to work, have guided the tastes of these village readers, so that they would have chosen and enjoyed the very books that had to be discarded. One can hardly imagine a reading circle finding much to discuss in books by the luminaries mentioned as chief favourites; but it is quite as difficult to imagine that a paper or a reading or an intimate talk about Stevenson, Scott, Dickens, and a few of the poets, would have failed in opening many eyes to the charms of the writers abolished. To prescribe what people shall read is impossible; it is foolish to present any public, in town or country, with a well-chosen library, and tell them to take it or leave it. Coercion would be as fruitless as it is impossible. But to leave the choice to the untrained and unguided initiative of the villagers, without some attempt at training and assisting their powers of choice, is hardly less absurd than it would be to let the children in a school decide what lessons they should be taught. This is the real inwardness of the great fiction question, on which so much wordy argument has been expended. There is no need to deplore the high percentage of fiction that is read; if this is of any literary value, the percentage is so much to the good. The innuendo underlying the Adult Education Committee’s sneer at “unsystematic and recreative reading” betrays an illiberal conception of the cultural value of belles-lettres, of which Meredith said:-- “Light literature is the garden and the orchard, the fountain, the rainbow, the far view; the view within us as well as without. The Philistine detests it, because he has no view, out or in. The dry confess they are cut off from the living tree, peeled and sapless, when they condemn it. The vulgar demand to have their pleasures in their own likeness--and let them swamp their troughs! They shall not degrade the name of noble fiction.... Shun those who cry out against fiction, and have no taste for elegant writing. Not to have a sympathy with the playful mind is not to have a mind.”