The man that cannot read his chapter on "Eccentricity" over and over again is incapable of appreciating some of Pepys's best passages! Books to be read and re-read ought to occupy only a small space on any shelf, and not many of them, in my opinion, are among the One Hundred Best Books listed by the late Sir John Lubbock. Each of us will make his own shelf of books. The book for me is the book that delights, attracts, soothes, or uplifts me. Let those critics go hang whose criticisms are not literature! Sainte-Beuve makes literature when he exercises his critical vocation; Brunetière has too heavy a hand; Francisque Sarcey has some touches of inspiration that give delight. There are no really good French critics to-day, probably because they have so little material to work on. Our own Mencken, with all his vagaries, is worth while, and Brander Matthews knows his line and the value of background and perspective; William Lyon Phelps has a light hand; but there are many leaves in our forests of critical writing and not much wood. Literary criticism is becoming a lost art with our English brethren, who once claimed Saintsbury and George Lewes. The admitted existence of cliques and claques in London makes us distrustful. You were worked into great enthusiasm for Stephen Phillips's "Herod" until you found that half a score of notices of this tragedy were written by the same hand! It seems almost impossible that "The Letters of William James" should appear shortly after "The Education of Henry Adams," and, though the Jameses were New Yorkers, they are certainly redolent of New England. We had begun to forget our debt to the writers of New England. Mrs. Freeman and Mr. Lincoln hold up their heads as writers of modern folk stories; but the _Atlantic Monthly_ has become eclectic. It has lost the flavour of New England. That Boston which in the _Atlantic_ had always been a state of mind has become different from the real old Boston. In truth, Indiana had begun to blot out the whole of New England, and Miss Agnes Repplier had begun to stain our map of culture with the modulated tints of Philadelphia. For myself, I had returned to the novels of Harriet Beecher Stowe--leaving out "Uncle Tom's Cabin," which I always found detestable--to "Elsie Venner" and to "The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table," in the hope that the flavour of New England, which I found to my horror was growing faint in me, might be retained. There is always "The House of the Seven Gables!"