Carlyle still had long to wait for anything like adequate appreciation. This man of commanding genius at forty-two years of age remained unrecognized. From his youth up he had given his best thought and spirit to a studious literary life. At the University of Edinburgh he had been first among his fellows, his industry in reading unexampled, so that the stories told of it can be matched only by the stories told of Buckle and Macaulay. His splendid faculties and early achievements had been freely acknowledged by those competent to judge of them, and at graduation he had left with his professors a realization that their best student of many years had gone. At forty-two Carlyle had already done work which now survives among the finest products of his mind, those matchless "Essays" that have been more widely read than anything else he ever wrote, and yet at that age, after he had in vain been seeking a publisher for his "French Revolution," he could declare to Emerson that the manuscript "like an unhappy ghost still lingers on the wrong side of Styx; the Charon of Albemarle Street (John Murray) durst not risk it in his sutilis cymba." He wrote later that he had "given up the motion of hawking the little manuscript book about any further; for a long time it has lain quiet in its drawer waiting for a better day."

Hawthorne's life illustrates more forcibly perhaps than that of any other American author the difficult road literary genius had to travel in his day in this country. Between his first book, "Fanshawe" and "The Scarlet Letter" lapsed a period lacking only one year of a quarter of a century. It was not until "The Scarlet Letter' appeared that anything like proper recognition came to Hawthorne.

In line with this thought is the route by which fame came to Gilbert White, of whose "Selborne" frequent editions, some of them resplendent, are still issued, while many authors who had fame in White's day are quite unread, their names known to the curious only. White was long an obscure churchman, devoting his years to a garden and to fields

about Selborne. Selborne no more than scores of other English villages, offered material from study of which a great book might be produced. Remote from great towns, it remained unknown. White himself was scarcely better known. Few of his own townsmen had any acquaintance with him. To them he was quite incomprehensible, a strange and silent, tho industrious man, doing work that promised no reward, the most unworldly of his kind. And yet White did for Selborne what no other man save Thoreau ever did for a small village by writing of its natural history-made it worldfamous, and made himself one to whom a statue might well lift up its face. Stratford, Ecclefechan, Alloway, Selborne, Concord-these are villages blest with world-renown because great writers were born in them, or lived in them, or wrote about them.

The supreme merit of a good book is that its value survives the lapse of time. It does not go out of fashion. Its appeal is to the elemental, the universal, the permanent in human life. The pleasure it gives is capable of constant renewal in the same mind. None can say when he has derived his last pleasure from truly great authors. Most readers find, as they grow in years, so do they grow in appreciation of the best books. No man ever opened Shakespeare without experiencing a new pleasure. The same is true of Milton or Chaucer, of Byron or Wordsworth, of Landor or Thackeray, of Hawthorne or Fielding. They become stanch and lifelong friends, who never weary us, are always hospitable, and can be trusted implicitly to maintain with fidelity the larger half of the friendship. The last word can never be said in praise of them. Praise of written words began at the beginning of knowledge. The rude savage praised mere records before he could possibly understand them. Great books have been praised with all the laudation that the speech of wise men could frame. The fairest words have come from Emerson:

"Consider what you have in the smallest, well-chosen library. A company of the wisest and wittiest men that could be

picked out of all civilized countries in a thousand years have set in best order the results of their learning and wisdom. The men themselves were hid and inaccessible, solitary, impatient of interruption, fenced by etiquette, but the thought which they did not uncover to their bosom friends is here written in transparent words to us, the strangers of another age."

Apart from the books they wrote, there has existed in most great writers much else on which the world has set high value. The books were scarcely more than the normal and logical expressions of great personalities. The men themselves were often as fine as the books they wrote. Indeed, in not a few instances, there was something finer in the man than in the book. It is a consoling discovery to make that men and women reserve their highest regard for character rather than for achievement-character that chief thing among all that is developed by experience of life. In most heroes of the author class something finer will be found in the man than in anything disclosed in his writings. Conspicuously true of Sir Walter Scott, it is scarcely less true of Milton and of others-for example, of Tolstoy.

Tolstoy's writings have carried his name far and will carry it to remote generations. He made Russia familiar to thousands to whom that land, save as a brutal force in war, was unknown. Slight was the interest of the common mind in that vast and voiceless empire spread over two continents, until Tolstoy pictured in moving story the burdens and sorrows of its life. Tolstoy gave to Russia a voice which all men heard. But when readers saw that he was not merely a writing man, but one who carried out in his own life the simple Christian faith he preached in his books, living as lived the poor, selling his goods to feed the poor, he rose to a hero's place. As an author, his name has gone round the world, but as a man his character has sunk deep into the world's central heart. This is a far more rare and a nobler thing to achieve.