This points to the right answer to another question that is constantly asked.  We are constantly asked whether desultory reading is among things lawful and permitted.  May we browse at large in a library, as Johnson said, or is it forbidden to open a book without a definite aim and fixed expectations?  I am for a compromise.  If a man has once got his general point of view, if he has striven with success to place himself at the centre, what follows is of less consequence.  If he has got in his head a good map of the country, he may ramble at large with impunity.  If he has once well and truly laid the foundations of a methodical, systematic habit of mind, what he reads will find its way to its proper place.  If his intellect is in good order, he will find in every quarter something to assimilate and something that will nourish.

Next I am going to deal with another question, with which perhaps I ought to have started.  What is literature?  It has often been defined.  Emerson says it is a record of the best thoughts.  “By literature,” says another author, “we mean the written thoughts and feelings of intelligent men and women arranged in a way that shall give pleasure to the reader.”  A third account is that “the aim of a student of literature is to know the best that has been thought in the world.”  Definitions always appear to me in these things to be in the nature of vanity.  I feel that the attempt to be compact in the definition of literature ends in something that is rather meagre, partial, starved, and unsatisfactory.  I turn to the answer given by a great French writer to a question not quite the same, viz.  “What is a classic?” Literature consists of a whole body of classics in the true sense of the word, and a classic, as Sainte-Beuve defines him, is an “author who has enriched the human mind, who has really added to its treasure, who has got it to take a step further; who has discovered some unequivocal moral truth, or penetrated to some eternal passion, in that heart of man where it seemed as though all were known and explored, who has produced his thought, or his observation, or his invention under some form, no matter what, so it be great, large, acute, and reasonable, sane and beautiful in itself; who has spoken to all in a style of his own, yet a style which finds itself the style of everybody,—­in a style that Is at once new and antique, and is the contemporary of all the ages.”  Another Frenchman, Doudan, who died in 1872, has an excellent passage on the same subject:—­

“The man of letters properly so called is a rather singular being:  he does not look at things exactly with his own eyes, he has not impressions of his own, we could not discover the imagination with which he started.  ’Tis a tree on which have been grafted Homer, Virgil, Milton, Dante, Petrarch; hence have grown peculiar flowers which are not natural, and yet which are not artificial.  Study has given to the man of letters something of the reverie of Rene; with