a list for the aspirant to letters is to throw the London Library at his head; he lays before us a stodgy lump of two or three hundred volumes, many of them excellent, and many more absolutely penal. It is enough to say that he seriously starts his list with the Venerable Bede's _Ecclesiastical History_. Bede! the dimmest, most distant of English chroniclers, who depicts the dimmest and most distant period of English history; once, in an A.B.C., I saw a shopman reading _Tono-Bungay_, which was propped against the cruet. Does Mr Bennett imagine that man dropping the tear of emotion and the gravy of excitement upon the Venerable Bede? And if one goes on with the list and discovers the _Autobiography of Lord Herbert of Cherbury_, _Religio Medici_, Berkeley's _Principles of Human Knowledge_, Reynold's _Discourses on Art_, the works of Pope, _Voyage of the Beagle_ ... one comes to understand how such readers may have been made by such masters. From the beginning to the end of that list my mind is obsessed by the word 'stodge,' and the novels do not relieve it much. There are a good many, but they comprise the usual Thackeray, Scott, Dickens ... need I go on? Relief is found only in Fielding, Sterne, and in one book each of Marryat, Lever, Kingsley, and Gissing. These authors are admitted presumably because they are dead. In all this, where is hope? How many green daffodil heads, trying to burst their painful way through the heavy earth of a dull life, has Mr Bennett trampled on? Is it impossible to find some one who is (as Mr Bennett certainly is), capable of the highest artistic appreciation and of high literary achievement, and who will, for a moment, put himself in the place of the people he is addressing? Is it impossible for an adult to remember that as a boy he hated the classics? Has he forgotten that as a young man he could be charmed, but educated only by means of a machine like the one they use for stuffing geese? The people we want to introduce to literature are, nearly all of them, people who work; some earn thirty shillings a week, and ponder a great deal on how to live on it; some earn hundreds a year and are not much better off; all are occupied with material cares, their work, their games, their gardens, their loves; nearly all are short of time, and expend on work, transit, and meals, ten to twelve hours a day. They read in tubes and omnibuses, in the midst of awful disturbance and overcrowding; also they are deeply corrupted by the daily papers, where nothing over a column is ever printed, where the news are conveyed in paragraphs and headlines, so that they never have to concentrate, and find it difficult to do so; they are corrupted too by the vulgarity and sensationalism which are the bones and blood of the magazines, until they become unable to think without stimulants.