One can go back to the “Vicar of Wakefield;” but can he read a second time “The Woman in White”? In such books there can be only one first time. Pluck out the heart of a mystery once, and it never grows again. Curiosity and astonishment make a poor foundation to build upon. The boy tires of his jumping-jack much sooner than of his top or ball. Only the normal, the sane, the simple, have the gift of long life; the strained, the intemperate, the violent will not live out half their days. We never outgrow our pleasure in simple, common things; if we do, so much the worse for us; and I think it will be found that those books to which we return and that stand the test of time have just this quality of simple, universal, every-day objects and experiences, with, of course, some glint of that light that never was on sea or land,--the light of the spirit. How many times does a reading man return to Montaigne, not to make a dead set at him, but to dip into him here and there, as one takes a cup of water from a spring! Human nature is essentially the same in all ages; and Montaigne put so much of his genuine, unaffected self into his pages, and put it with such vivacity of style, that all men find their own in his book; it is forever modern. We return to Bacon for a different reason,--the breadth and excellence of his wisdom, and his masterly phrases. The excellent is always modern; only, what is excellent? A man of my own tastes re-reads Gilbert White two or three times, and dips into him many times more. It is easy to see why such a book lasts. So much writing there is that is like half-live coals buried in ashes; but here there are no ashes, no dead verbiage at all; we are in immediate contact with a live, simple, unaffected mind and personality. But this general description applies to all books that last; they all have at least one quality in common, living reality. What is special to White is his fine, scholarly style, busied with the common, homely things of everyday country life. The facts are just enough heightened and related to the life of this man to make them of perennial interest. We probably go back to books from two motives: one, because we want to recover some past mood or experience to which the book may be the key; and the other from the perennial sources of pleasure and profit which a good book holds; in other words for association and inspiration.