ure or science is the business as well as the pleasure
of life. I have not the qualifications which would enable me to
undertake such a task with the smallest hope of success. My theme is
humble, though the audience to whom I desire to speak is large: for I
speak to the ordinary reader with ordinary capacities and ordinary
leisure, to whom reading is, or ought to be, not a business but a
pleasure; and my theme is the enjoyment--not, mark you, the improvement,
nor the glory, nor the profit, but the _enjoyment_--which may be derived
by such an one from books.

It is perhaps due to the controversial habits engendered by my
unfortunate profession, that I find no easier method of making my own
view clear than that of contrasting with it what I regard as an
erroneous view held by somebody else; and in the present case the
doctrine which I shall choose as a foil to my own, is one which has been
stated with the utmost force and directness by that brilliant and
distinguished writer, Mr. Frederic Harrison. He has, as many of you
know, recently given us, in a series of excellent essays, his opinion on
the principles which should guide us in the choice of books. Against
that part of his treatise which is occupied with specific
recommendations of certain authors I have not a word to say. He has
resisted all the temptations to eccentricity which so easily beset the
modern critic. Every book which he praises deserves his praise, and has
long been praised by the world at large. I do not, indeed, hold that the
verdict of the world is necessarily binding on the individual
conscience. I admit to the full that there is an enormous quantity of
hollow devotion, of withered orthodoxy divorced from living faith, in
the eternal chorus of praise which goes up from every literary altar to
the memory of the immortal dead. Nevertheless every critic is bound to
recognize, as Mr. Harrison recognizes, that he must put down to
individual peculiarity any difference he may have with the general
verdict of the ages; he must feel that mankind are not likely to be in a
conspiracy of error as to the kind of literary work which conveys to
them the highest literary enjoyment, and that in such cases at least
_securus judicat orbis terrarum_.

But it is quite possible to hold that any work recommended by Mr.
Harrison is worth repeated reading, and yet to reject utterly the theory
of study by which these recommendations are prefaced. For Mr. Harrison
is a ruthl