring-ing ourselves to realize vividly what literature cando for us is to enter the libraries of great men andsee what books have done for the acknowledged lead-ers of our race. You will recall John Stuart Mills experience inreading Wordsworth. Mill wa
. A child's guide to reading . d to like. In time I did learnto like it, but I did not outgrow Dickens. A personwho can read A Christmas Carol aloud to the endand keep his voice steady is, I suspect, not a safeperson to trust with ones purse or ones honor. It is not necessary to argue about the value ofliterature or even to define it. One way of bring-ing ourselves to realize vividly what literature cando for us is to enter the libraries of great men andsee what books have done for the acknowledged lead-ers of our race. You will recall John Stuart Mills experience inreading Wordsworth. Mill was a man of letters aswell as a scientific economist and philosopher, andwe expect to find that men of letters have been nour-ished on literature; reading must necessarily havebeen a large part of their professional examples of men of action who have been moldedand inspired by books will perhaps be more helpfulto remember; for most of us are not to be writersor to engage in purely intellectual work; our ambi- 30. DICKENS The Purpose of Reading tions point to a thousand different careers in theworld of action. Lincoln was not primarily a man of letters, al-though he wrote noble prose on occasion, and the artof expression was important, perhaps indispensable,in his political success. He read deeply in the lawand in books on public questions. For general lit-erature he had little time, either during his earlystruggles or after his public life began, and his auto-biographical memorandum contains the significantwords: Education defective. But these more sig-nificant words are found in a letter which he wroteto Hackett, the player: Some of Shakespeares playsI have never read, while others I have gone overperhaps as frequently as any unprofessional the latter are Lear, Richard III, HenryVIII, Hamlet, and, especially, Macbeth. If he had not read these masterpieces, no doubt hewould have become President just the same andguided the country through its terribl
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