THE 64 PIGSKIN LIBRARY ” 
527 
certain people care for, and therefore what they ought to have, as 
there is no harm in such collections; though, personally, I doubt 
whether there is much good, either, in this tidbit ” style of 
literature. 
Let me repeat that Mr. Eliot’s list is a good list, and that my 
protest is merely against the belief that it is possible to make any 
list of the kind which shall be more than a list as good as many 
scores or many hundreds of others. Aside from personal taste, we 
must take into account national tastes and the general change in 
taste from century to century. There are four books so pre¬ 
eminent—the Bible, Shakespeare, Homer, and Dante — that I 
suppose there would be a general consensus of opinion among the 
cultivated men of all nationalities in putting them foremost ; l but 
as soon as this narrow limit was passed there would be the wildest 
divergence of choice, according to the individuality of the man 
making the choice, to the country in which he dwelt, and the 
century in which he lived. An Englishman, a Frenchman, a 
German, an Italian, would draw up totally different lists, simply 
because each must necessarily be the child of his own nation. 2 * 
We are apt to speak of the judgment of “ posterity ” as final; 
but 44 posterity ” is no single entity, and the “ posterity ” of one 
age has no necessary sympathy with the judgments of the 
“ posterity ” that preceded it by a few centuries. Montaigne, in a 
very amusing and, on the whole, sound essay on training children, 
mentions with pride that when young he read Ovid instead of 
wasting his time on 46 4 King Arthur,’ 4 Lancelot du Lake,’ . . . and 
such idle time-consuming and wit-besotting trash of books, wherein 
youth doth commonly amuse itself.” Of course the trashy books 
which he had specially in mind were the romances which Cervantes 
1 Even this may represent too much optimism on my part. In Ingres’s picture 
on the crowning of Homer, the foreground is occupied by the figures of those whom 
the French artist conscientiously believed to be the greatest modern men of letters. 
They include half a dozen Frenchmen—only one of whom would probably have been 
included by a painter of some other nation—and Shakespeare, although reluctantly 
admitted, is put modestly behind another figure, and only a part of his face is 
permitted to peek through. 
2 The same would be true, although of course to a less extent, of an American, 
an Englishman, a Scotchman, and an Irishman, in spite of the fact that all speak 
substantially the same language. I am entirely aware that if I made an anthology 
of poems I should include a great many American poems—like Whittier’s “Snow- 
Bound,” “ Ichabod,” and “ Laus Deo ” ; like Lowell’s “ Commemoration Ode ” and 
‘ Biglow Papers ”—which could not mean to an Englishman what they mean to 
me. In the same way, such an English anthology as the “Oxford Book of 
English Verse ” is a good anthology—as good as many other anthologies—as long 
as it confines itself to the verse of British authors. But it would have been far 
better to exclude American authors entirely; for the choice of the American verse 
included in the volume, compared in quantity and quality with the correspond¬ 
ing British verse of the same period which is selected, makes it impossible to 
treat the book seriously, if it is regarded as a compendium of the authors of both 
countries. 
