The appeal of contemporary books is so constant and urgent that it stands in small need of emphasis; but the claims of the rich and splendid literature of the past are often slighted or ignored.

The supreme masters of an art ought to be the objects of constant study and thought; there is more of life, truth, and beauty in them than in their fellow-artists of narrower range of experience and artistic achievement.

For this reason these greatest interpreters of the human spirit are in no sense exclusively of the past; they are of the present and the future.

To know them is not only to know the particular periods in which they wrote, but to know our own period in the deepest sense.

No man can better prepare himself to enter into the formative life of his time than by thoroughly familiarising himself with the greatest books of the past; for in these are revealed, not the secrets of past forms of life, but the secrets of that spirit whose historic life is one unbroken revelation of its nature and destiny.