to read whatever their mind guided them to, but I do not believe that to be a wholesome case at all. The number of books has increased so enormously, the titles, if I may say so, are sometimes so misleading, that a student who is thrown into a library under unrestricted conditions is apt to be very much like that confectioner's apprentice-I do not know whether he really exists or whether he is legendary—who on his first employment in a confectioner's shop is always allowed to eat as much as he chooses, in the sure confidence of his master that he will eat so much, and procure for himself so disagreeable an illness, that he will never wish to partake again. Well, I think that is the danger of the student who wanders into these libraries without any guide whatever to help him.

That brings me to my last point. I think every free public library requires a taster in the shape of a librarian—that is to say, a man who not only knows the outsides and the titles of books, but a man who knows the insides. They require a taster to guide the student as to what he wants. I do not know whether

you have a taster in your librarian to-day, because I have only just made his acquaintance, but I do not doubt that you have. But it is a real and inestimable faculty. I believe that a tea-taster-a man who is endowed with the peculiar faculty of tasting tea and discriminating between the coarser and the finer kinds of tea-has a fortune in his palate; I believe that a man who can discriminate between the various kinds of silk by touch has a fortune in his fingers; but I am sure that neither of these is so valuable to the intellectual life of the nation as the taster who will guide the student to the books the student

wants.

PARLIAMENTARY ORATORY

It is a favourite plan of Lord Rosebery's to say what he has to say after a lecture and not before it, and this address on "Oratory" was his contribution from the chair after Mr. Herbert Paul had given a lecture on the subject at Edinburgh on November 26th, 1896. The lecture was one of a series organised by the Edinburgh United Liberal Committee, but the occasion, if political, was so in form only.