Read it through once

Literary history is an ideal order, which is modified by the introduction of new facts as they are found to be compatible with the existing order. The past should be altered by the present as much as the present is directed by the past. The historical sense involves a perception, not only of the pastness of the past, but of its presence; the historical sense compels a man to write not merely with his own generation in his bones, but with a perception that the whole of literature forms an order.