he reads will find its way
to its proper place. If his intellect is in good order, he will find
in every quarter something to assimilate and something that will
nourish.

Next I am going to deal with another question, with which perhaps I
ought to have started. What is literature? It has often been defined.
Emerson says it is a record of the best thoughts. "By literature,"
says another author, "we mean the written thoughts and feelings of
intelligent men and women arranged in a way that shall give pleasure
to the reader." A third account is that "the aim of a student of
literature is to know the best that has been thought in the world."
Definitions always appear to me in these things to be in the nature
of vanity. I feel that the attempt to be compact in the definition of
literature ends in something that is rather meagre, partial, starved,
and unsatisfactory. I turn to the answer given by a great French
writer to a question not quite the same, viz. "What is a classic?"
Literature consists of a whole body of classics in the true sense of
the word, and a classic, as Sainte-Beuve defines him, is an "author
who has enriched the human mind, who has really added to its treasure,
who has got it to take a step further; who has discovered some
unequivocal moral truth, or penetrated to some eternal passion,
in that heart of man where it seemed as though all were known and
explored, who has produced his thought, or his observation, or his
invention under some form, no matter what, so it be great, large,
acute, and reasonable, sane and beautiful in itself; who has spoken to
all in a style of his own, yet a style which finds itself the style
of everybody,--in a style that Is at once new and antique, and is the
contemporary of all the ages." Another Frenchman, Doudan, who died in
1872, has an excellent passage on the same subject:--

"The man of letters properly so called is a rather singular being:
he does not look at things exactly with his own eyes, he has not
impressions of his own, we could not discover the imagination with
which he started. 'Tis a tree on which have been grafted Homer,
Virgil, Milton, Dante, Petrarch; hence have grown peculiar flowers
which are not natural, and yet which are not artificial. Study has
given to the man of letters something of the reverie of Rene; with
Homer he has looked upon the plain of Troy, and there has remained
in his brain some of the light of the Gre