Note * — Chapter XXIX · Permanence as a Criterion

But circumstances which have nothing to do with value sometimes determine survival, and work which is of great value must often perish for that very reason. It never gets printed, none will look at it or listen to it. And immortality often attaches itself to the bad as firmly as to the good. Few things are worse than Hiawatha or The Black Cat, Lorna Doone or Le Crime de Silvestre Bonnard, and some of the greatest favourites* of the anthologies figure there through their ‘bad eminence’.