READ, READ, READ!

By TIME

"Read, Read, Read!"

"I have the greatest contempt for the way they teach at Oxford. The only things of any value there are the games that are played. The modern young man has no mental discipline. He thinks he can learn all about everything from casual conversation instead of from books. That is impossible. My advice to him is to read, read, read."

That word "contempt" is one that gives a maximum of satisfaction when spat out by old British lips and it usually exaggerates the feeling of the speaker. But there was little exaggeration in this case for the speaker was old Sir Edmund Gosse, poet and critic, onetime (1904-14) Librarian to the House of Lords, who at 76 styles himself "the last of the Pre-Raphaelites".

It was last week, when Sir Edmund was being congratulated and interviewed upon his golden wedding anniversary. An Oxonian newspaper reporter had shown ignorance of those same Pre-Raphaelites and of how he, Edmund Gosse, son of a penurious naturalist, had been "privately educated in Devonshire", had slaved over solemn religious tomes in his invalid mother's library, tutoring himself afterwards by. night when he was a young curator at the British Museum, until his scholarship and verses won him the friendship of Poets Swinburne and Rossetti, the comradeship of Robert Louis Stevenson, the hand of Painter Alma-Tadema's sister-in-law. Preposterous ignorance. And the old gentleman, who 30 years ago wrote sadly of his desuetude, continued: "He (the modern young man) is always playing games or motoring or dancing and gives no time to serious study. I was able to do so when I was a boy, so why not he?"