RULES FOR READERS.

Dominion, Volume 3, Issue 852, 25 June 1910, Page 9

RULES FOR READERS.

One'of the "Westminster Gazette's" recent competitions required "Twelve Rules for Readers." This ingenious collection won the prize:—

1. Never read poetry. Seo Plato passim; and, as a modern says, "la poesie de nos jours n'est quo luxe et ornement."

■ 2. Never read history. ■ Bossuet, a historian, says, "les histoires sont composees pour les princes souls."

3. Never read romances —"froides et dangereuses fictions." Bossuet again.

4. Never read philosophy. It was a philosopher who spoke of "cette chieiine de philosophic—sonvent battue et jamais defaitc."

5. Never read plays. Moliero himself says "il.no faut les voir qu'a la chandelle.": •

6. Never read essays—"ouvrages dans lcsquels on ne dit jamais le dernier mot."

7. Never read sermons. Thackeray says grandiloquence is "the sin of schoolmasters, governesses, sermoners."

8. Never read anecdotes. . You remember what De Quincey says about "anccdotage"?

9. Never read criticism. "The men who have failed in art and-lit«raturc," as Disraeli says. 10. Never . read travels, lest,' like Donne, you "had rather believo a traveller's lie than go to disprovo liinj." 11. Never read biography. Fuller (himself the author of "The Worthies' of England") says "biographists betray their pens to such abominable uiir truths." 12. Never read anything. "Is thero anything whereof it may be said, 'See, tins'is new'?" NOTES. As a new Academy of Literature is proposed, Mr. Clement Shorter, in the "Sphere," suggests this list of forty worthy of immortality Mr. Thomas Hardy, Mr. Edmund Gosse, Mr. Robert Bridges, Professor Bury, Lord Morloy, Mr. Frederic Harrison, Mr. J. M. Barrie, Mr. William Archer, Mr. Augustine Birrell, Mr. James Bryoo, Mr. Sidney Colvin, Mr. Austin Dobson, Professor Dowden, Mr. Anthony Hope, Sir W. R. Nicoll, Mr. Edward Clodd, Mr. J. G. Frazer, Mr. Rudyard Kipling, Mr. Bernard Shaw, Mr. Stopford Brooke, Mr. Andrew Lang, Mr. Joseph Conrad, Mr. W. L. Courtney, Dr. Gasquefc, Dr. Douglas Hyde, Mr. C. H. Firth, Mr. Sidney Lee, Mr. H. W. Massinghaniy Mr. A. T. Quiller-Couch, Mr. George Saintsbury, Sir George Trevelyan, Mr. A. W. Ward, Mr. W. B. Yeats, Mr. Owen Seaman, Mr. E. V. Lucas, Mr. Henry James, Mr. Herbert A. L. Fisher, Mr. T. Sturge-Mooro, Mr. Walter Raleigh, and.Mr. Theodore Watts-Dunton. Mr. Thomas Hardy, in the "English Review," has somo verses on Swinburne, entitled "A Singer Asleep." Hero, are two verses:— • /'ln this fair nicho above the unslumbering sea, Tliat gentries up and down all night, all day, , Prom' cove to promontory, from ness to bay. Tho Pates have fitly bidden that lie should be Pillowed eternally. "So hero, beneath the waking constellations, Where the waves peal their everlasting strains, . And their dull subterrene reverberations Shake him when storms mako mountains of their plains— Him once their peer in sad improvisations, ! And deft as ivind. to cleave their frothy ■ inanes— I leavo him, while the daylight gleam declines Upon' the capes and chines."