Now, not as that all-righting posterity do we approach, of course, the books we actually read. Nobody expects that our judgments of current literature be perennially brazen when two or three unbend in talk about that merchandise which is sold in the same "department" as stationery and string and glue. The rub is, rather, that our chief "classics" appear to have been selected and handed down to fame by the long arm of coincidence. That which remains to us of Greek and Roman literature composes by general consent our greatest treasure, the treasure which time has most thoroughly tested and approved. And it is precisely here that one finds least cause to suspect time of any entangling alliance with justice. There is no vaguest reason to suppose that of the Greek and Roman writers we have preserved, by any standards, what was best worth keeping; nor that of such authors as Æschylos and Aristophanes of whom oblivion has spared more than the name we have retained the masterworks. We cherish, instead, each scrap that accident has made peerless by the destruction of its betters.... I might go on to speak, even more tediously, of Sappho and Petronius and Plutarch, and of Virgil's foiled endeavors to destroy the latter part of his _Æneid_--and about the dream that revealed the hiding place of Dante's lost cantos, and about John Warburton's cook, and about how the Bible came by its present contents,--to show through what queer accidents the world's chief "classics," the books which are likely always to remain in theory man's finest literary achievements, have been made just what they are. But the point is that they might quite as easily have been something else. The point is that they have not earned their present and probably perpetual rank by their pre-eminence in special qualities, nor by any æsthetic principle whatever. And if the supreme names and masterpieces of the world's literature have been tagged as such by justice,--which always remains just barely possible,--it was done without removing her bandage, in the hazards of a game of blind man's buff.