ble in comparison with [`A] Kempis. His
philosophy of life seemed to lead to nothing except the cultivation of a
very high opinion of oneself. I gave this conclusion to one of my
English friends, who objected to my uncharted course of reading, and he
said, "A person like you who finds nothing humorous or even
philosophical in 'Alice in Wonderland' cannot be expected to like the
works of Marcus Aurelius!"

It takes a prig to divide his reading into nicely staked off little
plots, each with its own date. The art of injudicious reading, the art
of miscellaneous reading which every normal man ought to cultivate, is a
very fine and satisfactory art; for the best guide to books is a book
itself. It clasps hands with a thousand other books. It has always
seemed to me that "Sesame and Lilies" would not have been conceived by
Ruskin if he had not heard well an echo of "The Following of Christ."
There was a time when the lovers of Ruskin who wanted to read "The
Stones of Venice" and the rest at leisure, felt themselves obliged to
form clubs, and to divide the expense, if they were of moderate means,
in order to get what was good out of him. But somehow or other, probably
because it appealed more to everybody, it was always possible to find a
copy of "Sesame and Lilies" at an old book stand. I think I found one
most unexpectedly at Leary's in Philadelphia, where I also discovered
the copy of Froissart. The Froissart, as I have said, cost me just half
of my father's Christmas present that year, which was five dollars. I
must have managed to get the Ruskin volume out of some other fund, for I
had many things to buy with the other two and one half dollars!

Ruskin is left alone to-day; he does not seem to fill that "long-felt
want" which we, the young of the sixties and seventies, admitted. No
doubt he is very mannered in his style, mitred and coped when he might
have been very simple in his raiment. He was a priest in literature and
art; and he clothed himself as a priest. He marched with a stately
tread, and yet he stooped to the single violets by the wayside.

By the way, I often wished when I was reading Ruskin, who once made
apple blossoms fashionable, that he had led a crusade against the double
and the triple violet, which have destroyed the reputation of the real
violet. What can be more repellent to the lovers of simplicity than a
bunch of these artificialities, without perfume, tied by dark green
ribbon, and with all thei