528 
APPENDIX F 
not long afterwards destroyed at a stroke. But Malory’s book and 
others were then extant; and yet Montaigne, in full accord with 
the educated taste of his day, saw in them nothing that was not 
ridiculous. His choice of Ovid as representing a culture and 
wisdom immeasurably greater and more serious, shows how much 
the judgment of the “ posterity ” of the sixteenth century differed 
from that of the nineteenth, in which the highest literary thought 
was deeply influenced by the legends of Arthur’s knights, and 
hardly at all by anything Ovid wrote. Dante offers an even more 
striking instance. If 66 posterity’s ’’judgment could ever be accepted 
as final, it would seem to be when delivered by a man like Dante in 
speaking of the men of his own calling who had been dead from 
one to two thousand years. Well, Dante gives a list of the six 
greatest poets. One of them, he modestly mentions, is himself, 
and he was quite right. Then come Virgil and Homer, and then 
Horace, Ovid, and Lucan! Nowadays we simply could not under¬ 
stand such a choice, which omits the mighty Greek dramatists 
(with whom in the same canto Dante shows his acquaintance), and 
includes one poet whose works come about in the class of the 
“ Columbiad.” 
With such an example before us, let us be modest about 
dogmatizing overmuch. The ingenuity exercised in choosing the 
“ Hundred Best Books” is all right if accepted as a mere amuse¬ 
ment, giving something of the pleasure derived from a missing-word 
puzzle. But it does not mean much more. There are very many 
thousands of good books; some of them meet one man’s needs, 
some another’s; and any list of such books should simply be 
accepted as meeting a given individual’s needs under given con¬ 
ditions of time and surroundings. 
Khartoum, March 15 , 1910 . 
