ou may be very wrong; logically,
scientifically, historically, ethically altogether wrong; and yet you
may exercise an irresistible literary fascination over your own
generation and all that follow. Charles Lamb speaks disdainfully of
books which are no books, things in books' clothing. He had in mind Adam
Smith's _Wealth of Nations_, essays on population, treatises on moral
philosophy, and so forth. He meant that such works are works, but no
literature. Mill's _Logic_, geographical descriptions, guidebooks, the
_Origin of Species_, whatever may be the value of such volumes for
thought or knowledge, they are not literature. There is only one test to
apply to such books as those. If their statements are true, if their
reasoning is accurate, if their exposition is clear, such works are good
of their kind. Nevertheless, it is scarcely literary judgment which
judges them. You might as well apply "architectural" criticism to our
rows of tin-roofed cottages or to the average warehouse or wool-store or
tramshed. These are buildings, but they are not architecture.

Meanwhile Herodotus, with all his superstitions, his credulity and
mistakes; Plato, with all his blunders in elementary logic; Homer,
with all his naive ignorance of science and the wide world; Dante,
despite his cramped outlook; Milton, in spite of his perverse
theologizing--these and their like are, and will always be, literature.
No matter if Carlyle's _French Revolution_ be in reality as far from
the literal truth as the work of Froude, yet Carlyle and Froude are
literature, along with Herodotus and Livy and Froissart, while the most
scrupulously exact of chronicles may be but books.

The charm of supreme literature is independent of its date or country.
The current literary taste varies, we know, at different periods and in
different places. There are successive fashions and schools of
literature and literary principle--an Attic, an Alexandrian, an
Augustan, a Renaissance Italian, an Elizabethan, a Louis Quatorze, a
Queen Anne, a nineteenth century Romantic. And yet from each and all of
these there will stand out one or two writers, sometimes more, whom we
have enthroned in the literary Pantheon, and whose place there among the
gods seems only to grow the more assured as time goes on.

Now, what is it that is left, the common _residuum_, to all these
literary masters; to Homer, Sappho, AEschylus, Plato, Theocritus,
Juvenal; to Dante, Chaucer, Shakespeare, Moli