SOME MORE TESTIMONY.

A writer in a recent Saturday Review on "Old Writers and Modern Readers," discourses at length in the indolence of modern readers and the dying out of the old classics in English literature in consequence of this indolence. In this connection the examination system of the present day comes up. "Among all the evils that follow in the train of a regular system of examinations," says the writer, "we know of none greater than a certain habit of indolence which it forms in the mind. It encourages a student-nay, even in the press of competition it almost forces him-to accept his judgments ready-made. He wants to know what others say of a writer, not what the writer himself says. He has no time to take a book home, as it were, and make it part of himself. He never 'travels over the mind' of a great author till he becomes as familiar with its beauties and its nooks, its heights, its levels, and its denths, as a Cumberland shepherd with the mountains and valleys round about his home. He never looks upon his books as his friends. It is to his head, and not to his heart, that he wishes to take them; and he only cares to keep them there till they have served their purpose at the next examination. How different was the way in which Macaulay and his sister read! ' When they were discoursing together,' says Mr. Trevelyan, 'about a work of history or biography, a by-stander would have supposed that they had lived in the times of which the author treated, and had a personal acquaintance with every human being who was mentioned in his pages.' "