Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: III. ON BOOKS.1 I ASKED your President2 whether he would rather that I spoke this evening of Books, or of Newspapers. He chose, wisely I doubt not, the subject of Books. I do not wish to compare these kinds of composition. I am not anxious to ascertain, nor should I be able to ascertain, whether the octavo and quarto, or the flying sheet, exercise most power over our age, or which exercises it best. Such an inquiry would take me more than a night, or a week, or a year; perhaps the result, when we arrived at it, would not be worth much. There is another comparison, which seems to me far more important. Books and newspapers both exist for the sake of men. There were men before there were either books or newspapers, and if books or newspapers are ever put in the place of men, if we think more of them than of men, they will be curses to us instead of blessings. Whenever books have 1 Delivered to the Leicester Literary and Philosophical Society. Nov. 1865. 2 The Rev. D. Vaughan, of Leicester. crushed the manhood of men, they have been taken from men. The earth has had to forget its books, that it might recover its men. When it has recovered them, they have produced books, which did not crush manhood, but called it forth, which showed what men had been, and might be. I propose to gather together a few examples, from different parts of history, which may illustrate this remark. If they strike you as very familiar examples, if you think I am telling you a very old tale, I shall not be sorry. My business is not with new things. But I believe old facts may always be fresh, and may give out a fresh meaning, for each new generation. I shall take you first to Egypt. You have all heard of the great Library which was once collected in the city of Alexandria. It was not gathe...