Anyone in the leisure of his evenings, or of his days, if he is fortunate enough to have unoccupied sunlit hours, may master any poet in the language to which we have been born. Nothing is necessary to this study but a literate, intelligent mind, the text of the poet and such books as one can get in the libraries or with one’s pin money. And in selecting the books one has only to begin at random and follow the lead of the books themselves. Any text of “Macbeth” will give references to all the critical works that anyone needs and they in turn will point to all the rest. You do not need a laboratory course in philology in order to read your poet and to know him, to know him at least as well as the philologist knows him, to know him better, if you have a spark of poetic imagination. There is no democracy so natural, so real, and so increasingly populous as the democracy of studious readers. We acknowledge divinity in man, in our poet above all, and we see flickerings of divinity in the rare reader who is a critic. But we do not acknowledge the divine right of Shakespearian scholars or of any other self-constituted authorities in books. In our literary state the scholars are not our masters but our servants. We rejoice that they are at work and now and again turn up for us a useful piece of knowledge. But they cannot monopolize knowledge of the poets. That is open to any of us, and it is attainable with far less labor than the scholars have led us to believe. The selection of a single writer for special study, a selection open to us all, should not be made in haste. It should be a “natural selection” determined gradually and unawares. It will not do to say: “I will now begin to study Shakespeare for ten years.” That New Year’s resolution will not survive the first of February. But as you browse among books you may find yourself especially drawn to some one of the poets or prose writers. Follow your master when you find him.