any reputable sense of the word--let alone your
learning to write English--is, in short, impossible. And the
framers of the Statute, recognising this, have very sensibly
compromised by setting you to work on such things as 'the
Outlines of English Literature'; which are not Literature at all
but are only what some fellow has to say about it, hastily
summarising his estimates of many works, of which on a generous
computation he has probably read one-fifth; and by examining you
on (what was it all?) 'language, metre, literary history and
literary criticism,' which again are not Literature, or at least
(as a Greek would say in his idiom) escape their own notice being
Literature. For English Literature, as I take it, is _that which
sundry men and women have written memorably in English about
Life._ And so I come to my subject--the art of reading _that,_
which is Literature.

V

I shall take leave to leap into it over another man's back, or,
rather over two men's backs. No doubt it has happened to many of
you to pick up in a happy moment some book or pamphlet or copy of
verse which just says the word you have unconsciously been
listening for, almost craving to speak for yourself, and so sends
you off hot-foot on the trail. And if you have had that
experience, it may also have happened to you that, after ranging,
you returned on the track 'like faithful hound returning,' in
gratitude, or to refresh the scent; and that, picking up the book
again, you found it no such wonderful book after all, or that
some of the magic had faded by process of the change in yourself
which itself had originated. But the word was spoken.

Such a book--pamphlet I may call it, so small it was--fell into
my hands some ten years ago; "The Aims of Literary Study"--no
very attractive title--by Dr Corson, a distinguished American
Professor (and let me say that, for something more than ten--say
for twenty--years much of the most thoughtful as well as the most
thorough work upon English comes to us from America). I find, as
I handle again the small duodecimo volume, that my own thoughts
have taken me a little wide, perhaps a little astray, from its
suggestions. But for loyalty's sake I shall start just where Dr
Corson started, with a passage from Browning's, "A Death in the
Desert," supposed (you will remember)--

Supposed of Pamphylax the Antiochene

narrating the death of St John the Evangelist, John of Patmos;
the narrative interrupted by