As for me I confess to being a rather crusty despot.  When Horace was over here the other evening talking learnedly about silos and ensilage I admit that I became the very pattern of humility, but when I take my place in the throne of my arm-chair with the light from the green-shaded lamp falling on the open pages of my book, I assure you I am decidedly an autocratic person.  My retainers must distinctly keep their places!  I have my court favourites upon whom I lavish the richest gifts of my attention.  I reserve for them a special place in the worn case nearest my person, where at the mere outreaching of an idle hand I can summon them to beguile my moods.  The necessary slavies of literature I have arranged in indistinct rows at the farther end of the room where they can be had if I require their special accomplishments.

* * * * *

How little, after all, learning counts in this world either in books or in men.  I have often been awed by the wealth of information I have discovered in a man or a book:  I have been awed and depressed.  How wonderful, I have thought, that one brain should hold so much, should be so infallible in a world of fallibility.  But I have observed how soon and completely such a fount of information dissipates itself.  Having only things to give, it comes finally to the end of its things:  it is empty.  What it has hived up so painfully through many a studious year comes now to be common property.  We pass that way, take our share, and do not even say “Thank you.”  Learning is like money; it is of prodigious satisfaction to the possessor thereof, but once given forth it diffuses itself swiftly.

“What have you?” we are ever asking of those we meet.  “Information, learning, money?”

We take it cruelly and pass onward, for such is the law of material possessions.

“What have you?” we ask.  “Charm, personality, character, the great gift of unexpectedness?”

How we draw you to us!  We take you in.  Poor or ignorant though you may be, we link arms and loiter; we love you not for what you have or what you give us, but for what you are.

I have several good friends (excellent people) who act always as I expect them to act.  There is no flight!  More than once I have listened to the edifying conversation of a certain sturdy old gentleman whom I know, and I am ashamed to say that I have thought: 

“Lord! if he would jump up now and turn an intellectual handspring, or slap me on the back (figuratively, of course:  the other would be unthinkable), or—­yes, swear!  I—­think I could love him.”

But he never does—­and I’m afraid he never will!

When I speak then of my books you will know what I mean.  The chief charm of literature, old or new, lies in its high quality of surprise, unexpectedness, spontaneity:  high spirits applied to life.  We can fairly hear some of the old chaps you and I know laughing down through the centuries.  How we love ’em!  They laughed for themselves, not for us!