y that in times past you have tried your best to make
others think with you?"

"It was our duty."

"Well, let it pass for that. It amounted to an effort to make your
mental sclerosis infectious, and it was all the worse because, in you,
the stiffening of the tastes had taken the form of aversions rather than
preferences. You did not so much wish your readers to like your favorite
authors as to hate all the others. At the time when there was a fad for
making lists of The Hundred Best Authors, I always wondered that you
didn't put forth some such schedule."

"We had the notion of doing something of the kind," the Easy Chair
confessed, "but we could not think of more than ten or a dozen really
first-rate authors, and if we had begun to compile a list of the best
authors we should have had to leave out most of their works. Nearly all
the classics would have gone by the board. What havoc we should have
made with the British poets! The Elizabethan dramatists would mostly
have fallen under the ban of our negation, to a play, if not to a man.
Chaucer, but for a few poems, is impossible; Spenser's poetry is
generally duller than the Presidents' messages before Mr. Roosevelt's
time; Milton is a trial of the spirit in three-fourths of his verse;
Wordsworth is only not so bad as Byron, who thought him so much worse;
Shakespeare himself, when he is reverently supposed not to be
Shakespeare, is reading for martyrs; Dante's science and politics
outweigh his poetry a thousandfold, and so on through the whole
catalogue. Among the novelists----"

"No, don't begin on the novelists! Every one knows your heresies there,
and would like to burn you along with the romances which I've no doubt
you would still commit to the flames. I see you are the Bourbon of
criticism; you have learned nothing and forgotten nothing. But why don't
you turn your adamantine immutability to some practical account, and
give the world a list of The Hundred Worst Books?"

"Because a hundred books out of the worst would be a drop out of the
sea; there would remain an immeasurable welter of badness, of which we
are now happily ignorant, and from which we are safe, as long as our
minds are not turned to it by examples."

"Ah," our visitor said, "I see that you are afraid to confess yourself
the popular failure as a critic which you are. You are afraid that if
you made a list of The Hundred Worst Books you would send the classes to
buying them in the most expensiv