Well, we may leave our little declaration of independence from those who are supposed to be authorities in literature, and turning from them not too disrespectfully, go our own way. Let us be readers of literature. The study of literature will take care of itself. We cannot expect to know as much about the sources of “Hamlet” as Professor Puppendorf thinks he knows. Neither can we hope to bring as much imagination to our reading as Lamb brought to his. But of the two masters we shall follow Lamb, who was not a professor, nor even, it seems, a student of literature, but only a reader. If we happen to be interested in Professor Smith’s ideas of Milton, we can in three or four hours read his handbook on the subject, or, better, the other handbook from which he got his ideas. For the professors do not keep their wisdom for their students in class; they live, in spite of themselves, in a modern world and publish for the general reader all the knowledge they have--and a little more. We can follow the professors, if we choose, in the libraries. But probably there will be more wisdom and happiness in following Lamb or Stevenson, or some other reader who was not a professor; they tread a broader highway and never forget what books are made for. We may well follow Dr. S. M. Crothers, “The Gentle Reader,” who seems to have been enjoying books all his life and still enjoys them, though he lives near a great university. Another genial guide and counselor, whose company the younger generation might well seek often, is Mr. Howells. He is a professor of literature in the real sense, because he makes it. He is also a reader whose enthusiasms are fresh and individual. Many of his recorded impressions of contemporaneous books are buried in an obscure magazine, and his reticence has its disadvantages in an age when too many inept voices chatter about books. But he reads books and writes about them because he likes them, and so his accounts of his reading are rich in suggestion. Most of the authentic professors of literature, that is, the men who have produced literature, have been readers rather than students of books. Keats, I am quite sure, had neither opportunity nor inclination to make a formal study of books, even of the old poets from whom his genius drew its sustenance. He seems not to have studied Homer or the English translation by the Elizabethan poet, George Chapman. He calls his sonnet “On First Looking Into Chapman’s Homer.” You see, he only read it, only “looked into” it, just like an ordinary reader. But he was not ordinary, he was a poet, and so he could write this of his experience as a reader: