Page:Le Morte d'Arthur - Volume 1.djvu/434

 and the New World at large, which we hope will preserve Kant's " Perpetual Peace" under the auspices of the League of Nations. That is only one small item, however, in a library list which is running on to the final centuries of its Thousand. The largest slice of this huge provision is, as a matter of course, given to the tyrannous demands of fiction. But in carrying out the scheme, publishers and editors contrived to keep in mind that books, like men and women, have their elective affinities. The present volume, for instance, will be found to have its companion books, both in the same section and just as significantly in other sections. With that idea too, novels like Walter Scott's Ivanhoe and Fortunes of Nigel, Lytton's Harold, and Dickens's Tale of Two Cities, have been used as pioneers of history and treated as a sort of holiday history books. The poets next, and we may turn to the finest critic of Victorian times, Matthew Arnold, as their showman, and find in his essay on Maurice de Guerin a clue to the " magical power of poetry." William Hazlitt's "Table Talk" may help again to show the relationship of one author to another, which is another form of the Friendship of Books. His incomparable essay, "On Going a Journey," forms a capital prelude to Coleridge's " Bio- graphia Literaria"; and so throughout the long labyrinth of the Library shelves, one can follow the magic clue in prose or verse that leads to the hidden treasury. In that way every reader becomes his own critic and Doctor of Letters.