The Vice Of Reading

A recent JíngUsh wnter classes the habit of constant reading in which many persons now-a-days indulge, with dramdrinking, tea-drinking, and tobáceo smoking ; all being very injurious and destructive to true manhood. As he well says, reading is not a good thing in itself. If one reads for no object, neither to be made wiser nor nobler, nor to be innocently recreated, he derives no benefit from reading. If he wastes his time in reading, it is as bad as if he wasted it in any other way. And how many persons read from mere habit, appearing to derive neither instruction ncr pleasure from the exercise. How many spend an hour or more in reading, and then lay the book down with a yawn, and the remark that there is nothing in it, when the fault is likely to be in their lack of a motive in reading, as in the book itself. Novela are of ten read from a mere habit of idlenese. We would enjoin, therefore, upon our young readers always to read with an object, and if they have no object for reading to do something else.