he world a respectable body of literature
which is not the work of literary men. Its chief characteristic is
sincerity. The writers of these books are so busy in telling the truth
that they have no time to think of literature.

Among the more readable of these pieces is that unpretentious volume
in which Dr. Joseph Priestley relates the story of his life. For in
classing this book with the writings of authors who are not men of
letters one surely does not go wide of the mark. There is a sense in
which it is entirely proper to say that Priestley was not a literary
man. He produced twenty-five volumes of 'works,' but they were for use
rather than for art. He wrote on science, on grammar, on theology, on
law. He published controversial tracts: 'Did So-and-So believe
so-and-so or something quite different?' and then a discussion of the
'grounds' of this belief. He made 'rejoinders,' 'defenses,'
'animadversions,' and printed the details of his _Experiments on
Different Kinds of Air_. This is distinctly uninviting. Let me propose
an off-hand test by which to determine whether or no a given book is
literature. _Can you imagine Charles Lamb in the act of reading that
book?_ If you can; it's literature; if you can't, it isn't. I find it
difficult to conceive of Charles Lamb as mentally immersed in the
_Letter to an Anti-paedobaptist_ or the _Doctrine of Phlogiston
Established_, but it is natural to think of him turning the pages of
Priestley's Memoir, reading each page with honest satisfaction and
pronouncing the volume to be worthy the title of A BOOK.

It is a plain unvarnished tale and entirely innocent of those arts by
the practice of which authors please their public. There is no
eloquence, no rhetoric, no fine writing of any sort. The two or three
really dramatic events in Priestley's career are not handled with a
view to producing dramatic effect. There are places where the author
might easily have become impassioned. But he did not become
impassioned. Not a few paragraphs contain unwritten poems. The
simple-hearted Priestley was unconscious of this, or if conscious,
then too modest to make capital of it. He had never aspired to the
reputation of a clever writer, but rather of a useful one. His aim was
quite as simple when he wrote the Memoir as when he wrote his various
philosophical reports. He never deviated into brilliancy. He set down
plain statements about events which had happened to him, and people
whom he had k