r. Augustine Birrell
makes it, I think, a point of friendship that a man should love George
Borrow, whom I think to appreciate is an excellent but an acquired taste;
there are others who would propose _Mark Rutherford_ and the _Revelation
in Tanner's Lane_ as a sound test for a bookman's palate. But . . . de
gustibus . . . !

It is the chief office of the critic, while encouraging all honest work
which either can instruct or amuse, to distinguish between the books
which must be content to pass and the books which must remain because
they have an immortality of necessity.

According to the weightiest of French critics of our time the author of
such a book is one "who has enriched the human mind, who has really added
to its treasures, who has got it to take a step further . . . who has
spoken to all in a style of his own, yet a style which finds itself the
style of everybody, in a style that is at once new and antique, and is
the contemporary of all the ages." Without doubt Sainte-Beuve has here
touched the classical quality in literature as with a needle, for that
book is a classic to be placed beside Homer and Virgil and Dante and
Shakespeare--among the immortals--which has wisdom which we cannot find
elsewhere, and whose form has risen above the limitation of any single
age. While ordinary books are houses which serve for a generation or two
at most, this kind of book is the Cathedral which towers above the
building at its base and can be seen from afar, in which many generations
shall find their peace and inspiration. While other books are like the
humble craft which ply from place to place along the coast, this book is
as a stately merchantman which compasses the great waters and returns
with a golden argosy.

The subject of the book does not enter into the matter, and on subjects
the bookman is very catholic, and has an orthodox horror of all sects. He
does not require Mr. Froude's delightful apology to win the _Pilgrim's
Progress_ a place on his shelf, because, although the bookman may be far
removed from Puritanism, yet he knows that Bunyan had the secret of
English style, and although he may be as far from Romanism, yet he must
needs have his A'Kempis (especially in Pickering's edition of 1828), and
when he places the two books side by side in the department of religion,
he has a standing regret that there is no _Pilgrim's Progress_ also in
Pickering.

Without a complete Milton he could not be content.