will come later, in the light of further knowledge. For the present,
buy--buy whatever has received the _imprimatur_ of critical authority.
Buy without any immediate reference to what you will read. Buy!
Surround yourself with volumes, as handsome as you can afford. And
for reading, all that I will now particularly enjoin is a general and
inclusive tasting, in order to attain a sort of familiarity with the
look of "literature in all its branches." A turning over of the pages
of a volume of Chambers's _Cyclopædia of English Literature_, the
third for preference, may be suggested as an admirable and a diverting
exercise. You might mark the authors that flash an appeal to you.




CHAPTER III

WHY A CLASSIC IS A CLASSIC


The large majority of our fellow-citizens care as much about
literature as they care about aeroplanes or the programme of the
Legislature. They do not ignore it; they are not quite indifferent to
it. But their interest in it is faint and perfunctory; or, if their
interest happens to be violent, it is spasmodic. Ask the two hundred
thousand persons whose enthusiasm made the vogue of a popular novel
ten years ago what they think of that novel now, and you will gather
that they have utterly forgotten it, and that they would no more dream
of reading it again than of reading Bishop Stubbs's _Select Charters_.
Probably if they did read it again they would not enjoy it--not
because the said novel is a whit worse now than it was ten years ago;