dis" we sound the sea-floor of a quite open secret; the
secret namely of the invincible attraction of a certain type of artist
and sensualist towards the "white Christ" who came forth from the tomb
where he had been laid, with precious ointments about him, by the
Arimathaean.

In "The Soul of Man" another symbolic reversion displays itself--that
reversion namely of the soul of the true artist towards the
revolutionary organization which, along with insensitiveness and
brutality, proposes to abolish ugliness also.

The name of Oscar Wilde thus becomes a name "to conjure with" and a
fantastic beacon-fire to which those "oppressed and humiliated" may
repair and take new heart.

90. RUDYARD KIPLING. THE JUNGLE BOOK.

Whatever one may feel about Mr. Kipling's other work, about his
rampagious imperialism, his self-conscious swashbucklerism, his
pipe-clay and his journalism, his moralistic breeziness and his
patronage of the "white man's burden," one cannot help admitting that
the Jungle-Book is one of the immortal children's tales of the world.

In spite of the somewhat priggish introduction, even here, of what
might be called his Anglo-Saxon propaganda, the Jungle-Book carries
one further, it almost seems, and more convincingly, into the very
heart and inwards of beast-life and wood-magic, than any other work
ever written. The figures of these animals are quite Biblical in their
emphatic picturesqueness, and never has the romance of these spotted
and striped aboriginals, in their primordial struggles for food and
water, been more thrillingly conveyed. Every scene, every situation,
brands itself upon the memory as perhaps nothing else in literature
does except the stories in the Old Testament. The best of all
children's books--"Grimm's Fairy Tales" itself--takes no deeper hold
upon the youthful mind. Mr. Kipling's genius which in his other work
is constantly "dropping bricks" as the expressive phrase has it, and
running amuck through strenuous banalities, rises in the Jungle-Book
to heights of poetic and imaginative suggestion which will give him an
undying position among the great writers of our race.

91. CHARLES L. DODGSON. ALICE IN WONDERLAND. _The edition with the
original illustrations_.

It would be ridiculous to compile a list of a hundred best books and
leave out this one. Lack of space alone prevents us from including
"Through the Looking Glass" too.

"Alice" is after all as much of a classic now a