by finding
the least important book of a well-known author--as for example
Rousseau's _Poland_ instead of the _Confessions_ and Coleridge's _Aids to
Reflection_ instead of the _Poems_ or the _Biographia Literaria_. Think
of an historian whose ideal of historical work was so high that he
despised all who worked only from printed documents, selecting the
_Memorial of St. Helena_ of Las Casas in preference not only to a hundred-
and-one similar compilations concerning Napoleon's exile, but in
preference to Thucydides, Herodotus and Gibbon.

Sometimes Lord Acton names a theologian who is absolutely out-of-date, at
others a philosopher who is in the same case. But on the whole it is a
fascinating list as an index to what a well-trained mind thought the
noblest mental equipment for life's work. At the best, it is true, it
would represent but one half of life. But then Lord Acton recognized
this when he asked that men should be "steeled against the charm of
literary beauty and talent," and he was assuming in any case that all the
books in aesthetic literature, the best poetry and the best history had
already been read, as he undoubtedly had read them.

"The charm of literary beauty and talent!" There is the whole question.
Nothing really matters for the average man, so far as books are
concerned, but this charm, and I am criticizing Lord Acton's list for the
average man. The student who has got beyond it need not worry himself
about classified lists. He may read his Plato, and Aristotle, his Pascal
and Newman, his Christian apologists and German theologians, as he wills;
or he may read in some other quite different direction. Guidance is
impossible to a mind at such a stage of cultivation as Lord Acton had in
view.

Only minds at a more primitive stage of culture than this most learned
and most accomplished man seemed able to conceive of, could be bettered
by advice as to reading. Given, indeed, contact with some superior mind,
which out of its rich equipment of culture should advise as to the books
that might be most profitably read, I could imagine advice being helpful.
It would be of no value, it is true, to an untutored savage or illiterate
peasant, but to a youth fresh from school-books and much modern fiction,
to a young girl about to enter upon life in its more serious aspects, it
would be immensely serviceable. It was of such as these that Mr. Ruskin
thought when he wrote of "King's Treasures" in _Sesame an