Still, for your own sake you must confine yourself for a long time
to recognised classics, for reasons already explained. And though
you should not follow a course, you must have a system or principle.
Your native sagacity will tell you that caprice, left quite unfettered,
will end by being quite ridiculous. The system which I recommend
is embodied in this counsel: Let one thing lead to another.
In the sea of literature every part communicates with every other part;
there are no land-locked lakes. It was with an eye to this system
that I originally recommended you to start with Lamb.
Lamb, if you are his intimate, has already brought you into relations
with a number of other prominent writers with whom you can
in turn be intimate, and who will be particularly useful to you.
Among these are Wordsworth, Coleridge, Southey, Hazlitt, and Leigh Hunt.
You cannot know Lamb without knowing these men, and some of them
are of the highest importance. From the circle of Lamb's own work
you may go off at a tangent at various points, according to
your inclination. If, for instance, you are drawn towards poetry,
you cannot, in all English literature, make a better start than
with Wordsworth. And Wordsworth will send you backwards to
a comprehension of the poets against whose influence Wordsworth fought.
When you have understood Wordsworth's and Coleridge's *Lyrical Ballads*,
and Wordsworth's defence of them, you will be in a position to judge
poetry in general. If, again, your mind hankers after an earlier
and more romantic literature, Lamb's *Specimens of English Dramatic Poets
Contemporary with Shakspere* has already, in an enchanting fashion,
piloted you into a vast gulf of "the sea which is Shakspere."