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The excerpt represents the core issue or deciding factor on which you must meditate, and is drawn from Scaramouche by Rafael Sabatini: Rousseau. To M. des Amis, whose swordsmanship was all based on
practice and not at all on theory, who was indeed no theorist or
student in any sense, that little library was merely a suitable
adjunct to a fencing-academy, a proper piece of decorative furniture.
The books themselves meant nothing to him in any other sense. He
had not the type of mind that could have read them with profit nor
could be understand that another should do so. Andre-Louis, on the
contrary, a man with the habit of study, with the acquired faculty
of learning from books, read those works with enormous profit, kept
their precepts in mind, critically set off those of one master
against those of another, and made for himself a choice which he
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