Page:Compromises (Repplier).djvu/97

characters or to control our energies, we shall not find the list an imposing one. There will be little or nothing to tell a listening world. Rather may we incline to the open skepticism of Lord Byron: "Who was ever altered by a poem?" Even presuming that we are happy enough to detach ourselves from contemporary criticism, and to read for human delight; even presuming that, after a lifetime of effort, we have learned to recognize perfection in literary art, and to turn of our own free will to those lonely works which "in the best and noblest sense of a good and noble word, should be, and forever remain, essentially unpopular;" even then it does not follow that we are mastered by the books we love. There still remains to us that painful and unconquerable originality, which is not defiant, but only helplessly incapable of submission. "Giving a reason for a thing," says Dr. Johnson, "does not make it right." Let us hope that being unable to give a reason for a thing does not prove us wrong. The Rev. Mark Pattison, who was the most unflinching reader of his day, who looked upon money only as a substance convertible