JUST how far books and reading are questions of taste, or should be looked on as questions of taste merely, is passing hard to say. That there are prevailing fashions, local-colour variations, and a few more or less permanent models is noticeable to such a degree that an observer might conclude motley to be the only wear. The readers seem to be no more able to agree in what they like than did the urchins over the pease-porridge in the nursery rhyme: Some like it hot, Some like it cold, Some like it in the pot Nine days old. So it goes in books with every one to his own liking, though the particular likings are a very unsubstantial guide to the literary merits of the books liked. A book may become a fashion based on conventional acquiescence and appearances rather than on real worth. Let the judgment of individualism, with courage and restraint, lay bare the fashion, and where then is its habitation or what is its name? Such judgment sets up more or less arbitrary lines of taste that run wide, and it makes a guess at what is enduring literature, a hazardous kind of guess. Yet the peculiar thing of it all is that in this guess pedantry is as likely to play false as is the capricious fancy of the reading public that takes the book of the hour, whatever it be. This makes a kind of self-constituted division of readers, each satisfied with his lot and each serving a purpose. Some readers' tastes, however, are neither prudish nor slovenly. They are very catholic and succeed in picking out what is good from both the bookish and the popular kinds of books. They can read any book that is a book. But you recall that Charles Lamb could not reckon directories, scientific treatises, the works of Hume and Gibbon, and generally those "volumes which no gentleman's library should be without" as being books. If to these were added those books which no gentleman's library should contain, we come to a field fairly easy of investigation. In other words, we must get back to that field that includes the literature of power rather than the literature of knowledge. Of course, if somebody chooses to read blockheaded encyclopædias, withering economic essays, proper Sunday school books, sophomoric novels, or privately printed verse, that is purely his own concern; but such reading is beyond the pale of real books as they relate to well-regulated courses in the home or in school life.