Mr. Anthony Trollope, in distributing the prizes on Tuesday evening
to the City and Spitalfields School of Art, remarked on the rarity of the power of reading,—not, of course, of the mere power of articulating and understanding written sentences, —b ut of the power of so entering into what you read as to gather up its chief character- istics rapidly and well; and he added that unless you obtained this power in youth, you never obtained it in old age. Both remarks are true, but perhaps the truth wants more general recognition than it receives, that there are many people who get a great deal more from life than they ever could from books, and that it is these persons mainly who have not the power of reaping easily and rapidly the fruits of reading. It is but very few who, like Mr. Trollope, have the art of catching rapidly all the distinctive features both from life and from books. As a rule, we suspect that the best life-readers are not the best book-readers ; but the worst of it is that when they are not, the effect of their life-reading is apt to be wasted, and certainly is not made available as it otherwise might be beyond the range of their own experience.
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