But what is none the less sure is that Lamb recognized by a swift and delicate intuition the literary food that was best fitted to nourish his own intellectual growth. This was Sir Walter Scott’s secret, and this was Lamb’s. Both knew instinctively what was good for them, and a clear perception of our individual needs is something vastly different from idle preference based on an ignorant conceit. It is what we have each of us to learn, if we would hope to thrive; and while we may be aided in the effort, yet a general command to read and enjoy all great authors seldom affords us the precise assistance we require. Still less do we derive any real help from those more contentious critics who, being wedded hard and fast to one particular author or to one particular school of thought, refuse, with ostentatious continency, to cast lingering looks upon any other type of loveliness. Literary monogamy, as practiced by some of our contemporaries, makes us sigh for the old genial days of Priest Martin, when the tyranny of opinions had not yet grown into a binding yoke, and when it was still possible to follow the example of Montaigne’s old woman, and light one candle to Saint Michael and another to the Dragon. At present, the saint--or perhaps the dragon--stands in a blaze of glory, all the more lustrous for the dark shadow thrown on his antagonist. “Praise handed in by disparagement,” the Greek drama whipped upon the back of Genesis,--if I may venture to quote Charles Lamb again--this is the modern method of procedure, a method successfully inaugurated by Macaulay, who could find no better way of eulogizing Addison than by heaping antithetical reproaches upon Steele. In a little volume of lectures upon Russian literature, lectures which were sufficiently popular to bear both printing and delivery, I find the art of persuasiveness illustrated by this firebrand of a sentence, hurled like an anathema at the heads of a peaceful and unoffending community: “Read Tolstoï! Read humbly, read admiringly! Reading him in this spirit shall in itself be unto you an education of your highest artistic nature. And when your souls have become able to be thrilled to their very depths by the unspeakable beauty of Tolstoï’s art, you will then learn to be ashamed of the thought that for years you sensible folks of Boston have been capable of allowing the Stevensons with their Hydes, and the Haggards with their Shes, and even the clumsy Wards with their ponderous Elsmeres, to steal away, under the flag of literature, your thoughtful moments.”