[Footnote 1:  “If I would put anything in my Common-place Book, I find out a head to which I may refer it.  Each head ought to be some important and essential word to the matter in hand” (Locke’s Works, iii. 308, ed. 1801).]

[Footnote 2:  This is for indexing purposes, but it is worth while to go further and make a title for the passage extracted, indicating its pith and purport.]

Various correspondents have asked me to say something about those lists of a hundred books that have been circulating through the world within the last few months.  I have examined some of these lists with considerable care, and whatever else may be said of them—­and I speak of them with deference and reserve, because men for whom one must have a great regard have compiled them—­they do not seem to me to be calculated either to create or satisfy a wise taste for literature in any very worthy sense.  To fill a man with a hundred parcels of heterogeneous scraps from the Mahabharata, and the Sheking, down to Pickwick and White’s Selborne, may pass the time, but I cannot perceive how it would strengthen or instruct or delight.  For instance, it is a mistake to think that every book that has a great name in the history of books or of thought is worth reading.  Some of the most famous books are least worth reading.  Their fame was due to their doing something that needed in their day to be done.  The work done, the virtue of the book expires.  Again, I agree with those who say that the steady working down one of these lists would end in the manufacture of that obnoxious product—­the prig.  A prig has been defined as an animal that is overfed for its size.  I think that these bewildering miscellanies would lead to an immense quantity of that kind of overfeeding.  The object of reading is not to dip into everything that even wise men have ever written.  In the words of one of the most winning writers of English that ever existed—­Cardinal Newman—­the object of literature in education is to open the mind, to correct it, to refine it, to enable it to comprehend and digest its knowledge, to give it power over its own faculties, application, flexibility, method, critical exactness, sagacity, address, and expression.  These are the objects of that intellectual perfection which a literary education is destined to give.  I will not venture on a list of a hundred books, but will recommend you instead to one book well worthy of your attention.  Those who are curious as to what they should read in the region of pure literature will do well to peruse Mr. Frederic Harrison’s admirable, volume, called The Choice of Books.  You will find there as much wise thought, eloquently and brilliantly put, as in any volume of its size and on its subject, whether it be in the list of a hundred or not.