You mention French literature. Do I overwhelm you with a sumptuous Voltaire, or sicken you with a sentimentally illustrated “Paul et Virginie”? I do not. I exhibit to you yellow-back volumes of the later verse of Francis Jammes--which are supposed to be going to be bound one of these days--or I show you a play or two of Rostand’s. If you desire to have further dealings with the literature of France, the French department of the university is, for a consideration, at your service. You mention Fraser’s “Golden Bough”? I show you something equally informing and more entertaining, comfortable volumes in which the mythology of Ireland is narrated to us by Jeremiah Curtin and by Seumas MacManus, and I show you a stray volume of Louis Ginzberg’s “The Legends of the Jews.” I should not try to make the possessors of efficient libraries unhappy. But I do it for their own good, in the hope that I may eventually reform them. And when I look upon my two volumes of “The Evergreen,” a quarterly published in Edinburgh some twenty years ago, numbering among its contributors Fiona MacLeod, Nora Hopper, Douglas Hyde, Standish O’Grady and Rosa Mulholland, and “The Squire’s Recipes,” by Kendall Banning, and “Scottish Heraldry Made Easy,” and Shaemas O’Sheel’s “The Dear Old Lady of Eighty-sixth Street,” and a bound volume of The Gentleman’s Magazine for 1761 and “L. Annsei Senecae et Aliorum Tragoediae (Amsterodami, Apud Guiljel: Ians: Caesium)” and a battered edition of Scott’s “Marmion,” enriched by the comments of a Louise Cogswell who owned it in 1810 and wrote approvingly, “and very well told too” under the sub-title “A Tale of Flodden Field,” and Joseph Forster’s “Studies in Black and Red” (very ghastly), and both of Ernest Dowson’s novels and his translations from the French, as well as his poems, and “The American Annual of Photography” for 1916, and “Miss Thackeray’s Works,” complete in one volume, and Layton Crippen’s “Clay and Fire,” and Bithell’s “Contemporary Belgian Poetry,” and Sir Francis Burnand’s “More Happy Thoughts,” and a volume containing “The Poetical Works of Rogers, Campbell, J. Montgomery Lamb, and Kirke White,” and an inscribed copy of Palmer Cox’s “The Brownies, Their Book”--when I contemplate, among the more commonplace inhabitants of my shelves, these books, then I cannot keep from feeling a sense of superiority to all those who have laboriously “built up” their libraries in accordance with the mandates of strict utility. My library is inefficient and impractical, entertaining and unexacting. Its members have come to me by chance and by momentary inclination. For if a man’s books are to be, as the old phrase has it, his friends, they must be allowed to him because of some fitness on his part subtly felt by them. A man does not deliberately select his friends; there must be a selection by them as well as by him. Unless he is applying the principles of efficiency to friendship. And in that case he has no friends at all.