Excerpt from The Study of English: Literature an Address to Young Men and Women With so much by way of general introduction, let me try, taking a few suggestions out of the mass, to point out some of the ways in which the love of literature may be of service to us in enlarging, sweetening, and beautifying life. We will first revert to a point already touched upon. On practical grounds it is, as I have said, often urged, and even more frequently felt, that to cultivate a taste for books which do not contain useful knowledge is mere waste of time. They will not help us to gain a living; they will not make us more successful in business; they have no direct bearings on practical affairs; can we afford, therefore, to spend our energies upon them when there is so much that we must learn if we are to keep step with the rapid march of civilization? The spirit which dictates such an argument as this is not simply the spirit of the active man of the world, who estimates everything by its money-getting power: it is the spirit also of many modern leaders in education, who are coming more and more to insist that there is but one standard of educa tional values, the direct utility of knowledge in the busi ness of life. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.