land, with its wonderful and gorgeous descriptions, that make the scene live before the eyes.

Of splendid modern prose writers, Ruskin is one of the greatest. It takes a little effort and a little choosing to learn to like him; but those who will take the pains to study him will be richly rewarded.

About the simplest thing he wrote was Ethics of the Dust, a series of conversations with some young girls about nature and everyday life. Children of ten are said to have read this book and liked it; yet it is by no means childish, and any one might enjoy it.

Next in general interest and simplicity is Sesame and Lilies-a queer title. The first chapter is "Of Kings' Treasuries"-meaning books; and the second "Of Queens' Gardens," meaning the dominion over nature and society which culture gives a woman. This is one of the very best books ever written on How and What to Read, though written in a very symbolic style that will require more than one reading fully to understand it.

Another book of quite a different kind is called in Ruskin's odd fashion The Crown of Wild Olive. It is a series of essays on work and the things in life worth working for.

These three books are short, and perhaps at first many will not like them very much; but liking will grow with time.

There is a book, however, that will well repay getting and reading in part, from time to time, for many years. That is Modern Painters. It is in four large volumes, and from the title one might suppose it was a technical history of modern painting. This is not the fact, however. It is a popular study of the noblest element in art, and throughout

the four volumes one will find marvelous pictures of word-painting, such as Ruskin's description of Turner's "Slave Ship," when he is discussing seapainting. He talks of art and nature, always looking at art from the point of view of nature; and the volumes are so well divided into chapters and sections, each with its title and sub-title, that one can pick out an interesting subject here, and another there. It will be of especial interest and value to any one who cares at all about art. Ruskin wrote the first volume of this work before he was twentyfour, and it is perhaps the most brilliant thing he ever did. It is full of life and color and splendid word-painting.

The reader who believes in culture and wishes to cultivate the esthetic and refined should certainly read Matthew Arnold's book, Culture and Anarchy. It requires a close and logical mind to appreciate and understand him, and to read and like him is not easy, but a liking for his chapter on "Sweetness and Light" is an excellent test of one's real success in the cultivation of culture.

It will be seen that there are good essays of many types. There is the epigrammatic discussion of everyday matters, such as we find in Bacon, and in quite a different way in Emerson; and there is the quaint and playful humor of Addison and Lamb; there is the splendid rhetoric of De Quincey and of Macaulay, and the brilliant word-painting of Ruskin; there is the preaching of Carlyle, and the literary lecturing of Matthew Arnold. If we cannot know all, we must choose our bent and follow the lines we like best.

The most popular form of the essay is that of

Addison and Lamb-the quaint, amusing, human badinage on familiar topics, full of love, and full of sense. Along this line there are a few good modern books - Oliver Wendell Holmes's Autocrat of the Breakfast Table, Ik Marvel's Reveries of a Bachelor, Charles Dudley Warner's Backlog Studies, and Barrie's My Lady Nicotine and When a Man's Single.1 Gilbert Chesterton and George Bernard Shaw hold the field in the first years of the twentieth century, with a brilliant paradoxical style quite. different from the kindly sentiment of the books just mentioned. They are rather the successors of the even more paradoxically brilliant Oscar Wilde. Wilde and Shaw are chiefly known as playwrights, but their plays are in effect sparkling essays, like discussions put in the mouths of their characters.

The essay can never be read in a hurry, nor by one who feels himself rushed. The great essayists wrote in the most leisurely manner possible, a very little at a time, and only when in precisely the right mood. In the same way must they be read-alone, before an open fire, of a long winter evening. The woman who delights in these things will sit curled up in a great easy-chair, her head tipped against the back, the light well shaded over her shoulder. The man will, if he is a smoker, inevitably want his pipe. No modern cigar will do, and the vulgarity of chewing is utterly inconsistent with a taste for reading essays. It is the refined, imaginative, and dreamy who especially enjoy this form of literature.

NOTE.-Most of the essays mentioned in this chapter will be found in a volume entitled The Best English Essays, edited by Sherwin Cody.

1 Barrie's great novel is The Little Minister.

CHAPTER VIII

OLD NOVELS THAT ARE GOOD

T THE top of the ladder of literature is poetry, to which only a few succeed in climbing. Next is the essay, a large comfortable niche cut in the side of the rock of ages, which is never crowded, and so is all the more grateful to those who frequent it. And down at the bottom is the novel, which we all read.

Novels are read for various reasons, which are not often truthfully set down by the professional critic. Truth, however, is always best, and no one need be ashamed of it.

Most of us read novels for the same reason that we go to the theater for amusement. We want to get away from the weary commonplace things about us, and get some refreshment by dipping into another world. Perhaps our social world is narrow; but in a good novel we may move in the best society. Possibly we are ambitious, and wish to read of the things we would like to have if we could. Reading about them is next best to having them. Or possibly our world is so unexciting and dreary that we need the excitement of an exciting novel to keep us from dying of decay. Excitement is a good thing, really necessary to life, however bad it may be when carried to extremes. Some people become feverish in their chase for excitement and in their constant reading of exciting novels; but we

must not condemn the healthy for the excesses of the mentally sick.

The excitement afforded by novels is of several different kinds. There is the excitement of love and passion—perhaps the most deeply grained sentiment of the human heart, and apparently the most necessary to health of the heart, especially in these days when our spontaneous emotions are constantly being repressed. Then there is the excitement of travel and adventure. Finally we have the novel of intellectual piquancy, the book full of epigrams and smart sayings such as Oscar Wilde might have written. The novel of love and passion may be the lascivious and dirty book, or may sin equally by being the weakly sentimental Sunday-school story. The abuse of the novel of travel and adventure is the cheap dime novel, or the high-priced dime novel calied the historical romance. And the extreme of the epigrammatic story is the snobby smart novel, which tends to make prigs of us. This last novel is largely a modern development.

In any of these lines a novel is good if it gives us real men and women, acting naturally and truly, and is written with sufficient rapidity and lightness. The great sin in a novel is ignorance of human nature; and the next sin is dullness. Either is fatal.

The oldest examples of modern fiction are two great collections of tavern tales- Boccaccio's Decameron and the Arabian Nights. These stories were told to amuse; because they amused those who listened to them, they have well succeeded in amusing English readers for several hundred years since. The Decameron is largely a series of stories of love and passion. They are many of them exceedingly