The sentence was executed with blind obedience; the volumes of paper or parchment were distributed to the four thousand baths of the city; and such was their incredible multitude that six months were barely sufficient for the consumption of this precious fuel. … The tale has been repeatedly transcribed; and every scholar, with pious indignation, has deplored the irreparable shipwreck of the learning, the arts, and the genius, of antiquity. For my own part, I am strongly tempted to deny both the fact and the consequences.
Of the consequence he writes:
Perhaps the church and seat of the patriarchs might be enriched with a repository of books: but, if the ponderous mass of Arian and Monophysite controversy were indeed consumed in the public baths, a philosopher may allow, with a smile, that it was ultimately devoted to the benefit of mankind. I sincerely regret the more valuable libraries, which have been involved in the ruin of the Roman empire; but, when I seriously compute the lapse of ages, the waste of ignorance, and the calamities of war, our treasures, rather than our losses, are the object of my surprise. Many curious and interesting facts are buried in oblivion: the three great historians of Rome have been transmitted to our hands in a mutilated state, and we are deprived of many pleasing compositions of the lyric, iambic, and dramatic poetry of the Greeks. Yet we should gratefully remember that the mischances of time and accident have spared the classic works to which the suffrage of antiquity had adjudged the first place of genius and glory; the teachers of ancient knowledge, who are still extant, had perused and compared the writings of their predecessors; nor can it fairly be presumed that any important truth, any useful discovery in art or nature, has been snatched away from the curiosity of modern ages.
I certainly do not ask you to subscribe to all that. In fact when Gibbon asks us to remember gratefully “that the mischances of time and accident have spared the classic works to which the suffrage of antiquity had adjudged the first place of genius and glory,” I submit with all respect that he talks nonsense. Like the stranger in the temple of the sea-god, invited to admire the many votive garments of those preserved out of shipwreck, I ask “at ubi sunt vestimenta eorum qui post vota nuncupata perierunt?”—or in other words “Where are the trousers of the drowned?” “What about the Sthenoboea of Euripides, the Revellers of Ameipsias—to which, as a matter of simple fact, what you call the suffrage of antiquity did adjudge the first prize, above Aristophanes’ best?”
But of course he is equally right to this extent, that the fire consumed a vast deal of rubbish: solid tons more than any man could swallow—let be, digest—“read, mark, learn and inwardly digest.” And that was in AD 642, whereas we have arrived at 1916. Where would our voracious Alexandrian be today, with all the literature of the Middle Ages added to his feast and on top of that all the printed books of 450 years? “Reading,” says Bacon, “maketh a Full Man.” Yes, indeed!
Now I am glad that sentence of Bacon falls pat here, because it gives me, turning to his famous Essay “Of Studies,” the reinforcement of his great name for the very argument which I am directing against the fallacy of those teachers who would have you use “manuals” as anything else than guides to your own reading or perspectives in which the authors are set out in the comparative eminence by which they claim priority of study or indicate the proportions of a literary period. Some of these manuals are written by men of knowledge so encyclopaedic that (if it go with critical judgment) for these purposes they may be trusted. But to require you, at your stage of reading, to have even the minor names by heart is a perversity of folly. For later studies it seems to me a more pardonable mistake, but yet a mistake, to hope that by the employ of separate specialists you can get even in fifteen or twenty volumes a perspective, a proportionate description, of what English Literature really is. But worst of all is that Examiner, who—aware that you must please him, to get a good degree, and being just as straight and industrious as anyone else—assumes that in two years you have become expert in knowledge that beats a lifetime, and, brought up against the practical impossibility of this assumption, questions you—not on a little selected firsthand knowledge—but on massed information which at the best can be but derivative and secondhand.
Now hear Bacon.
Studies serve for Delight—
(Mark it—he puts delight first)
Studies serve for Delight, for Ornament, and for Ability. Their Chiefe use for Delight, is in Privatenesse and Retiring;2 for Ornament, is in Discourse; and for Ability, is in the Judgement and Disposition of Businesse. … To spend too much Time in Studies is Sloth; to use them too much for Ornament is Affectation; to make judgement wholly by their Rules is the Humour of a Scholler. They perfect Nature, and are perfected by Experience: for Naturall Abilities are like Naturall Plants, they need Proyning by Study. And Studies themselves doe give forth Directions too much at Large, unless they be bounded in by experience.
Again, he says:
Some Bookes are to be Tasted, Others to be Swallowed, and Some Few to be Chewed and Digested: that is, some Bookes are to be read onely in Parts; Others to be read but not Curiously; and
