Green-Mountain freeman. [volume] (Montpelier, Vt.) 1844-1884, 1878-05-01

READING BY COURSE AND BY Topic
| In the ignorance and enthusiasm of girl
! hood, | asked a" bookish " elderly clergy
man for Il " course of reading He very
Willingly handed me list of books cover
| ing sheet Of commercial note paper,
made up largely Of suchworks as Rollins
Ancient History" Grote's Greece"
| Gibbon Decline and Fall and Buck
les :" History OF Civilization" and Whate-
! ly's Evidences " and Butler " Analo-
gy" for a diversion. With commend
! able desire TO be thorough, and TO begin
al the beginning, attacked Rolin. On
account OF some trouble with nv ewes, half
read. By chance l happened to mention
what was doing to an enterprising sopho-
more Of my acquaintance. who asked mer-
rily;
How long do you suppose it will take
you 10 read Rollin, in half-hour INSTALL
mens?"
am sure l can't tell" l answered.
! Well, somewhere between ten and fif-
teen years" he replied; " and You may ex-
pect TO finish Your list some time in the
next century" The very thought so fright
ened me that | never opened the book
again, not even TO count the pages to see
! if he was right.
But this is reading by course, and not by
topics. A friend Of mine tried 10 read
Macaulay's '' History of England" with.
out much knowledge of the detail of Eng
/ lish history. She found so much of which
she knew nothing taken for granted as
familiar, that she grew quite discouraged,
and gave it up. One day she saw the
Students Hume Here was the very
book she wanted. and taking that and the
" Students France for basis, she con.
structed course Of reading TO meet her
own necessities She began with the Nor
man conquest, for she had no interest in
| the endles squabbles of the SaXons and
| Danes. (Some time afterward. however,
when she WAS tracing the rise of the Euro
! pean nations, she was glad to read this
earlier history.) She read first the story
of the reign of an English king, then that
of the contemporary French sovereign, at
the same time weaving in a woof of poet
ry. romance and biography. Bulwer's
" Harold - made the times of the Nor
man conquest vivid and real; ;" Ivanhoe,"
KeniIworth.1 and Shakspeare's Hen
ries, filled out the pictures of the days of
! VIC L
Abbott and Woodstock gave her
the local coloring' of the times OF Mary,
| Queen Of Scots. and Cromwell. She ran
over some of the Erckmann- Chatrian tales
and Dickens's " Tale of Two Cities" for a
more vivid idea of the awful days OF the
French Revolution. The gossipy" Queens
of England "(abridgetl " edition. showed
her how the royal wives and mothers felt
and acted, and Victor Hugo, in Les
| Miserables, furnished Il thrilling des-
cription of the battle of Waterloo. 1n
this manner, with n poem here, novel
or biography there, she made up a glow
ing mosaic of the most important events
in the history of the two countries nearest
allied TO our own, and with none of the
tedium which belongs to the popular idea
of reading history, and was thus prepared
to enjoy Macaulay. Theirs, or Carlyle.
How much more satisfactory her two or
three years work than If. like a hummng
bird, she had slipped "a little here. and II
little there, and alighted nowhere. Green's
" Short History of the English People -
! (the revised edition) is even better than
the Students Hume for the frame
work of such n course of reading. and
Yonge's " PARALLEL History of France and
England" has the important events ar
ranged in tables, in such way as 10 ena-
BILE the eye 10 assist the memory" Mary
Bake" in Scribner for April.