The College Conference Meeting Last Evening.

Prof. Norton had an audience last evening which filled the standing room in Sever 11.

His subject, he began by saying, was best stated as "realing in college." Though this simple knowledge how to read gives to man, whatever his other acquirements, the solid basis for an education, yet the library-the greater opportunity here-is neither fully nor wisely used. Before men have learned to choose, they are injured by the tremendous mass offered to them, much of which is trivial, much enervating, much even bad. For reading, like the choice of friends, is serious; no gentleman can spend time upon low-minded books. And the time spent merely upon what is trivial is a real loss. It keeps men from acquiring a taste for the best.

A great many lists have been recently published of the "hundred best books." The lists are often entertaining, but not valuable. For no hundred best books can be picked out. Eight, or six, or four,- the books that every cultured man must know, are easily selected. They cannot be read for mere amusement; rather for delight, a delight that grows steadily with time and study. Beyond these very few, every man, according to his associations and individual taste, will fill out a different hundred. For instance,- Prof. Norton said,- a gentleman in England of the richest acquirements and the ripest and widest culture had recently sent to him his own "hundred best." Twenty, Prof. Norton had never heard of; he had never opened but twenty nor read largely except in seven of the hundred. This was a signify ant fact.

Each body, then, must make out his own list as he goes. But at the outset, a man may safely take those which the whole world has decisively stamped as the best. These would be Homer, Virgil, aeschylus, and Sophocles and. beyond all doubt, Aristophanes; Lucre tires, and Plato. In the middle ages, the Divine Comedy which has most perfectly expressed their thought and their emotions; the prelude to this, Dante's Vita Nuova; the Life of St. Louis, by Joinville, the Romance of the Cid, and the Arthurian Romances. In later times the number of names really great is considerable. One might give Chaucer, the freshest and most springlike of all poets; Spenser (though with a certain hesitation). and Milton,- a little, for his real greatness was style rather than matter. Among the moderns, man a should select to begin with who ever most appeals to him, provided he choose a great author and not a coarse one. It is bad to get into literature by the back door,- as witness the obscenity of the minor Elizabethan drama.

There is no harm in not reading very many books. A great many, as Lord Bacon said, may be read by deputy. And the valuable deputy for French is St. Beuve, the purest critic who ever wrote.

It is not necessary to go behind and say much in general about the value of books. Through them we learn man, the chief interest to all mankind.