FREDERIC HARRISON’S essay “On the Choice of Books,” which appeared in 1886, is one of the most notable literary essays of the generation to which its author belongs. It was widely discussed and, it may be imagined, with some asperity by the generation which it characterized as reading Zola’s seventeenth romance and listening to “Pinafore” for three hundred nights. Such a generation, according to Mr. Harrison, will read critical observations on the sublime and the beautiful, but will neither recognize them nor care for them. He speaks in a striking way of the “nausea which idle culture seems to produce” for what is best in literature. The symptoms he thus describes undoubtedly existed to a marked extent and they were undoubtedly diseased, but they belong as naturally to every transition state resulting from the diffusion of knowledge, as measles and similar disagreeable eruptions do to childish growth.

  Harrison was born in London, October 18th, 1831. He graduated at Oxford, studied law, and began his literary career as an essayist on legal and ethical subjects. Among his works are “The Weaving of History,” “Order and Progress,” “Social Statics,” “Oliver Cromwell,” and “The Annals of an Old Manor House.”