Well, we have entered the classroom in which Mr. Saintsbury is discoursing of Elizabethan literature, we have entered, so to speak, by the side door. If our nature is at all shaped to receive profit and enjoyment from the study of books, we shall be curious to see from reading the whole of Mr. Saintsbury’s book what has led up to Chapman and what writers succeed him. Of the various ways in which authors may be grouped for analysis the historical is the best for the young student; and it is on the historical scheme of division that most studies of literature are based. A very useful series of books has been begun under the editorship of Professor William A. Neilson in which each volume deals with a class of literature, one with the essay, one with the drama, one with ballads, and so on. This series, intended for advanced students, will probably not be the best for the beginner, though it is often true that works intended for advanced readers are the very best for the young, and that books for young readers entirely fail as introductions to more thorough studies. The reader who is really interested in tracing out the relations between writers will in good time wish to read studies of literature made on the historic plan and also some which survey generic divisions of literature. The two methods intersect at right angles. The main thoroughfare of literary study which runs from the early story-tellers through Fielding and Thackeray to Hardy and George Meredith, crosses the other great thoroughfares: the one which follows the relations between Fielding, Gray, Johnson, and Burke and other great men of that age; the one which makes its way through the age of Wordsworth and passes from Burns’s cottage to Scott’s Abbottsford; and the one through the age of Victoria. This has been surveyed as far as George Meredith, and the critics are busily putting up the fences and the sign posts. In view of the limitations which mere time imposes on the number of books which any individual may study, we shall resolve early not to attempt the impossible, not to try to study with great intimacy the entire range of literature. The thing to do is to select, or to allow our natural drift of mind to select for us, one period of literature, or one group, or one writer in a period. In ten years of leisurely but thoughtful reading, after the day’s work is done, one can know, so far as one’s given capacity will admit, as much about Shakespeare as any Shakespeare scholar, that is, as much that is essential and worth knowing. Not that ten years will exhaust Shakespeare or any other great poet, but they will suffice for the laying of a foundation of knowledge complete and adequate for the individual reader, and on that foundation the individual can build his personal knowledge of the poet, a structure in which the materials furnished by other students become of decreasing importance.