One is surprised to read the remark of the “Saturday Review” on the published letters of Whitman,--letters that have no extrinsic literary value whatever, not one word of style,--namely, that few books are so well calculated to “purge the soul of nonsense;” and the remark of the fastidious Henry James on the same subject, that, with all their enormities of the common, the letters are positively delightful. Here, again, the source of our interest is undoubtedly in the personal revelation,--the type of man we see through the letters, and not in any wit or wisdom lodged in the letters themselves. One reader seeks religious or moral values alone in the works he reads; another seeks scientific or philosophical values; another, artistic and literary values; others, again, purely human values. No one, I think, would read Scott or Dickens for purely artistic values, while, on the other hand, it seems to me that one would go to Mr. James or to Mr. Howells for little else. One might read Froude with pleasure who had little confidence in him as an historian, but one could hardly read Freeman and discount him in the same way; one might have great delight in Ruskin, who repudiated much of his teaching. I suppose one comes to like plain literature as he comes to like plain clothes, plain manners, simple living. What grows with us is the taste for the genuine, the real. The less a writer’s style takes thought of itself, the better we like it. The less his dress, his equipage, his house, concern themselves about appearances, the more we are pleased with them. Let the purpose be entirely serious, and let the seriousness be pushed till it suggests the heroic; that is what we crave as we grow older and tire of the vanities and shams of the world.