The resignation of Sir Francis C. Burnand, for twenty-five years editor of London Punch, reminds one how little it has been subject to the vicissitudes of journalism. As if by fore-ordination, the admirable parodist, Owen Seaman, takes the head of the historic table, and Punch will, if anything, be more Punch than ever. Others may change, but Punch retains a kind of Olympian uniformity. From its first number, sixty-five years ago, to the last, its outward appearance and inward savor are practically identical. England has been in conspiracy to provide it with talent.

During the editor's term of office the paper lost such artists as Charles Keene, Du Maurier, and Sir John Tenniel; but it also saw the rise of Mr. Linley Sambourne's forceful caricature, of Mr. Raven-Hill's delightful rusticities, of the nervous and most expressive art of the lamented Phil May. In fact, barring an inclination to overindulgence in rather trite doggerel, Punch's jorum has rarely been more tasty than in the past quarter century. Its only serious rival in the comic field has been Fliegende Blätter.

There is, of course, the prevailing American view that Punch is dull. Dull it is, in the sense that the best fun of the most jocose family may be merely tantalizing to the outsider. A nudge to the initiated may be sufficient to recall jokes proved by a thousand laughs; the uninitiated needs a clue. Now, Punch's family is London—a family whose acquaintance is tolerably worth while—and probably no one who has not imaginatively made himself familiar with the mood of London has any business with Punch at all. It is the homesickness for London that extends the subscription list to the bounds of the empire; it is the desire to know what London thinks of itself, of the provinces, of the world, that makes readers for Punch in every land. It represents London in the mood of intellectual dalliance as thoroughly as Fliegende Blätter does non-Prussian Germany. This representative quality gives to these two comic papers something of the solemnity of institutions.

Yellow journalism has its faults, but it was the first to shake the newspapers out of the old rut and give them new vigor. Before the advent of this class of journals there was no organ among the conservative press to speak down to the people. It was the consequence of a growing democracy and had for its purpose the establishment of a press wherein the laboring classes would have expression.

The object of reading is not to dip into everything that even wise men have ever written. In the words of one of the most winning writers of English that ever existed—Cardinal Newman—the object of literature in education is to open the mind, to correct it, to refine it, to enable it to comprehend and digest its knowledge, to give it power over its own faculties, application, flexibility, method, critical exactness, sagacity, address, and expression.

Literature consists of all the books—and they are not so many—where moral truth and human passion are touched with a certain largeness, sanity, and attraction of form. Poets, dramatists, humorists, satirists, masters of fiction, the great preachers, the character-writers, the maxim-writers, the great political orators—they are all literature in so far as they teach us to know man and to know human nature.

What I venture to press upon you is that it requires no preterhuman force of will in any young man or woman—unless household circumstances are more than usually vexatious and unfavorable—to get at least half an hour out of a solid busy day for good and disinterested reading. Some will say that this is too much to expect, and the first persons to say it, I venture to predict, will be those who waste their time most. At any rate, if I cannot get half an hour, I will be content with a quarter.

Multiply the half-hour by three hundred and sixty-five, and consider what treasures you might have laid by at the end of the year, and what happiness, fortitude, and wisdom they would have given you during all the days of your life.

You may have often heard from others, or may have found out, how good it is to have on your shelves, however scantily furnished they may be, three or four of those books to which it is well to give ten minutes every morning, before going down into the battle and choking dust of the day. Perhaps it matters little what it may be so long as your writer has cheerful seriousness, elevation, calm, and, above all, a sense of size and strength, which shall open out the day before you, and bestow gifts of fortitude and mastery.

If a man is despondent about his work, the best remedy that I can prescribe to him is to turn to a good biography; there he will find that other men before him have known the dreary reaction that follows long-sustained effort, and he will find that one of the differences between the first-rate man and the fifth-rate lies in the vigor with which the first-rate man recovers from this reaction, and crushes it down, and again flings himself once more upon the breach.

A taste for poetry is not given to everybody, but anybody who does not enjoy poetry, who is not refreshed, exhilarated, stirred by it, leads but a mutilated existence. I would advise that in looking for poets—of course after Shakespeare—you should follow the rule of allowing preferences, but no exclusion.

Various mechanical contrivances and aids to successful study are not to be despised by those who would extract the most from books. The wise student will do most of his reading with a pen or pencil in his hand. He will not shrink from the useful toil of making abstracts and summaries of what he is reading.

Again, some great men—Gibbon was one, and Daniel Webster was another, and the great Lord Stafford was a third—always before reading a book made a short, rough analysis of the questions which they expected to be answered in it, the additions to be made to their knowledge, and whither it would take them.

Another practise is that of keeping a commonplace book, and transcribing into it what is