Of course, literature in its stricter sense is more limited than all the material covered by the definition above. A dictionary, for example, can hardly be called literature. A bit of writing or talking to be literature must show the imprint of the author’s personality and it must have in it something valuable enough to make it worth preserving. But, in general, the definition as given gets at the root of the matter, and that is all we need be concerned with. It shows that literature is not a fad or an amusement of too highly cultivated people, but one of the biggest and most valuable things in the world. _We_, no matter who or where we are or even whether we can read or write, are dependent on literature in our everyday lives. How can we tell good literature from bad? Well, it is often pretty hard to tell about the books and stories of today, but there is a very easy way of telling about what was written a hundred or a thousand years ago. Nowadays, when most people can read and write and the printing-press makes it possible to produce great numbers of books and papers, there are thousands of people writing all the time and naturally a lot of them write very poor stuff. We talk about the “best selling books” and go wild over some new novel. We did the same last month and we’ll do the same next month. “What is the most popular novel this month?” “Oh, ‘So-and-so’ by So-and-so. It’s simply grand!” “What was the most popular novel last month?” “Let’s see. Oh, yes—‘So-and-so,’ by So-and-so. It’s a perfectly charming story.” “What was the most popular novel a year ago?” “A _year_ ago? Mercy, I don’t know! There are so many novels now.” There it is. All the time people are raving about the “latest” book. Like as not in a year they can’t even remember its name. Why is that? Because, hardly any of these books are really _good_ literature. Many of them are interesting and amuse us while we read them, but that’s all. In a year, or less, we have forgotten them.