In no class of readers does the tendency to unwarranted assumptions of knowledge show more comically than in those advanced students of books who are called Professors of English Literature. Properly speaking, no one is a professor of literature except the man who can produce something worth reading. But as the term is used it defines a class of teachers who have spent much time and study, not as writers but as readers of books, and who then set themselves up, or are set up in spite of individual modesty by the artificial university systems, to “teach” literature. The professional teacher of literature can know only a limited number of books. And while he has been reading his kind, his unprofessional neighbors, even his students, are reading their kind. He knows some literature that they do not; they know some literature that he does not. The chances are that the professor and not the lay reader will have departed the farther from the true uses of literature. It is possible to read a number of good books while the professor is studying what another professor says in reply to a third professor’s opinions about what Shakespeare meant in a certain passage. The professor of literature seems to regard Shakespeare and other poets as inspired children who need a grown person to interpret their baby talk; whereas the lay reader takes it for granted that Shakespeare had more or less definite ideas about what he wished to say and succeeded in saying it with admirable clarity. To be sure, a professor here and there may be found who is a live and virile reader of poetry like the rest of us, and the faults of pedantry and pretentious authority are not inevitable faults of the profession as a whole. There is, however, one universal fault of the professional teacher of literature which is imposed by the conditions of employment in our universities and is subversive of the true purpose of colleges and the true purposes of literature. One fundamental idea of a college is to afford a certain number of scholarly men the means of livelihood from college endowments in order that they may have time to devote to books. The modern professor of literature seems to have so many duties of administration and discipline that he has little time to read for the sake of reading--which is the chief reason for reading at all. The old idea of a university as a place where the few educated members of society could retire for study and intellectual communion has passed away, and the professor of literature is rather at a disadvantage in the modern world where there are more educated persons outside the universities than in them, and where the cultivated person of leisure, reading literature by himself, can easily outstrip the professor.