at one. If I had to help a crude but willing taste, I would handle its
reading as follows:--

FIRST PERIOD

Reading made up exclusively of recent novels, good, well-written,
thoughtful novels, not too startling in form or contents. I would begin
on novels because anybody can read a novel, and because the first
cleansing operation is to induce the subject to read good novels instead
of bad ones. Here is a preliminary list:--

_Tony-Bungay_ (Wells)
_Kipps_ (Wells)
_The Custom of the Country_ (Wharton)
_The Old Wives' Tale_ (Bennett)
_The Man of Property_ (Galsworthy)
_Jude the Obscure_ (Hardy)
_Tess of the D'Urbervilles_ (Hardy)
_Sussex Gorse_ (Kaye-Smith)

and say twenty or thirty more of this type, all published in the last
dozen years. It is, of course, assumed that interest would be
maintained by conversation.

SECOND PERIOD

After the subject (victim, if you like) had read say thirty of the best
solid novels of the twentieth century, I think I should draw him to the
more abstruse modern novels and stories. In the first period he would
come in contact with a general criticism of life. In the second period
he would read novels of a more iconoclastic and constructive kind, such
as:--

_The Island Pharisees_ (Galsworthy)
_The New Machiavelli_ (Wells)
_Sinister Street_ (Mackenzie)
_The Celestial Omnibus_ (Forster)
_The Longest Journey_ (Forster)
_Sons and Lovers_ (Lawrence)
_The White Peacock_ (Lawrence)
_Ethan Frome_ (Wharton)
_Round the Corner_ (Cannan)

Briefly, the more ambitious kind of novel, say thirty or forty
altogether. At that time, I should induce the subject to browse
occasionally in the _Oxford Book of English Verse_.

THIRD PERIOD

Now only would I come to the older novels, because, by then, the mind
should be supple enough to stand their congestion of detail, their
tendency to caricature, their stilted phrasing, and yet recognise their
qualities. Here are some:--

_The Rise of Silas Lapham_ (Howells)
_Vanity Fair_ (Thackeray)
_The Vicar of Wakefield_ (Goldsmith)
_The Way of All Flesh_ (Butler)
_Quentin Durward_ (Scott)
_Guy Mannering_ (Scott)

Briefly, the bulk of the works of Thackeray, Jane Austen, Charlotte
Bronte, and George Eliot. 'Barry Lyndon' twice, and Trollope never.
Here, at last, the solid curriculum, but only, you will observe, when a
little of the mud of the magazines had been cleaned off. Rather more
verse too, beg