Under these circumstances, it is hardly a matter of surprise that people whose minds are, as Mr. Bagehot termed it, “to let” stand hesitating between license and servitude. On the one side, we hear men--intelligent men, too--boasting that they never read anything but the newspapers, and seeming to take a perverted pride in their own melancholy deprivation. On the other, we see both men and women, and sometimes even children, practicing a curious sort of literary asceticism, and devoting themselves conscientiously and very conspicuously to the authors they least enjoy. These martyrs to an advanced cultivation find their self-imposed tasks, I am happy to think, grow harder year by year. Helen Pendennis, occasionally reading Shakespeare, “whom she pretended to like, but didn’t,” had comparatively an easy time of it; but her successor to-day who goes to a lecture on Hegel or Euripides when she would prefer cards and conversation; who sits, perplexed and doubtful, through a performance of “A Doll’s House” when “Little Lord Fauntleroy” represents her dramatic preference; who tries to read Matthew Arnold and Tourguéneff, and now and then Mr. Pater, when she really enjoys Owen Meredith, and “Bootles’ Baby,” and the Duchess, pays a heavy price for her enviable reputation. “The true value of souls is in proportion to what they can admire,” says Marius the Epicurean; but the true value of our friends’ distinction is in proportion to the books we behold in their hands. We have hardly yet outgrown the critical methods of the little heroine of “Mademoiselle Panache,” who knows that Lady Augusta is accomplished because she has seen her music and heard of her drawings; and, as few of us resemble the late Mr. Mark Pattison in his unwillingness to create a good impression, we naturally make an effort to be taken at our best. Mr. Payn once said that Macaulay had frightened thousands into pretending they knew authors with whom they had not even a bowing acquaintance; and though the days of his autocracy are over, it has been succeeded by a more fastidious and stringent legislation. We no longer feel it incumbent upon us to profess an intimacy with Thucydides, nor to revere the “Pilgrim’s Progress.” Indeed, a recent critic has been found brave enough to speak harsh words concerning the Delectable Mountains and the Valley of Humiliation,--words that would have frozen the current of Macaulay’s blood, and startled even the tolerant Sainte-Beuve, weary as he confessed himself of the Pilgrim’s vaunted perfections. But there is always a little assortment of literary shibboleths, whose names we con over with careful glibness, that we may assert our intimacy in hours of peril; nor should we, in justice, be censured very severely for doing what is too often with us, as with the Ephraimites, a deed of simple self-defense.