of the people who are most keenly interested in literature, and if Lamb frequently strikes you as dull, then evidently there is something wrong.  The difficulty must be fairly fronted, and the fronting of it brings us to the very core of the business of actually forming the taste.  If your taste were classical you would discover in Lamb a continual fascination; whereas what you in fact do discover in Lamb is a not unpleasant flatness, enlivened by a vague humour and an occasional pathos.  You ought, according to theory, to be enthusiastic; but you are apathetic, or, at best, half-hearted.  There is a gulf.  How to cross it?

To cross it needs time and needs trouble.  The following considerations may aid.  In the first place, we have to remember that, in coming into the society of the classics in general and of Charles Lamb in particular, we are coming into the society of a mental superior.  What happens usually in such a case?  We can judge by recalling what happens when we are in the society of a mental inferior.  We say things of which he misses the import; we joke, and he does not smile; what makes him laugh loudly seems to us horseplay or childish; he is blind to beauties which ravish us; he is ecstatic over what strikes us as crude; and his profound truths are for us trite commonplaces.  His perceptions are relatively coarse; our perceptions are relatively subtle.  We try to make him understand, to make him see, and if he is aware of his inferiority we may have some success.  But if he is not aware of his inferiority, we soon hold our tongues and leave him alone in his self-satisfaction, convinced that there is nothing to be done with him.  Every one of us has been through this experience with a mental inferior, for there is always a mental inferior handy, just as there is always a being more unhappy than we are.  In approaching a classic, the true wisdom is to place ourselves in the position of the mental inferior, aware of mental inferiority, humbly stripping off all conceit, anxious to rise out of that inferiority.  Recollect that we always regard as quite hopeless the mental inferior who does not suspect his own inferiority.  Our attitude towards Lamb must be:  “Charles Lamb was a greater man than I am, cleverer, sharper, subtler, finer, intellectually more powerful, and with keener eyes for beauty.  I must brace myself to follow his lead.”  Our attitude must resemble that of one who cocks his ear and listens with all his soul for a distant sound.

To catch the sound we really must listen.  That is to say, we must read carefully, with our faculties on the watch.  We must read slowly and perseveringly.  A classic has to be wooed and is worth the wooing.  Further, we must disdain no assistance.  I am not in favour of studying criticism of classics before the classics themselves.  My notion is to study the work and the biography of a classical writer together, and then to read criticism afterwards.  I think that in reprints of the classics the customary “critical