'Love me, love my book' is a version of a familiar proverb which one might be slow to accept. There are, as one need hardly say, many admirable persons for whose sake one would gladly make any sacrifice of personal comfort short of that implied in a study of their works. But the converse of the statement is more nearly true. I confess that I at any rate love a book pretty much in proportion as it makes me love the author. I do not of course speak of histories or metaphysical treatises which one reads for the sake of the information or of the logical teaching; but of the imaginative books which appeal in the last resort to the sympathy between the writer and the reader. It matters not whether you are brought into contact with a man by seeing or hearing, by the printed or spoken word—the ultimate source of pleasure is the personal affinity. To read a book in the true sense—to read it, that is, not as the critic but in the spirit of enjoyment—is to lay aside for the moment one's own personality, and to become a part of the author. It is to enter the world in which he habitually lives—for each of us lives in a separate world of his own—to breathe his air, and therefore to receive pleasure and pain according as the atmosphere is or is not congenial. I may by an intellectual effort perceive the greatness of a writer whose character is essentially antagonistic to my own; but I cannot feel it as it must be felt for genuine enjoyment. The qualification must, of course, be understood that a great book really expresses the most refined essence of the writer's character. It gives the author transfigured, and does not represent all the stains and distortions which he may have received in his progress through the world. In real life we might have been repelled by Milton's stern Puritanism, or by some outbreak of rather testy self-assertion. In reading 'Paradise Lost,' we feel only the loftiness of character, and are raised and inspirited by the sentiments, without pausing to consider the particular application.