ou, whose interest
in literature has ever kept pace with the time, to whom no new thing is
unwelcome if only it is good, are safe from her accusations; but how
many authors have deserved them! Miss Mitford is speaking of a certain
writer who is at the same time a clergyman, and whom it is not
difficult to recognize.

"I never," she says, "saw him interested in the slightest degree by the
work of any other author, except, indeed, one of his own followers or of
his own clique, and then only as admiring or helping him. He has great
kindness and great sympathy with working people, or with a dying friend,
but I profess to you I am amazed at the utter selfishness of authors. I
do not know one single poet who cares for any man's poetry but his own.
In general they read no books except such as may be necessary to their
own writings--that is to the work they happen to be about, and even then
I suspect that they only read the bits that they may immediately want.
You know the absolute ignorance in which Wordsworth lived of all modern
works; and if, out of compliment to a visitor, he thought it needful to
seem to read or listen to two or three stanzas, he gave unhesitating
praise to the writer himself, but took especial care not to repeat the
praise where it might have done him good--utterly fair and false."

There are touches of this spirit of indifference to contemporary
literature in several writers and scholars whom we know. There are
distinct traces of it even in published writings, though it is much more
evident in private life and habit. Emerson seriously suggests that "the
human mind would perhaps be a gainer if all the secondary writers were
lost--say, in England, all but Shakespeare, Milton, and Bacon, through
the profounder study so drawn to those wonderful minds." In the same
spirit we have Emerson's laconic rule, "Never read any but famed books,"
which suggests the remark that if men had obeyed this rule from the
beginning, no book could ever have acquired reputation, and nobody would
ever have read anything. The idea of limiting English literature to a
holy trinity of Shakespeare, Milton, and Bacon, and voluntarily losing
all other authors, seems to me the most intense expression of the spirit
of aristocracy in reading. It is as if a man were to decide in his own
mind that society would be the better if all persons except the three
Emperors were excluded from it. There is a want of reliance upon one's
own judgment, a