Now the question of how to read and what to read has of late filled much space in the daily papers, if it cannot strictly speaking be said to have profoundly occupied the public mind.  But you need be under no alarm.  I am not going to supply you with a new list of the hundred books most worth reading, nor am I about to take the world into my confidence in respect of my “favorite passages from the best authors.”  Nor again do I address myself to the professed student, to the fortunate individual with whom literature or science is the business as well as the pleasure of life.  I have not the qualifications which would enable me to undertake such a task with the smallest hope of success.  My theme is humble, though the audience to whom I desire to speak is large:  for I speak to the ordinary reader with ordinary capacities and ordinary leisure, to whom reading is, or ought to be, not a business but a pleasure; and my theme is the enjoyment—­not, mark you, the improvement, nor the glory, nor the profit, but the enjoyment—­which may be derived by such an one from books.

It is perhaps due to the controversial habits engendered by my unfortunate profession, that I find no easier method of making my own view clear than that of contrasting with it what I regard as an erroneous view held by somebody else; and in the present case the doctrine which I shall choose as a foil to my own, is one which has been stated with the utmost force and directness by that brilliant and distinguished writer, Mr. Frederic Harrison.  He has, as many of you know, recently given us, in a series of excellent essays, his opinion on the principles which should guide us in the choice of books.  Against that part of his treatise which is occupied with specific recommendations of certain authors I have not a word to say.  He has resisted all the temptations to eccentricity which so easily beset the modern critic.  Every book which he praises deserves his praise, and has long been praised by the world at large.  I do not, indeed, hold that the verdict of the world is necessarily binding on the individual conscience.  I admit to the full that there is an enormous quantity of hollow devotion, of withered orthodoxy divorced from living faith, in the eternal chorus of praise which goes up from every literary altar to the memory of the immortal dead.  Nevertheless every critic is bound to recognize, as Mr. Harrison recognizes, that he must put down to individual peculiarity any difference he may have with the general verdict of the ages; he must feel that mankind are not likely to be in a conspiracy of error as to the kind of literary work which conveys to them the highest literary enjoyment, and that in such cases at least securus judicat orbis terrarum.