526 
APPENDIX F 
any list of good books with any other list of good books in the 
sense of saying that one list is 66 betteror “ worse 11 than another. 
Of course a list may be made up of worthless or noxious books; 
but there are so many thousands of good books that no list of 
small size is worth considering if it purports to give the “ best ” 
books. There is no such thing as the hundred best books, or the 
best five-foot library; but there can be drawn up a very large 
number of lists, each of which shall contain a hundred good books 
or fill a good five-foot library. This is, I am sure, all that 
Mr. Eliot has tried to do. His is in most respects an excellent 
list, but it is of course in no sense a list of the best books for all 
people, or for all places and times. The question is largely one 
of the personal equation. Some of the books which Mr. Eliot 
includes I would not put in a five-foot library, nor yet in a fifty- 
foot library; and he includes various good books which are at 
least no better than many thousands (I speak literally) which he 
leaves out. This is of no consequence so long as it is frankly 
conceded that any such list must represent only the individual’s 
personal preferences, that it is merely a list of good books, and 
that there can be no such thing as a list of the best books. It 
would be useless even to attempt to make a list with such pre¬ 
tensions unless the library were to extend to many thousand 
volumes, for there are many voluminous writers, most of whose 
writings no educated man ought to be willing to spare. For 
instance, Mr. Eliot evidently does not care for history; at least, he 
includes no historians as such. Now, personally, I would not 
include, as Mr. Eliot does, third or fourth rate plays, such as those 
of Dryden, Shelley, Browning, and Byron (whose greatness as 
poets does not rest on such an exceedingly slender foundation as 
these dramas supply), and at the same time completely omit 
Gibbon and Thucydides, or even Xenophon and Napier. Macaulay 
and Scott are practically omitted from Mr. Eliot’s list; they are 
the two nineteenth-century authors that I should most regret to 
lose. Mr. Eliot includes the iEneid and leaves out the Iliad ; to 
my mind this is like including Pope and leaving out Shakespeare. 
In the same way, Emerson’s “ English Traits ” is included and 
Holmes’s “ Autocrat ” excluded—an incomprehensible choice from 
my standpoint. So with the poets and novelists. It is a mere 
matter of personal taste whether one prefers giving a separate 
volume to Burns or to Wordsworth or to Browning ; it certainly 
represents no principle of selection. 66 1 Promessi Sposi ” is a 
good novel; to exclude in its favour “ Vanity Fair,” “ Anna 
Karenina,” “ Les Miserables,” “ The Scarlet Letter,” or hundreds 
of other novels, is entirely excusable as a mere matter of personal 
taste, but not otherwise. Mr. Eliot’s volumes of miscellaneous 
essays, “ Famous Prefaces” and the like, are undoubtedly just what 
