Let us at the outset agree not to map out our journey too rigidly. A young friend of mine conceived at the age of sixteen the inordinate ambition to read everything that is good. He procured a public library catalogue, and asked a school-teacher to check off the titles of all the books knowledge of which is essential to a perfect education. The teacher smiled and confessed that she did not know even the titles herself. She might have added that neither does any one else know the titles, much less the insides, of all good books. But she marked some hundred names, and the ambitious youngster entered upon his long feast. He never finished all the books that were checked, for one or two proved discouragingly stiff and dull, and as he ran his eye down the list for the next prescribed masterpiece he saw other alluring titles which were not checked, and he wrote the numbers on library slips. The experience taught him that he must select books for himself, and that the world’s library is too vast for anyone to be acquainted with all its treasures. A youth so eager to know good books can be trusted sooner or later to find his way to them. For the benefit of less zealous persons, great faith used to be placed in lists of the Hundred Best Books. Such lists, even the very judicious selection made by Sir John Lubbock (Lord Avebury), can never be satisfactory. Lord Avebury is too good a student of nature and human nature to regard his list as final. It was not final for one man, John Ruskin, who has given us a most inspiring essay on books, “Of Kings’ Treasures.” Ruskin thought that Lubbock had included in the chosen hundred some books that were not only unworthy but injurious. No man could make a list which would fare any better at the hands of another critic of solid convictions. Who shall select a social Four Hundred, all of whom we should accept as friends? Who can select a Four Hundred or a One Hundred of books and not leave out some of the noblest and best? It may be that Lubbock and Ruskin were both a little priggish to take that century of masterpieces quite so solemnly. In books, as in all things, we cherish much that is not the best, but is good in its way. It is not natural nor right to reject all but the superlatively excellent. It is natural to prefer sometimes a book of secondary value, and it is perversely natural to turn away from the book that we are assured too insistently we “ought to read.” A formal list of “oughts” is a severe test for ordinary human patience. Becky Sharp in “Vanity Fair” is a bad-tempered and bad-hearted young woman, but one can have a little sympathy with her when she throws her copy of Johnson’s Dictionary at the head of her teacher as she parts forever from the school gates. It is not altogether her fault if Johnson’s Dictionary seems to her at that moment of all printed things the most detestable.