different list--the curious way certain books and writers have of
hanging inevitably together, and necessarily implying one another.

Thus it appears that the type of mind--it would be presumptuous to
call it the best type of mind--which prefers Euripides to Sophocles,
and Heine to Schiller, prefers also Emily Brontë to Charlotte Brontë,
and Oliver Onions to Compton Mackenzie. Given the mind that in
compiling such a list would at once drag in The Odyssey and The
Psalms, and run hastily on to Sir Thomas Browne and Charles Lamb, we
are instinctively conscious that when it reaches, with its arbitrary
divining rod, our own unlucky age, it will skip quite lightly over
Thackeray; wave an ambiguous hand in the direction of Meredith, and
sit solemnly down to make elaborate mention of all the published works
of Walter Pater, Thomas Hardy and Mr. Henry James.

It seems to me that nothing is more necessary, in regard to the advice
to be given to young and ardent people, in the matter of their
reading, than some sort of communication of the idea--and it is not an
easy idea to convey--that there is in this affair a subtle fusion
desirable between one's natural indestructible prejudices, and a
certain high authoritative standard; a standard which we may name, for
want of a better word, "classical taste," and which itself is the
resultant amalgam of all the finest personal reactions of all the
finest critical senses, winnowed out, as it were, and austerely
purged, by the washing of the waves of time. It will be found, as a
matter of fact, that this latter element in the motives of our choice
works as a rule negatively rather than positively, while the positive
and active force in our appreciations remains, as it ought to remain,
our own inviolable and quite personal bias. The winnowed taste of the
ages, acquired by us as a sort of second nature, warns us what to