ON THE EE-EEADING OF BOOKS 229 



through it. I suppose I found too much dogma in 

 it. Arnold makes a dogma out of what he calls the 

 " method and secret of Jesus," his " method of inr 

 wardness " and " secret of self-renunciation ; " he 

 iterates and reiterates these phrases till one never 

 wants to hear them again. Arnold's hesetting sin 

 of giving a quasi-scientific value to certain literary- 

 terms here has free rein, and one finds only a new 

 kind of infiiexibility in place of the one he con- 

 demns. Sir Thomas Browne directed a free play of 

 mind upon the old dogmas, and the result was the 

 " Eeligio Medici," a work which each generation 

 treasures and re-reads, not because of the dogma, but 

 because of the literature ; it is a rare specimen of 

 vital, flexible, imaginative writing. It is full of 

 soul, like Emerson's "Divinity School Address," 

 which sought to dissolve certain of the old dogmas. 

 In both these authors we are made free as the spirit 

 makes free ; but in Arnold's criticism we are made- 

 free only as a liberal Anglicanism makes free, which 

 is not much. 



The books that we do not like to part with after 



we have read them, that we like to keep near us, 



like Amiel's " Journal," say, — are probably the books 

 that our children's children will like to have around. 

 A Western woman once paid an Eastern author this 

 rare compliment. "Most of the new books," she 

 said, " we see at the public library ; but your books 

 we always buy, because we like to have them: in the 

 house." Probably it is the personal element in a 

 book, the quality of the writer, that alone endears 



