o exercise that useful art with the quotations from the Latin with which Montaigne, following the fashion of his day, plentifully peppered his essays; and it would be an assiduous reader indeed who could read in full the last few chapters of The Brothers Karamazov. I know that I found myself content to glance at rather than peruse the speeches which Dostoevsky put into the mouths of counsel at the trial. I think all the books I have mentioned are important enough to be read thoroughly, but even they are more enjoyable if you exercise your right to skip. Change of taste has rendered certain parts of even great works tedious. We no longer want to be bothered with the moral dissertations7 of which the eighteenth century was so fond, nor with the lengthy descriptions of scenery which were favored in the nineteenth. When the novel became realistic authors fell in love with detail for its own sake, and it took them a long time to discover that detail is interesting only if it is relevant. To know how to skip it to know how to read with profit and pleasure, but how you are to learn it I cannot tell you, for it is a trick I have never acquired. I am a bad skipper; I am afraid of missing something that may be of value to me, and so will read pages that only weary me; when once I begin to skip, I cannot stop, and end the book dissatisfied with myself because I am aware I have not done it justice, and then I am apt to think that I might just as well, never have read it at all.