f EXLIBKISUNIVERSI!YOFCALIFOKNIA* JOHN HENRY NASH LIBRARY SAN FRANCISCO PRESENTED TO THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA ROBERT GORDON SPROULPRESIDENT. MR.ANDMRS.MILTON S.RAV CECILY, VIRGINIAANDROSALYN RAY AND THE RAY OIL BURNER COMPANY The Committee on Publications of the Grolier Club certifies that this copy of "One Hundred Books Famous in English Literature" is one of three hundred and five copies printed on hand-made paper, and that all were printed during the year nineteen hundred and two. ONE HUNDRED BOOKS FAMOUS IN ENGLISH LI 'ERATURE ONE HUNDRED BOOKS | FAMOUS IN | ENGLISH LITERATURE j WITH FACSIMILES OF j THE TITLE-PAGES AND AN INTRODUCTION BY I GEORGE E. WOODBERRY Copyright, 1902, by THE GROLIER CLUB OF THE CITY OF NEW YORK FACSIMILE TITLES TITLE AUTHOR DATE PAGE First Page of the Canterbury Tales . . . Chaucer . 1478 . 3 First Page of the Confessio Amantis . . Gower . . 1483 . 5 First Page of the Morte Arthure . . . Malory . 1485 . 7 The Booke of Common Praier 1 549 . 9 The Vision of Pierce Plowman .... Langland . 1550 . n Chronicles of England, Scotlande, and Irelande Holinshed . 1577 . 13 A Myrrour for Magistrates 1 563 . 1 5 Songes and Sonettes Surrey . . 1567 . 17 The Tragidie of Ferrex and Porrex . . Sackville . 1570 . 19 Euphues. The Anatomy of Wit . . . Lylie . . 1579 . 21 The Countesse of Pembrokes Arcadia . . Sidney . . 1590 . 23 The Faerie Queene Spenser. . 1590 . 25 Essaies Bacon . . 1598 . 27 The Principal Navigations, Voiages, Traffiques and Discoveries of the English Nation Hakluyt . 1598 . 29 The Whole Works of Homer .... Chapman . 1 6 1 1 . 31 TM, u i TJ-UI King James's , The Holy Bible tf 1611. ** Version The Workes of Benjamin Jonson . . . Jonson . . 1616 . 35 The Anatomy of Melancholy Burton . . 1621 . 37 vii FACSIMILE TITLES TITLE AUTHOR DATE PAGE Mr. William Shakespeares Comedies, His- tories, & Tragedies Shakespeare 1623 . 39 The Tragedy of the Dutchesse of Malfy . Webster . 1623 . 41 A New Way to Pay Old Debts .... Massinger . 1633 . 43 The Broken Heart Ford . . 1633 . 45 The Famous Tragedy of the Rich Jew of Malta Marlowe . 1633 . 47 The Temple Herbert . 1633 . 49 Poems Donne . . 1633 . 51 Religio Medici Browne. . 1642 . 53 The Workes of Edmond Waller Esquire 1645 . 55 Comedies and Tragedies and^Sdier l6 ^ ' 57 Hesperides Herrick . . 1648 . 59 The Rule and Exercises of Holy Living . Taylor . . 1650 . 61 The Compleat Angler Walton . . 1653 . 63 Hudibras Butler . . 1663 . 65 Paradise Lost Milton . . 1667 . 67 The Pilgrims Progress Bunyan . . 1678 . 69 Absalom and Achitophel Dryden . . 1681 . 71 An Essay Concerning Humane Understanding Locke . . 1690 . 73 The Way of the World Congreve . 1700 . 75 The History of the Rebellion and Civil Wars in England Clarendon . 1702 . 77 The Lucubrations of Isaac Bickerstaff Esq. Steele . . 1710 . 79 The Spectator Addison . 1711 . 81 The Life and Strange Surprizing Adventures of Robinson Crusoe Defoe . . 1719 . 83 viii FACSIMILE TITLES TITLE AUTHOR DATE PAGE Travels into Several Remote Nations of the World Swift . . 1726 . 85 An Essay on Man Pope . . 1733 . 87 The Analogy of Religion Butler . . 1736 . 89 Reliques of Ancient English Poetry . . Percy . . 1765 . 91 Odes on Several Descriptive and Allegoric Subjects Collins . . 1747 . 93 Clarissa Richardson 1748 . 95 The History of Tom Jones Fielding . 1749 . 97 An Elegy Wrote in a Country Church Yard Gray . . 1751 . 99 A Dictionary of the English Language . Johnson . 1755 . 101 Poor Richard's Almanack Franklin . 1758 . 103 Commentaries on the Laws of England . Blackstone. 1765 . 105 The Vicar of Wakefield Goldsmith. 1766 . 107 A Sentimental Journey Sterne . . 1768 . 109 The Federalist 1788 . in The Expedition of Humphry Clinker . . Smollett i6[7J7i . 113 An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations Smith . . 1776 . 115 The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire Gibbon . . 1776 . 117 The School for Scandal Sheridan . 1777 . 119 The Task Cowper . 1785 . 121 Poems, Chiefly in the Scottish Dialect . . Burns . . 1786 . 123 The Natural History and Antiquities of Selborne White . . 1789 . 125 Reflections on the Revolution in France . Burke . . 1790 . 127 ix FACSIMILE TITLES TITLE AUTHOR DATE PAGE Rights of Man Paine . . 1791 . 129 The Life of Samuel Johnson Boswell. . 1791 . 131 Lyrical Ballads Wordsworth 1798 . 133 A History of New York, from the Begin- ning of the World to the End of the Dutch Dynasty Irving . . 1809 . 135 Childe Harold's Pilgrimage Byron . . 1812 . 137 Pride and Prejudice Austen . . 1813 . 139 Christabel Coleridge . 1816 . 141 Ivanhoe Scott . . 1820 . 143 Lamia, Isabella, The Eve of St. Agnes, and Other Poems Keats . . 1820 . 145 Adonais Shelley . . 1821 . 147 Elia Lamb . . 1823 . 149 Memoirs of Samuel Pepys, Esq. F.R.S. . Pepys . . 1825 . 151 The Last of the Mohicans Cooper. . 1826 . 153 Pericles and Aspasia Landor . . 1836 . 155 The Pickwick Papers Dickens . 1837 . 157 Sartor Resartus Carlyle . . 1834 . 159 Nature Emerson . 1836 . 161 History of the Conquest of Peru . . . Prescott . 1847 . 163 The Raven and Other Poems .... Poe . . . 1845 . 165 Jane Eyre Bronte . . 1847 . 167 Evangeline Longfellow 1847 . 169 Sonnets Mrs. Browning 184 7 . 171 The Biglow Papers Lowell . . 1848 . 173 Vanity Fair Thackeray. 1848 . 175 FACSIMILE TITLES TITLE AUTHOR DATE PAGE The History of England Macaulay . 1 849 . 177 In Memoriam Tennyson . 1850 . 179 The Scarlet Letter Hawthorne 1850 . 181 Uncle Tom's Cabin Mrs. Stowe 1852 . 183 The Stones of Venice Ruskin . . 1851 . 185 Men and Women Browning . 1855 . 187 The Rise of the Dutch Republic . . . Motley. . 1856 . 189 Adam Bede George Eliot 1859 . 191 On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection Darwin. . 1859 . 193 Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam Fitzgerald . 1859 . 195 Apologia pro Vita Sua Newman . 1864 . 197 Essays in Criticism Arnold . . 1865 . 199 Snow-Bound . . . Whittier 1866 201 Except where noted, all facsimiles of title-pages are of the size of those in the original editions. XI INTRODUCTION BOOK is judged by its peers. In the presence of the greater works of authors there is no room for personal criticism; they constitute in themselves the perpetual mind of the race, and dispense with any private view. The eye rests on these hundred titles of books famous in English literature, as it reads a physical map by peak, river and coast, and sees in miniature the intellectual conformation of a na- tion. A different selection would only mean an- other point of view ; some minor features might be replaced by others of similar subordination; but the mass of imagination and learning, the mind- achievement of the English race, is as unchange- able as a mountain landscape. Perspective thrusts its unconscious judgment upon the organs of xiv INTRODUCTION sight, also; if Gower is thin with distance and the clump of the Elizabethans shows crowded with low spurs, the eye is not therefore deceived by the large pettiness of the foreground with its more numerous and distinct details. The mass governs. Darwin appeals to Milton; Shelley is judged by Pope, and Hawthorne by Congreve. These books must of necessity be national books; for fame, which is essentially the highest gift of which man has the giving, cannot be conferred ex- cept by a public voice. Fame dwells upon the lips of men. It is not that memorable books must all be people's books, though the greatest are such the Book of Common Prayer, the Bible, Shake- speare; but those which embody some rare intel- lectual power, or illuminate some seldom visited tract of the spirit, or merely display some peculiar taste in learning or pastime, must yet have some- thing racial in them, something public, to secure their hold against the detaching power of time; they must be English books, not in tongue only, but body and soul. They are not less the books of a nation because they are remote, superfine, un- common. Such are the books of the poets the Faerie Queene; books of the nobles Arcadia; books of the scholar the Anatomy of Melan- choly. These books open the national genius as truly, kind by kind, as books of knowledge exhibit the nation's advancement in learning, stage by stage, when new sciences are brought to the birth. INTRODUCTION xv The Wealth of Nations, Locke's Essay, Black- stone's Commentaries, are not merely the product of private minds. They are landmarks of English intellect; and more, since they pass insensibly into the power of civilization in the land, feeding the general mind. The limited appeal that many clas- sics made in their age, and still make, indicates lack of development in particular persons; but however numerous such individuals may be, in whatever majorities they may mass, the mind of the race, once having flowered, has flowered with the vigor of the stock. The Compleat Angler finds a rustic breast under much staid cloth ; Pepys was never at a loss for a gossip since his seals were broken, and Donne evokes his fellow-eccentric whose hermitage is the scholar's bosom; but whether the charm work on few or on many is in- different, for whom they affect, they affect through consanguinity. The books of a nation are those which are appropriate to its genius and embody its variations amid the changes of time; even its sports, like Euphues, are itself; and the works which denote the evolution of its civilized life in fructifying progress, whose increasing diversities are yet held in the higher harmony of one race, one temperament, one destiny, are without metaphor its Sibylline books, and true oracles of empire. It is a sign of race in literature that a book can spare what is private to its author, and comes at last to forgo his earth-life altogether. This is xvi INTRODUCTION obvious of works of knowledge, since positive truth gains nothing from personality, but feels it as an alloy; and a wise analysis will affirm the same of all long-lived books. Works of science are charters of nature, and submit to no human caprice; and, in a similar way, works of imagina- tion, which are to the inward world of the spirit what works of science are to the natural universe, are charters of the soul, and borrow nothing from the hand that wrote them. How deciduous such books are of the private life needs only to be stated to be allowed. They cast biography from them like the cloak of the ascending prophet. An author is not rightly to be reckoned among im- mortals until he has been forgotten as a man, and become a shade in human memory, the myth of his own work. The anecdote lingering in the Mermaid Tavern is cocoon-stuff, and left for waste; time spiritualizes the soul it released in Shakespeare, and the speedier the change, so much the purer is the warrant of a life above death in the minds of men. The loneliness of antique names is the austerity of fame, and only therewith do Milton, Spenser, Chaucer, seem nobly clad and among equals; the nude figure of Shelley at Oxford is symbolical and prophetic of this dis- encumberment of mortality, the freed soul of the poet, like Bion, a divine form. Not to speak of those greatest works, the Prayer Book, the Bible, which seem so impersonal in origin as to be the INTRODUCTION xvii creation of the English tongue itself and the genius of language adoring God; nor of Hakluyt or Clarendon, whose books are all men's actions; how little do the most isolated and seclusive authors, Surrey, Collins, Keats, perpetuate except the pure poet! In these hundred famous books there are few valued for aught more than they contain in themselves, or which require any other light to read them by than what they bring with them; they are rather hampered than helped by the recollection of their authors' careers. Sidney adds lustre to the Arcadia; an exception among men, in this as in all other ways, by virtue of that something supereminent in him which dazzled his own age. But who else of famous authors is greater in his life than in his book? It is the book that gives significance to the man, not the man to the book. These authors would gain by oblivion of themselves, and that in proportion to their greatness, thereby being at once removed into the impersonal region of man's permanent spirit and of art. The exceptions are only seem- ingly such; it is Johnson's thought and the style of a great mind that preserve Boswell, not his human grossness; and in Pepys it is the mundane and every-day immortality of human nature, this permanently curious and impertinent world, not his own scandal and peepings, that yield him allowance in libraries. In all books to which a na- tion stands heir, it is man that survives, the as- xviii INTRODUCTION pect of an epoch, the phase of a religion, the mood of a generation, the taste, sentiment, thought, pur- suit, entertainment, of a historic and diversified people. There is nothing accidental in the fact that of these hundred books forty-six bear no author's name upon the title-page; nor is this due merely to the eldest style of printing, as with Chaucer, Gower, Malory, Langland; nor to the inclusion of works by several hands the Book of Common Prayer, the Mirror for Magistrates, the Tatler, the Spectator, the Reliques, the Fed- eralist; nor to the use of initials, as in the case of Donne and Mrs. Browning. The characteris- tic is constant. It is interesting to note the names thus self-suppressed: Sackville, Spenser, Bacon, Burton, Browne, Walton, Butler, Dryden, Locke, Defoe, Swift, Pope, Richardson, Gray, Franklin, Goldsmith, Sterne, Smollett, Sheridan, White, Wordsworth, Irving, Austen, Scott, Lamb, Cooper, Carlyle, Emerson, Bronte, Lowell, Tennyson, George Eliot, Fitzgerald. The broad and various nationality of English literature is a condition precedent to greatness, and underlies its mighty fortune. Its chief glory is its continuity, by which it exceeds the moderns, and must, with ages, surpass antiquity. Literary ge- nius has been so unfailing in the English race that men of this blood live in the error that litera- ture, like light and air, is a common element in the life of populations. Literature is really the INTRODUCTION xix work of selected nations, and with them is not a constant product. Many nations have no litera- ture, and in fertile nations there are barren cen- turies. The splendid perpetuity of Greek literature, which covered two thousand years, was yet broken by lean ages, by periods of desert dearth. In the English, beginning from Chaucer (as is just, since he is our Homer, whatever ages went before Troy or Canterbury), there have been reigns without a poet; and Greek example might prepare the mind for Alexandrian and Byzantine periods in the future, were it not for the grand combinations of world-colonies and world-contacts which open new perspectives of time for which the mind, as part of its faith in life, requires destinies as large. The gaps, however, were greatest at the be- ginning, and grow less. One soil, one govern- ment, one evenly unfolded civilization long life in the settled and peaceful land contribute to this continuity of literature in the English; but its ex- planation lies in the integrity of English nurture, and this is essentially the same in all persons of English blood. Homer was not more truly the school of Greece than the Bible has been the school of the English. It has overcome all exter- nal change in form, rule and institution, fused con- venticle and cathedral, and in dissolving separate and narrow bonds of union has proved the greatest bond of all, and become like a tie of blood. Eng- lish piety is of one stock, and through every book xx INTRODUCTION of holy living where its treasures are laid up, there blows the breath of one Spirit Herbert and Bunyan are peers of a faith undivided in the hearts of their countrymen. It does not change, but is the same yesterday, to-day and forever. On the secular side, also, English nurture has been of the like simple strain. The instinct of adventure, English derring-do, has never failed. Holinshed and Hakluyt were its chroniclers of old; and from the Morte d' Arthur to Sidney, from the Red-Cross Knight to Ivanhoe, from Shakespeare's Henry to Tennyson's Grenville, genius has not ceased to stream upon it, a broad river of light. The Word of God fed English piety; English daring was fed upon the deeds of men. Hear Shakespeare's Henry: "Plutarch always delights me with a fresh novelty. To love him is to love me; for he has been long time the instructor of my youth. My good mother, to whom I owe all, and who would not wish, she said, to see her son an illustrious dunce, put this book into my hands almost when I was a child at the breast. It has been like my conscience, and has whispered in my ear many good suggestions and maxims for my conduct and the government of my affairs." The English Plu- tarch is written on the earth's face. Its battles have named the lands and seas of all the world; but, as was said of English piety, from Harold to Cromwell, from the first Conqueror to Welling- ton, from the Black Prince to Gordon, English INTRODUCTION xxi daring the strength of the yeoman, the breath of the noble is of one stock. Race lasts; those who are born in the eyrie find eagles' food. This has planted iron resolution and all-hazarding courage in epic-drama and battle-ode, and, as in the old riddle, feeds on what it fed. English liter- ature is brave, martial, and brings forth men-chil- dren. It has the clarion strength of empire; like Taillefer at Hastings, Drayton and Tennyson still lead the charge at Agincourt and Balaclava. As Shakespeare's Henry was nourished, so was the English spirit in all ages bred. This integrity of English nurture, seen in these two great modes of life turned toward God in the soul and toward the world in action, is as plainly to be discerned in details as in these generalities; and to state only one other broad aspect of the facts governing the continuity of literary genius in the English, but one that goes to the foundations, the condition that both vivifies and controls that genius in law, metaphysics, science, in all political writing, whether history, theory, or discussion, as well as in the creative and artistic modes of its develop- ment, is freedom. The freedom of England, which is the parent of its greatness in all ways, is as old in the race as fear of God and love of peril; and, through its manifold and primary operation in English nurture, is the true continuer of its literature. A second grand trait of English literature that xxii INTRODUCTION is writ large on these title-pages, is its enormous assimilative power. So great is this that he who would know English must be a scholar in all lit- eratures, and that with no shallow learning. The old figure of the torch handed down from nation to nation, as the type of man's higher life, gives up its full meaning only to the student, and to him it may come to seem that the torch is all and the hand that bears it dust and ashes; often he finds in its light only the color of his own studies, and names it Greek, Semitic, Hindu, and looks on English, French and Latin as mere carriers of the flame. In so old a symbol there must be profound truth, and it conveys the sense of antiquity in life, of the deathlessness of civilization, and something also of its superhuman origin the divine gift of fire transmitted from above; but civilization is more than an inheritance, it is a power; and truth is always more than it was ; and wherever the torch is lit, its light is the burning of a living race of men. The dependence of the present on the past, of a younger on an older people, of one nation on another, is often misinterpreted and misleads; life cannot be given, but only knowledge, example, direction influence, but not essence; and the im- pact of one literature upon another, or of an old historic culture upon a new and ungrown people, is more external than is commonly represented. The genius of a nation born to greatness is irre- sistible, it remains itself, it does not become an- INTRODUCTION xxiii other. The Greeks conquered Rome, men say, through the mind; and Rome conquered the bar- barians through the mind; but in Gibbon who finds Greece? and the mind of Europe does not bear the ruling stamp of either Byzantine or Italian Rome. In the narrowly temporal and per- sonal view, even under the overwhelming might of Greece, Virgil remained, what Tennyson calls him, "Roman Virgil"; and in the other capital in- stance of apparently all-conquering literary power, under the truth that went forth from Judea into all lands, Dante remained Italian and Milton English. Yet in these three poets, whose names are syn- onyms of their countries, the assimilated element is so great that their minds might be said to have been educated abroad. What is true of Milton is true of the young English mind, from Chaucer and earlier. In the beginning English literature was a part of Euro- pean literature, and held a position in it analogous to that which the literature of America occupies in all English speech; it was not so much colonial as a part of the same world. The first works were European books written on English soil; Chaucer, Gower and Malory used the matter of Europe, but they retained the tang of English, as Emerson keeps the tang of America. The name applied to Gower, "the moral Gower," speaks him English; and Arthur, "the flower of kings," remains forever Arthur of Britain; and the Can- xxiv INTRODUCTION terbury pilgrimage, whatever the source of the world-wandering tales, gives the first crowded scene of English life. In Lan gland, whose form was mediaeval, lay as in the seed the religious and social history of a protestant, democratic, and labor-honoring nation. In the next age, with the intellectual sovereignty of humanism, Surrey, Sackville, Lyly, Sidney and Spenser put all the new realms of letters under tribute, and made capture with a royal hand of whatever they would have for their own of the world's finer wealth; the dramatists gathered again the tales of all na- tions; and, period following period, Italy, Spain and France in turn, and the Hebrew, Greek and Latin unceasingly, brought their treasures, light or precious, to each generation of authors, until the last great burst of the age now closing, itself indebted most universally to all the past and all the world. Yet each new wave that washed em- pire to the land retreated, leaving the genius of English unimpaired and richer only in its own strength. Notwithstanding the concettisti, the heroic drama, the Celtic mist, which passed like shadows from the kingdom, the instinct of the authors held to the massive sense of Latin and the pure form of Greek and Italian, and constituted these the enduring humane culture of English letters and their academic tradition. The perma- nence of this tradition in literary education has been of vast importance, and is to the literary INTRODUCTION xxv class, in so far as they are separate by training, what the integrity of English nurture at large has been to the nation. The poets, especially, have been learned in this culture; and, so far from be- ing self-sprung from the soil, were moulded into power by every finer touch of time. Chaucer, Spenser, Milton, Gray, Shelley, Tennyson are the capital names that illustrate the toil of the scholar, and approve the mastery of that classical culture which has ever been the most fruitful in the choicest minds. As on the broad scale English literature is distinguished by its general assimila- tive power, being hospitable to all knowledge, it is most deeply and intimately, because continu- ously, indebted to humane studies, in the strictest sense, and has derived from them not, as in many other cases, transitory matter and the fashion of an hour, but the form and discipline of art itself. In assimilating this to English nature, literary genius incurred its greatest obligation, and in thereby dis- covering artistic freedom found its greatest good. This academic tradition has created English cul- ture, which is perhaps best described as an instinc- tive standard of judgment, and is the necessary complement to that openness of mind that has characterized English literature from the first. Nor is this last word a paradox, but the simple truth, as is plain from the assimilative power here dwelt upon. The English genius is always itself; no element of greatness could inhere in it other- xxvi INTRODUCTION wise; but, in literature, it has had the most open mind of any nation. A third trait of high distinction in English lit- erature, of which this list is a reminder, and one not unconnected with its continuity and receptivity, is its copiousness. This is not a matter of mere number, of voluminousness; there is an abundance of kinds. In the literature of knowledge, what branch is unfruitful, and in the literature of power, what fountainhead is unstruck by the rod? Only the Italian genius in its prime shows such supreme equality in diversity. How many human interests are exemplified, and how many amply illustrated, exhibiting in a true sense and not by hyperbole myriad-minded man ! In the English genius there seems something correspondent to this marvellous efficacy of faculty and expression ; it has largeness of power. The trait most commonly thought of in connection with Aristotle as an individual " master of those who know" and in connection with mediaeval schoolmen as a class, is not less characteristic of the English, though it appears less. The voracity of Chaucer for all literary knowledge, which makes him encyclopaedic of a period, is matched at the end of these centuries by Newman, whose capaciousness of intellect was in- clusive of all he cared to know. Bacon, in saying, " I take all knowledge to be my province," did not so much make a personal boast as utter a national motto. The great example is, of course, Shake- INTRODUCTION xxvii speare, on whose universality later genius has exhausted metaphor; but for everything that he knew in little, English can show a large litera- ture, and exceeds his comprehensiveness. The fact is best illustrated by adverting to what this list spares. English is rich in translations, and in this sort of exchange the balance of trade is always in favor of the importer. Homer alone is included here, to except the Bible, which has been so inbred in England as to have become an English book to an eye that clings to the truth through all appearances; but how rich in great national books is a literature that can omit so noble a work, though translated, and one so his- toric in English, as North's Plutarch ! In the literature of knowledge, Greek could hardly have passed over Euclid; but Newton's Principia is here not required. Sir Thomas More is one of the noblest English names, and his Utopia is a memorable book; but it drops from the list. Nor is it names and books only that disappear; but, as these last instances suggest, kinds of literature go out with them. Platonism falls into silence with the pure tones of Vaughan, in whom light seems almost audible ; and the mystic Italian fervor of the passional spirit fades with Crashaw. The books of politeness, though descended from Castiglione, depart with Chesterfield, perhaps from some pettiness that had turned courtesy into eti- quette; and parody retires with Buckingham. xxviii INTRODUCTION Latin literature was almost rewritten in English during the eighteenth century; but the traces of it here are few. Of inadequate representation, how slight is burlesque in Butler, and the pres- ence of Chevy Chase hardly compensates for the absence of the war-ballad in Drayton and Campbell. So it is with a hundred instances. In another way of illustration, it is to be borne in mind that each author appears by only one title; and while it may be true that commonly each finer spirit stores up his immortality in some one book that is a more perfect vessel of time, yet fecundity is rightly reckoned as a sign of greatness and measure of it in the most, and the production of many books makes a name bulk larger. Mass counts, when in addition to quality; and the greatest have been plentiful writers. No praise can make Gray seem more than a remnant of genius, and no qualification of the verdict can deprive Dryden and Jonson of largeness. It be- longs to genius to tire not in creation, thereby imitating the excess of nature flowing from un- husbanded sources. Yet among these hundred books, as in scientific classification, one example must stand for all, except when some folio, like an ark, comes to the rescue of a Beaumont and Fletcher. This is cutting the diamond with itself. But within these limits, narrowing circle within circle, what a universe of man remains ! Culture after culture, epoch by epoch, are laid bare as in INTRODUCTION xxix geologic strata, mediaeval tale and history, hu- manistic form, the Shakespearian age, Puritan, Cavalier, man scientific, reforming, reborn into a new natural, political, artistic world, man modern ; and in every layer of imagination and learning lies, whole and entire, a buried English age. It is by virtue of its copiousness that English litera- ture is so representative, both of man's individual spirit in its restless forms of apprehension and embodiment, and of its historic formulation in English progress as national power. The realization of this long-lived, far- gather ing, abounding English literature, in these external phases, leaves untouched its original force. Whence is its germinating power, what is this genius of the English? It is the same in literature as in all its other manifold manifestations, for man is forever unitary and of one piece. Curiosity, which is the distinction of progressive peoples, is perhaps its initial and moving source. The trait which has sent the English broadcast over the world and mingled their history with the annals of all nations is the same that has so blended their lit- erature with the history of all tongues. The ac- quisitive power which has created the empire of the English, with dominion on dominion, is parallel with the faculty that assimilates past literatures with the body of their literary speech. But curi- osity is only half the word. It is singular that the first quality which occurs to the mind in con- xxx INTRODUCTION nection with the English is, almost universally and often exclusively, their practicality. They are really the most romantic of all nations; romanti- cism is the other half of their genius, and supple- ments that positive element of knowledge-hunting or truth-seeking which is indicated by their end- less curiosity. Possibly the Elizabethan age is generally thought of as a romantic period, as if it were exceptional; and the romantic vigor of the late Georgian period, though everywhere acknow- ledged, is primarily regarded as more strictly a literary and not a national characteristic in its time; but, like all interesting history, English his- tory was continuously romantic. The days of the crusaders, the Wars of the Roses and the French wars were of the same strain in action and char- acter, in adventurous travel, in personal fate, in contacts, as were the times of Shakespeare's world or of the world of Waterloo. What a reinforce- ment of character in the English has India been, how restorative of greatness in the blood ! It must be that romanticism should characterize a great race, and, when appealing to a positive genius, the greatest race; for in it are all the in- vitations of destiny. Futurity broods and brings forth in its nest. Romanticism is the lift of life in a people that does not merely continue, but grows, spreads and overcomes. The sphere of the word is not to be too narrowly confined, as only a bookish phrase of polite letters. INTRODUCTION xxxi In the world of knowledge the pursuit of truth is romantic. The scientific inquirer lives in a realm of strangeness and in the presence of the unknown, in a place so haunted with profound feeling, so electric with the emotions that feed great minds, that whether awe of the unsolved or of the solved be the stronger sentiment he cannot tell; and the appeal made to him to the explorer in every bodily peril, to the experimenter in the den of un- tamed forces, to the thinker in his solitude is often a romantic appeal. The moments of great discoveries are romantic moments, as is seen in Keats' s sonnet, lifting Cortez and the star-gazer on equal heights with the reader of the Iliad. The epic of science is a Columbiad without end. Nor is this less true of those branches of knowledge esteemed most dry and prosaic. Locke, Adam Smith, Darwin were all similarly placed with Pythagoras, Aristotle and Copernicus; the mind, society and nature, severally, were their Americas. Even in this age of the mechanical application of forces, which by virtue of the large part of these inventions in daily and world-wide life seems superficially, and is called, a materialistic age, ro- manticism is paramount and will finally be seen so. Are not these things in our time what Drake and Spanish gold and Virginia, what Clive and the Indies, were to other centuries? It is true that the element of commercial gain blends with other phases of our inventions, and seems a debase- xxxii INTRODUCTION ment, an avarice; but so it was in all ages. Nor are the applications of scientific discovery for the material ends of wealth other or relatively greater now than the applications of geographical dis- covery, for example, to the same ends were in Elizabeth's reign and later. In the first ages commercial gain was in league with the waves from which rose the Odyssey, a part of that early trading, coasting world, as it was always a part of the artistic world of Athens. Gain in any of its material forms, whether wealth, power or rank, does not debase the knowledge, the cour- age of heart, the skill of hand and brain, from which it flows, for it is their natural and proper fruit; nor does it by itself materialize either the man or the nation, else civilization were doomed from the start, and the pursuit of truth would end in humiliation and ignominy. It is rather the attitude of mind toward this new world of know- ledge and this spectacle of man now imperializing through nature's forces, as formerly through dis- covery of the earth's lands and seas, that makes the character of our age. Romanticism, being the enveloping mood in whose atmosphere the spirit of man beholds life, and, as it were, the light on things, changes its aspect in the process of the ages with the emergence of each new world of man's era; and as it once inhered in English loyalty and the piety of Christ's sepulchre, and in English voyaging over-seas and colonizing INTRODUCTION xxxiii of the lands, it now inheres in the conquest of natural force for the arts of peace. The present age exceeds its predecessors in marvel in propor- tion as the victories of the intellect are in a world of finer secrecy than any horizon veils, and build an empire of greater breadth and endurance than any monarch or sovereign people or domineer- ing race selfishly achieves; its victories are in the unseen of force and thought, and it brings among men the undecaying empire of knowledge, as inexpugnable as the mind in man and as inap- propriable as light and air. Here, as elsewhere, it is the sensual eye that sees the sensual thing, but the spiritual eye spiritually discerns. It is romance that adds this "precious seeing" to the eye. Openness to the call, capability of the passion, and character, so sensitized and moulded in indi- viduals and made hereditary in a civilization and a race and idealized in conscience, constitute the motor-genius of a nation, which is its finding fac- ulty; and the appreciation of results and putting them to the use of men make its conserving and positive power. These two, indistinguishably married and blended, are the English genius. A positive genius following a romantic lead, a ro- mantic genius yielding a positive good, equally describe it from opposed points of view; yet in the finer spirits and in the long age the romantic temperament is felt to be the fertilizing element, to be character as opposed to performance. Great- xxxiv INTRODUCTION ness lies always in the unaccomplished deed, as in the lonely anecdote of Newton: " I do not know what I may appear to the world, but to myself I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the seashore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble, or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me." So Tennyson with his "wages of going on," and Sir John Franklin and Gordon in their lives. This spiritual breath of the nation in all its activities through centuries is the breath of its literature, there embodied in its finer being and applied to the highest uses for the civ- ilization and culture of the nation by truth and art. In English literary history, and in its men of genius taken individually, the positive or the ro- mantic may predominate, each in its own moment; but the conspectus of the whole assigns to each its true levels. Romanticism condensed in character, which is the creation of the highest poetic genius, the rarest work of man, has its illustrative ex- ample in Shakespeare, the first of all writers; he followed it through all its modes, and perhaps its simplest types are Henry IV for action, Romeo for passion, and Hamlet, which is the romance of thought. Before Shakespeare, Spenser closed the earliest age, which had been shaped by a diffused romantic tradition, inherited from mediaevalism, though in its later career masked under Renais- sance forms; and since Shakespeare, a similar INTRODUCTION xxxv diffused romantic prescience, in the region of the common life and of revolutionary causes most sig- nificantly, brought in our age that has now passed its first flower, but has yet long to run. These are the three great ages of English poetry. In the interval between the second and the third, the magnificently accomplished school of the eight- eenth century gave to English an age of culti- vated repose, in which Pope, its best example, lived on the incomes of the past, and, together with the younger and the elder men he knew, ex- hibited in literature that conserving and positive power which is the economy of national genius; but even in that great century, wherever the future woke, there was a budding romanticism, in Col- lins, Gray, Walpole, Thomson, Cowper, Blake. Such was the history of English poetry, and the same general statement will be found applicable to English prose, though in a lower tone, due to the nature of prose. Taken in the large, impor- tant as the positive element in it is, the English literary genius is, like the race, temperamentally romantic, to the nerve and bone. This view becomes increasingly apparent on ex- amination of the service of this literature to civili- zation and the individual soul of man, which is the great function of literature, and of its place fn the world of art. "How shall the world be served?" was Chau- cer's question ; and it has never been absent from xxxvi INTRODUCTION any great mind of the English stock. The litera- ture of a nation, however, including, as here, books of knowledge, is so nearly synonymous with the mind in all its operations in the national life, as to be coextensive with civilization, and hardly sep- arable from it. Civilization is cast in the mould of thought, and retains the brute necessity of nature only as mass, but not as surface ; it is the flowering of human forces in the formal aspect of life, and of these literature is one mode, reflecting in its many phases all the rest in their manifestations, and in- wardly feeding them in their vital principle. The universality of its touch on life is indicated by the fact that it has made the English a lettered people, the alphabet as common as numbers, and the abil- ity to read almost as wide-spread in the race as the ability to count. Its service, therefore, cannot be summarized any more than the dictionary of its words. It is possible to bring within the com- pass of a paragraph only hints and guide-marks of its work; and naturally these would be gathered from its most comprehensive influences in the higher spheres of intellect and morals, in the world of ideas, and in the person of those writers who were either the founders or restorers of knowledge. Such a cardinal service was the Baconian method, to take a single great instance, which may almost be said to have reversed the logical habit of the mind of Europe, and to have summoned nature to a new bar. It is enough to name this. Of INTRODUCTION xxxvii books powerful in intellectual results, Locke's Essay is, perhaps, thought of as metaphysical and remote, yet it was of immeasurable influence at home and abroad, so subtly penetrating as to resemble in scale and intimacy the silent forces of nature. It was great as a representative of the spirit of rationalism, which it supported and spread with incalculable results on the temper of educated Europe ; and great also as a product and embodi- ment of that cold, intellectual habit, distinctive of a certain kind of English mind, and usually re- garded as radical in the race. It was great by the variety as well as the range of its influence, and was felt in all regions of abstract thought and those practical arts, education, government and the like, then most affected by such thought; it permanently modified the cast of men's minds. In opposition to it new philosophical movements found their mainspring. A similar honor belongs to Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations in another century. It is customary to eulogize the pioneer, and to credit the first openers of Californias with the wealth of all the mines worked by later comers; and, in this sense, the words of Buckle, that have been placed opposite the title-page, are, perhaps, to be taken: " Adam Smith contributed more, by the publication of this single work, towards the happiness of men than has been effected by the united abilities of all the statesmen and legislators of whom history has preserved an authentic ac- xxxviii INTRODUCTION count." But the excess of the statement is a proof of the largeness of the truth it contains, and like- minded praise is not from Buckle alone, but may be found in half a score of thoughtful and tem- perate authors. In the last age, Darwin, by his Origin of Species, most arrested the attention of the scientific mind, and stimulated the highly edu- cated world with surprise. He was classed with Copernicus, as having brought man's pretension to be the first of created things, and their lord from the beginning, under the destroying criti- cism of scientific time and its order, in the same way that Copernicus brought the pretension of the earth to be the centre of the universe under a like criticism of scientific space and its order; and in these proud statements there is some measure of truth. The ideas of Darwin compel a readjust- ment of man's thoughts with regard to his tem- poral and natural relation to the universe in which he finds himself; and the vast generalities of all evolutionary thought received from Darwin im- mense stimulus, its method greater scope, and its results a firmer hold on the general mind, with an influence still unfathomable upon man's highest beliefs with regard to his origin and destiny. There are epochs in the intellectual history of the race as marked as those of the globe; and such works as these, in the literature of knowledge, show the times of the opening of the seals. In addition to the service so done in the ad- INTRODUCTION xxxix vancement of civilization by the discovery of new truth, as great benefaction is accomplished by the continual agitation and exercise of men's minds in the ideas that are not new but the ever-liv- ing inheritance from the past, whose permanence through all epochs shows their deep grounding in the race they nourish. In English such ideas are, especially, in the view of the whole world, ideas of civil and religious liberty in the widest sense and particularly as worked out in legal and politi- cal history. The common law of England in Blackstone is a mighty legacy. On the large public scale, and as involved in the constitutional making of a great nation, the Federalist is a document invaluable as setting forth essentials of free government under a particular application; and for comment on social liberty, Burke, on the conservative, and Paine, on the radical side, ex- hibit the scope, the weight and fire of English thought. Of still greater significance, for the mass and variety of teaching, is that commentary on man's freedom which is contained in the oper- ation of liberty and its increase as presented in the long story of England's greatness recorded in the works of her historians from Holinshed to Macaulay, with what the last prolific genera- tion has added. They are exceeded in the dig- nity of their labors by Gibbon, whose work on Rome, which Mommsen called the greatest of all histories and is often likened to a mighty bridge xl INTRODUCTION spanning the gulf between the ancient and the modern world, was a contribution to European learning; but the historians of English liberty have more profitably served mankind. At yet another remove, the ideas of liberty and the mind acquainted with English books is dazzled by the vast comprehensiveness of such a phrase are again poured through the nation's life-blood by all her poets, and well-nigh all her writers in prose, in one or another mode of the Promethean fire. These ideas are never silent, never quiescent; they work in the substance, they shape the form and feature, of English thought; they are the ne- cessary element of its being; they constitute the race of freemen, and are known in every language as English ideas. They give sublimity to the figure of Milton; they are the feeding flame of Shelley's mind; they alone lift Tennyson to an eagle-flight of song. In the unceasing celebra- tion of ideal liberty, and its practical life in Eng- lish character and events, the literature of England has, perhaps, done a greater service than in the positive advancement of knowledge, for it is more fundamental in the national life. Touching the subject almost at random, such are a few of the points of contact between English books and the civilization of men. It is still more difficult to state briefly the action of literature on the individual for what is more distinctly his private gain, in the enlargement of INTRODUCTION xli his life, the direction of his thoughts, and bringing him into harmony with the world. As, in regard to civilization, the emphasis lay rather on the liter- ature of knowledge, here it lies on the literature of power, on imaginative and reflective works. Its initial office is educative; it feeds the imagina- tion and the powers of sympathy, and trains not only the affections but all feeling; and in these fields it is the only instrument of education outside of real experience. It is this that gives it such primacy as to make acquaintance with humane letters almost synonymous with culture. No ac- tual world is large enough for a man to live in; at the lowest, there is some tradition of the past, some expectation of the future; and, though train- ing in the senses is an important part of early life, yet the greater part of education consists in putting the young in possession of an unseen world. The biograph is a marvellous toy of the time, but literature in its lower forms of informa- tion, of history, travel and description, has been a biograph for the mind's eye from the beginning; and in its higher forms of art it performs a greater service by bringing into mental vision what it is above the power of nature to produce. To ex- pand the mind to the compass of space and time, and to people these with the thoughts of mankind, to revive the past and penetrate the reality of the present, is the joint work of all literature; and as a preparation for individual life, in unfolding the xlii INTRODUCTION faculties and the feelings, humane letters achieve their most essential task. Literature furnishes the gymnasia for all youth, in that part of their na- ture in which the highest power of humanity lies. But this is only, as was said, its initial office. Throughout life it acts in the same way on old and young alike. The dependence of all men on thought, and of thought on speech, is a profound matter, though as little considered as gravitation that keeps the world entire; and the speech on which such a strain of life lies is the speech of books. How has Longfellow consoled middle life in its human trials, how has Carlyle roused manhood, and Emerson illumined life for his readers at every stage! Scott is a benefactor of millions by virtue of the entertainment he has given to English homes and the lonely hours of his fellow-men, now for three generations, to an extent hardly measurable in thought; and so in hardly a less degree is Dickens, and, though di- minishing in inclusive power, are Thackeray, Aus- ten, Bronte, Cooper, Hawthorne, George Eliot, to name only novelists. Each century has had its own story-telling from Chaucer down, though masked in the Elizabethan period as drama, and in each much hearty and refined pleasure has been afforded by the spectacle of life in books; but in the last age the benefit so conferred is to be reckoned among the greater blessings of civiliza- tion. It is singular that humor, so prime and INTRODUCTION xliii constant a factor in English, should have so few books altogether its own, and these not of the greater class; but the spirit which yields burlesque in Butler and Irving, and comedy in Massinger, Congreve and Sheridan, pervades the body of English literature and characterizes it among na- tional literatures. The highest mind is incomplete without humor, for a perfect idealism includes laughter at the real; and it is natural, for, the principle of humor being incongruity to the in- tellect, it is properly most keen in those in whom the idea of order, which is the mother-idea of the intellect, is most omnipresent and controlling; but as humor is thus auxiliary in character, it is found to be subordinate also in English literature as a whole. The constancy of its presence, how- ever, is a sign of the general health of the Eng- lish genius, which has turned to morbidity far less than that of other nations ancient or mod- ern. It is a cognate fact, here, that great books are never frivolous; they leave the reader wiser and better, as well through laughter as through tears, or they sustain imaginative and sympathetic power already acquired. They open the world of humanity to the heart, and they open the heart to itself. In another region, not primarily of entertainment, the value of literature lies in its function to inspire. In individual life, each finer spirit of the past touches with an electric force those of his own kindred as they are born xliv INTRODUCTION into the world of letters, and often for life. The later poets have most personal power in this way. Burns, Wordsworth, Byron, Shelley have been the inspiration of lives, like Carlyle and Emerson in prose. The most intense example of national inspiration in a book is Uncle Tom's Cabin; but in quieter ways Scotland feels the pulse of Burns, and England the many-mingled throbbing of the poets in her blood. On the large scale, in the impact of literature on the individual soul and through that on the na- tional belief, aspiration and resolve, the great sphere of influence lies necessarily in the religious life, because that is universal and constant from birth to death and spreads among the secret springs and sources of man's essential nature. It is a commonplace, it has sometimes been made a re- proach, that English literature is predominantly moral and religious, and the fact is plainly so. The strain that began with Piers Plowman flour- ished more mightily in the Pilgrim's Progress. The psalm-note that was a tone of character in Surrey, Wyatt and Sidney gave perfect song in Milton, both poet and man. From Butler to Newman the intellect, applied to religion, did not fail in strenuous power. Taylor's Holy Living is a saint's book. If religious poets, of one pure strain of Sabbath melody, have been rare, yet Herbert, Vaughan, Cowper, Keble, Whittier are to the memory Christian names, with the humility INTRODUCTION xlv and breathing peace of sacred song. The portion of English literature expressly religious is en- larged by the works of authors, both in prose and verse, in which religion was an occasional theme and often greatly dealt with; and the religious and moral influence of the body of literature as a whole on the English race is immensely increased by those writers into whom the Christian spirit entered as a master-light of reason and imagina- tion, such as Spenser in the Faerie Queene and Wordsworth in his works generally, or Gray in the solemn thought of the Elegy. To particu- larize is an endless task; for the sense of duty toward man and God is of the bone and flesh of English books in every age, being planted in the English nature. This vast mass of experience and counsel, of praise and prayer, of insight and leading, variously responding to every phase of the religious consciousness of the historic people, has been, like the general harvest, the daily food of the nation in its spiritual life. If Shakespeare is the greatest of our writers, the English Bible is the greatest of our books; and the whole matter is summarized in saying that the Bible, together with the Book of Common Prayer, is the most widely distributed, the most universally influen- tial, the most generally valued and best-read book of the English people, and this has been true since the diffusion of printing. It may seem only the felicity of time that the English language best xlvi INTRODUCTION adorns its best book; but it is by a higher bless- ing that English character centres in this Book, that English thinkers see by it, that English poets feel by it, that the English people live by it; for it has passed into the blood of all English veins. It is natural to inquire, after dwelling so much on the practical power of English literature in society and life, what is its value in the world of art, in that sphere where questions of perfec- tion in the form, of permanence in the matter, and the like, arise. If the standards of an aca- demic classicism be applied, English literature will fall below both Latin and Greek, and the Italian and French, and take a lower place with German and Spanish, to which it is most akin. But such standards are pseudo-classical at best, and under modern criticism find less ground in the ancients. The genius of the English is romantic, and origi- nated romantic forms proper to itself, and by these it should be judged. The time is, perhaps, not wholly gone by when the formlessness of Shake- speare may be found spoken of as a matter of course, as the formlessness of Shelley is still gen- erally alleged; but if neither of these has form in the pseudo-classic, the Italian and French, sense of convention, decorum and limit, they were cre- ators of that romantic form in which English, to- gether with Spanish, marks the furthest original modern advance. The subject is too large, and too much a matter of detail, for this place; but INTRODUCTION xlvii it is the less necessary to expand it, for it is as superfluous to establish the right of Shakespeare in the realm of the most perfect art as to exam- ine the title-deeds of Alexander's conquests. He condensed romanticism in character, as was said above; and in the power with which he did this, in the wisdom, beauty and splendor of his achieve- ment, excelled all others, both for substance and art. The instinct of fame may be safely followed in assigning a like primacy to Milton. The mo- ment which Milton occupied, in the climax of a literary movement, is, perhaps, not commonly ob- served with accuracy. The drama developed out of allegorical and abstract, and through histori- cal, into entirely human and ideal forms; and in Shakespeare this process is completed. The same movement, on the religious as opposed to the sec- ular line, took place more slowly. Spenser, like Sackville, works by impersonation of moral quali- ties, viewed abstractly; the Fletchers, who carried on his tradition, employ the same method, which gives a remote and often fantastic character to their work; nor was moral and religious poetic nar- rative truly humanized, and given ideal power in character and event, until Milton carried it to its proper artistic culmination in Paradise Lost. Mil- ton stands to the evolution of this branch of poetic literature, springing from the miracle-plays, pre- cisely as Shakespeare does to the branch of ideal drama; and thus, although he fell outside of the xlviii INTRODUCTION great age, and was sixty years later than Shake- speare in completing the work, the singularity of his literary greatness, his loneliness as a lofty ge- nius in his time, becomes somewhat less inexplica- ble. The Paradise Lost occupies this moment of climax, to repeat the phrase, in literary history, and, like nearly all works in such circumstances, it has a greatness all its own. But, beyond that, it lies in a region of art where no other English work com- panions it, as an epic of the romantic spirit such as Italy most boasts of, but superior in breadth, in ethical power, in human interest, to Ariosto or Tasso, and comparing with them as Pindar with the Alexandrians; it realized Hell and Eden, and the world of heavenly war and the temptation, to the vision of men, with tremendous imaginative power, stamping them into the race-mind as permanent imagery; and the literary kinship which the work- manship bears to what is most excellent and shin- ing in the great works of Greece, Rome and Italy, as well as to Hebraic grandeur, helps to place the poem in that remoter air which is an association of the mind with all art. No other English poem has a similar brilliancy, aloofness and perfection, as of something existing in another element, except the Adonais. In it personal lyricism achieved the most impersonal of elegies, and mingled the fair- est dreams of changeful imaginative grief with the soul's intellectual passion for immortality full- voiced. It is detached from time and place; the INTRODUCTION xlix hunger of the soul for eternity, which is its sub- stance, human nature can never lay off; its liter- ary kinship is with what is most lovely in the idyllic melody of the antique; and, owing to its small scale and the simple unity of its mood, it gives forth the perpetual charm of literary form in great purity. These two poems stand alone with Shakespeare's plays, and are for epic and lyric what his work is for drama, the height of English performance in the cultivation of romance. Other poets must be judged to have attained excellence in romantic art in proportion as they reveal the qualities of Shakespeare, Milton and Shelley; for these three are the masters of romantic form, which, being the spirit of life proceeding from within outward, is the vital structure of English poetic genius. This internal power is also a principle of classic art in its antique examples; but academic criticism developed from them a hardened formal- ism to which romantic art is related as the spirit of life to the death-mask of the past. Such pal- lor has from time to time crossed the features of English letters in a man or an age, and has brought a marble dignity, as to Landor, or the shadow of an Augustan elegance, as in the era of Pope; but it has faded and passed away under the flush of new life. Even in prose, in which so-called classic qualities are still sought by aca- demic taste, the genius of English has shown a native obstinacy. The novel is so Protean in 1 INTRODUCTION form as to seem amorphous, but essentially repeats the drama, and submits in its masters to Shake- spearian parallelism; in substance and manner it has been overwhelmingly of a romantic cast; and in the other forms of prose, style, though of all varieties, has, perhaps, proved most preservative when highly colored, individualized, and touched with imaginative greatness, as in Browne, Taylor, Milton, Bunyan, Burke, Carlyle, Macaulay; but the inferiority of their matter, it should be ob- served, affects the endurance of the eighteenth- century prose masters Steele, Addison, Swift and Johnson, to name the foremost. Commonly, it must be allowed, English, both prose and poetry, notwithstanding its triumphs, is valued for sub- stance and not for form, whether this be due to a natural incapacity, or to a retardation in devel- opment which may hereafter be overcome, or to the fact that the richness of the substance renders the fineness of the form less eminent. In conclusion, the thought rises of itself, will this continuity, assimilative power, and copious- ness, this original genius, this serviceableness to civilization and the private life, this supreme ro- mantic art, be maintained, now that the English and their speech are spread through the world, or is the history of the intellectual expansion of Ath- ens and Rome, the moral expansion of Jerusalem, to be repeated ? The saying of Shelley, " The mind in creation is a fading coal," seems to be true of INTRODUCTION li nations. Great literatures, or periods in them, have usually marked the culmination of national power; and if they "look before and after," as Virgil in the ^neid, they gather their wisdom, as he too did, by a gaze reverted to the past. The paradox of progress, in that the laudator temporis acti is always found among the best and noblest of the elders, while yet the whole world of man ever moves on to greater knowledge, power and good, continues like the riddle of the Sphinx; but time seems unalterably in favor of mankind through all dark prophecies. The mystery of genius is unsolved; and the Messianic hope that a child may be born unto the people always re- mains; but the greatness of a nation dies only with that genius which is not a form of human greatness in individuals, but is shared by all of the blood, and constitutes them fellow-country- men. The genius of the English shows no sign of decay; age has followed age, each more glori- ously, and whether the period that is now closing be really an end or only the initial movement of a vaster arc of time, corresponding to the greater English destiny, world-wide, world-peopling, world-freeing, the arc of the movement of democ- racy through the next ages, is immaterial; so long as the genius of the people, its piety and dar- ing, its finding faculty for truth, its creative shaping in art, be still integral and vital, so long as its spiritual passion be fed from those human and Hi INTRODUCTION divine ideas whose abundance is not lessened, and on those heroic tasks which a world still half discovered and partially subdued opens through the whole range of action and of the intellectual and moral life, so long as these things endure, English speech must still be fruitful in great ages of literature, as in the past these have been its fountainheads. But if no more were to be written on the page of English, yet what is writ- ten there, contained and handed down in famous books and made the spiritual food of the vast mul- titude whose children's children shall use and read the English tongue through coming centuries under every sky, will constitute a moral dominion to which Virgil's line may proudly apply His ego nee metas rerum nee tempora pono : Imperium sine fine dedi. <>ne feunlivct) Boofes jfamoujs in digits!) literature Dan Chaucer, the first warbler, whose sweet breath Preluded those melodious bursts that fill The spacious times of great Elizabeth With sounds that echo still. TENNYSON of mac cfic fatty gab y tgft nty fobtty cucrp ft^ne tn fuc^c Ptooutr tn m^rg an orO|pt9 anty ^ g^n in fy wtp ^ff ^10 cours g wwne fbufic* tita6c mctbbie t) at ngg$t tJSi^ cpptj ge ^o p!t'6i> ^rn) natutx m f)tr coragc C^t) Kigptg fbf 6 & go Qtnt^ fPmer :^ fi Qtn6? 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Ibouncso ^nj fo tfjaf ftnuc wmmpfc^ Co MS figt pneft for fo fax rjje onfbfto Jt)otb pt2nojeftr< of $iefgulb^ftf fbfto | gl J)olb ot^wn fbv fcft^nj ^pon Oeatn? tbas forne^hj (b an^idtrfofto (1 s tftc 6u( one ej /g fbfto fiuncfe ^ jo on? cr? te Jtjolb tiBpp ttucs fbfto fau fgnne/o fbfio | / ^ efmp?0 fco rt) matmttj of Reduced Leaf in original, 8.68x12.75 inches Flos regum Arthurus JOHN OF EXETER jffrt }aOfato aecompfgfffro? ano fengfjfeo . c _. flgflorgee atflbcS of wnfompCacgot) ae of otfjc* ^(fc V ^ ,rga? ano? tbotfofj acfce of gtefe conqiwcout $ pr^t cte/Ttn^ affo oet^i| 6bo0eeof enfatimpfco an^oodtpne^ 2 memangano? oft^mee/tbOetfov J$at j 6ouc no( Co mate tic 2o/ (tie \l%cfe Bcoug^ ^c c^^ocit) of QfcafrC nj to t^c fenOc of fecono fiDawgo? C?"^ of 36ecuraP)/ ^ % KJgto? of Kfcfc 4tx tQe 6j)6Ce ttQcroetQ aC t^ept no and? nom6ct op t tb^imc tbae fgcft t?c no6& TtctQuc / tbfre no6f acfre 3 put poffe !bpng/ 3:ft? fccono? tbae C^tGrmagn o: ftuGw t^ g;or6r/ of ^(jomc %fforpe ie man? pCacee 6b(Qc m fomffk ano? cn^Cpfffe/ ano; tQe atto? Cap tbae 6&Qef cap of 6ofopn/of ^fr> e acfee c ^f a 6oofi 9ntb tQc^affeni pij?noe ano? 6png? of no6fc me mor H026t>tbaro2 C^fburtQ / ffo fag^ no6K? 3n^emc| me Ormpt^nCe t^^orjc of tQ* fapa? no6& ano? conqu*nmt 6^nga Tttt^ut /ano; of i)ie finpg^s ^^otpe of ffa fat>ne gwaC/anD of eQc tet6 ano? cnopng of t^e ragty 71 tt^ut/ Tiff etmp 1192 (fia< j oaje m$ noBla fea^e / e^at| of cjoteftqw o Reduced Leaf in original, 7.87x11.25 inches So judiciously contrived that the wisest may exercise at once their knowledge and devo- tion; its ceremonies few and innocent; its language significant and perspicuous; most of the words and phrases being taken out of the Holy Scriptures and the rest are the expressions of the first and purest ages. COMBER 8 fcoofce of tSe tommott pjaiet aimrimttratum of tpe , anb otbeT tttesr anU ceremonies L O N D I N I , in oicina^icljttrdi Grafton^ imtareflcrtt* Cum priuttcgio ad imprimendumfolum . A.mo Domw. M. D. X L t X. Wen/e Mftty. Reduced Leaf in original, 7.5x10.5 inches The author of Piers Ploughman, no doubt, embodied in a poetic dress just what millions felt. His poem as truly expressed the pop- ular sentiment on the subjects it discussed as did the American Declaration of Indepen- dence the national thought and feeling on the relations between the Colonies and Great Brit- ain. Its dialect, its tone and its poetic dress alike conspired to secure to the Vision a wide circulation among the commonalty of the realm, and by formulating to use a favor- ite word of the day sentiments almost uni- versally felt, though but dimly apprehended, it brought them into distinct consciousness, and thus prepared the English people for the reception of the seed which the labors of Wycliffe and his converts were already sow- ing among them. MARSH 10 By far the most important of our historical records, in print, during the time of Queen Elizabeth. DIBDIN 12 Firfte volume of the Cbronwles of England ,Sc ot~ lande, and Irelande. CONTEYNlNGi ccn ant) allotuct). f c. $? Imprinted at London by lohn Daye, dwelling oiir Alderfgate. These papers of his lay like dead lawrels in a churchyard; but I have gathered the scattered branches up, and by a charme, gotten from Apollo, made them greene againe and set them up as epitaphes to his memory. A sinne it were to suffer these rare monuments of wit to lye covered in dust and a shame such conceipted comedies should be acted by none but wormes. Oblivion shall not so trample on a sonne of the Muses ; and such a sonne as they called their darling. Our nation are in his debt for a new English which he taught them. " Euphues and his England " began first that language : all our ladyes were then his scol- lers ; and that beautie in court, which could not parley Eupheueisme was as little regarded as shee which now there speakes not French. BLOUNT 20 EVPHVES. THE ANATOMY Verie pleafant for all (jentlcmen to reade^ and molt ncccflary to remember. ein are contayned the delightes that wit followeth in hit youth* ly thepteafdntneffe of tone, and the happinellc lie leapech in age, by the perfetnc$ of wifcdomc. By lohn Lylie, Mdf/lc r I Corrcltedend augmented. ^T LON DON Printed for Gabriel! Cawood, dwelling in Panics Church-yard. The noble and vertuous gentleman most worthy of all titles both of learning and chevalrie M. Philip Sidney. SPENSER 22 COVNTESSE WRITTEN BY SIR PHILIPPE S I D N E L LONDON Printed for William Ponfbnbie. t^nno Domini, ijpo. Our sage and serious poet Spenser (whom I dare be known to think a better teacher than Scotus or Aquinas). MILTON 24 THE FAERIE QVEENE. Difpofed into twelue books, fafaioning XII. Morall vertues. LONDON Priatcd for William Ponfonbic. 1 5 9 o. Who is there that upon hearing the name of Lord Bacon does not instantly recog- nize everything of literature the most extensive, everything of discovery the most penetrating, everything of observa- tion of human life the most distinguished and refined ? BURKE 26 EfTai aies. Religious dilations. Places of perfwafion and diflwafion. Scene and allowed* LONDON Printed for Humfrey Hooper and are to bee foldc at the blacke Beare in Chaun- cerylane. 1598. They contain the heroic tales of the exploits of the great men in whom the new era was inaugurated ; not mythic like the Iliads and the Eddas, but plain, broad narratives of substantial facts, which rival legend in interest and grandeur. What the old epics were to the royally or nobly born, this mod- ern epic is to the common people. We have no longer kings or princes for chief actors to whom the heroism, like the dominion of the world, had in time past been confined. But, as it was in the days of the Apostles, when a few poor fishermen from an obscure lake in Palestine assumed, under the Divine Mission, the spiritual authority over mankind, so, in the days of our own Elizabeth, the seamen from the banks of the Thames and the Avon, the Plym and the Dart, self-taught and self-directed, with no impulse but what was beat- ing in their own royal hearts, went out across the unknown seas, fighting, discovering, colonizing, and graved out the channels, paving them at last with their bones, through which the commerce and enterprise of England has flowed out over all the world. FROUDE 28 PRINCIPAL NAVI- GATIONS, VOIAGES, TRAFFIQJVES AND DISCO- ueriesof the Englifh Nation, made by Sea or ouer-land , to the remote and fartheft di- flant quarters of the Earth, at any time within the compafle of thefe 1500. yeeres : Deuided into three feuerall Volumes, according to the pofitions of the Regions, whercunto they were direfled. ThisfirftVolumecontainingthewoorthyDifcoueries, &c. of the Englifh toward the North and Northeaft by Sea, goieue, faigafz, and Noua Zembla, toward the great riuer Ob t with the mighty Empire of Rujpa y the Cafpian fea, Geor- gia, Armenia, Media, Per/ta, Bog/jar in Baflria, and diuers kingdoms of Tartaria : Together with many notable monuments and teftimo- nies of the ancient forren trades, and of the warrelike and other fliipping of this realme of England in former ages. Whereunto is annexed alfo a brief e Commentarie of the true flate of I/land, and of the Northren Seas and lands fituate that way. And lajily, the memorable defeate of the Spanifi huge Armada, Anno 1588. and the famous vi&orie atchieued at the citie of Cadiz, 1596. are defcribed. toy RICHARD HA cict VVT Majler cf Artes, and fometime Student of Chritl- Church in Oxford. Jjf Imprinted at London by GEORGE BISHOP, RALPH NEWBERIE and ROBERT BARKER. 1598. Reduced Leaf in original, 7x10.87 inches Much have I travell'd in the realms of gold And many goodly states and kingdoms seen ; Round many western islands have I been Which bards in fealty to Apollo hold. Oft of one wide expanse had I been told That deep-brow'd Homer ruled as his demesne ; Yet did I never breathe its pure serene Till I heard Chapman speak out loud and bold : Then felt I like some watcher of the skies When a new planet swims into his ken ; Or like stout Cortez, when with eagle eyes He stared at the Pacific and all his men Look'd at each other with a wild surmise Silent, upon a peak in Darien. KEATS in Irowm, THE WHOLE WORKS OF HOMER; PRINCE OF POETTS^ In lais Iliads , and Odyfacs . Omma ab. Jiis;et m bisjunt omma,: ~T Printed by Ifaac laggard, and Ed. Blount. 1 61 j. Reduced Leaf in original, 8.56x13.25 inches This most tragic of all tragedies save King Lear. SWINBURNE 40 THE TRAGEDY OF By the Kings Maiefties Seruants. The perfect and exaft Coppy, with diuerfe things Printed^tbflt the length of the Play would ooi beare in the Prcfencmenr. Written by John Webjler. flora.* ' Candida t ImperttpnoHbu vttrt mticttm. LONDON' Printed by NICHOLAS O*BS 3 for IP aw WATERS ON, and are to be fold at the figoe of the Crow/ic , in 'Ptutlts Church-yaid , 1623. To me Massinger is one of the most interesting as well as one of the most delightful of the old dramatists, not so much for his passion or power, though at times he reaches both, as for the love he shows for those things that are lovely and of good report in hu- man nature, for his sympathy with what is generous and high-minded and hon- orable and for his equable flow of a good every-day kind of poetry, with few rapids or cataracts, but singularly soothing and companionable. LOWELL 42 A NEW WAY TO PAT OLD DEBTS A COMOEDIE t hath beene often atted at the *Ph by the Queenes <\>faiefties feruants . The Author. PHILIP MASSINGER,. LONDON, Printed by P. forHemy Seyle , dwelling in S. Pauls Church-yard , at the figne of the Tylers head. Anno. JM. DC. ' XXXHL Ford was of the first order of poets. He sought for sublimity, not by parcels in metaphors or visible images, but directly where she has her full residence in the heart of man ; in the actions and suffer- ings of the greatest minds. There is a grandeur of the soul above mountains, seas, and the elements. Even in the poor perverted reason of Giovanni and Anna- bella we discover traces of that fiery par- ticle, which in the irregular starting from out of the road of beaten action, discovers something of a right line even in obliquity, and shows hints of an improvable great- ness in the lowest descents and degrada- tion of our nature. LAMB 44 THE BROKEN HEART. A Tragedy. By the K i N G s Majcfties Scruants at the priuate Houie ia the Printed by /.>. for HVGH be fdd at his S)iop t neert the GifiMr it) !5 1 Next Marlow, bathed in the Thespian springs, Had in him those brave sublunary things That the first poets had ; his raptures were All air and fire which made his verses clear ; For that fine madness still he did retain, Which rightly should possess a poet's brain. DRAYTON Tbe THE RICH IEVV OF MALTA. IT WAS PLAYD BEFORE THE KINO AND QVEENE, IN HIS MAJESTIES Theatre at Wkite-Hnll^y herMajefties Servants at the Cock-fit. Writttnb) CHRISTOJHERMARLO. Printed by I. S. for Nicholas rtrotfotar., and are to be fold at bis Shop in the Inner-Temple, mere the Church. 1 6 3 j. Sir, I pray deliver this little book to my dear brother Farrar, and tell him he shall find in it a picture of the many spiritual conflicts that have passed betwixt God and my soul, before I would subject mine to the will of Jesus, my Master, in Whose service I have now found perfect freedom. Desire him to read it ; and then, if he can think it may turn to the advantage of any dejected poor soul, let it be made public; if not, let him burn it; for I and it are less than the least of God's mercies. HERBERT ess sea* es THE TEMPLE. SACRED POEMS AND PRIVATE EJA- CULATIONS. ^ By M'. GEORGE HERBERT. PSAL. 29. /> Temple doth every manfpeak of his honour. CAMBRIDGL Printed by Thorn. Buck, and /?og?r "Daniel, printers to the Umverfitic. Did his youth scatter poetry wherein Lay Love's philosophy? Was every sin Pictured in his sharp satires, made so foul, That some have fear'd sin's shapes, and kept their soul Safer by reading verse: did he give days, Past marble monuments, to those whose praise He would perpetuate? Did he I fear Envy will doubt these at his twentieth year? But, more matured, did his rich soul conceive And in harmonious holy numbers weave A crown of sacred sonnets, fit to adorn A dying martyr's brow, or to be worn On that blest head of Mary Magdalen, After she wiped Christ's feet, but not till then; Did he fit for such penitents as she And he to use leave us a Litany Which all devout men love, and doubtless shall, As times grow better, grow more classical? Did he write hymns, for piety and wit, Equal to those great grave Prudentius writ? WALTON J. WITH EL E G I ES ON THE AUTHORS DEATH. LONDON. Printed by M.F. for JOHN and are cobefold achis fliopinSc2)/& Church-yard in Fleet-Jreet, 1633. It is not on the praises of others, but on his own writings that he is to depend for the esteem of pos- terity ; of which he will not easily be deprived while learning shall have any reverence among men; for there is no science in which he does not discover some skill; and scarce any kind of knowledge, pro- fane or sacred, abstruse or elegant, which he does not appear to have cultivated with success. JOHNSON Waller was smooth. POPE 54 THE VV O R K E S , V.'7;.'.'r.','' OF SEDMOND WALLER 1 ! Efquire, | Lately a Member of the Ho- nourable HOUSE of COMMON s, In this prefent Parliament. NA.BKEHI. LONDON, Primed for Them 1645. O volume, worthy, leaf by leaf and cover, To be with juice of cedar washed all over ! Here 's words with lines, and lines with scenes consent To raise an act to full astonishment ; Here melting numbers, words of power to move Young men to swoon, and maids to die for love : Love lies a-bleeding here ; Evadne there Swells with brave rage, yet comely everywhere ; Here 's A Mad Lover ; there that high design Of King and No King, and the rare plot thine. So that where'er we circumvolve our eyes, Such rich, such fresh, such sweet varieties Ravish our spirits, that entranc'd we see, None writes love's passion in the world like thee. HERRICK COMEDIES AND FRAGEDIES FRANCIS BEAVMONT Written by< AND /Gentlemen. IOHN FLETCHER Never printed before, And aow publifhed by the Authours Originall Copies. Si quid habmt veri Vatwn prtfagia, vivam. LONDON, Printed for Httmpbrey Robinfin, at the three Pidgeom, and for Humphrey Mofeley at the Princes /goafifhing: And. tbeyfaid, We alfo wit-go m tb tbee. ] oh n 1 1 . 3 . London^ Printed by 7". Mtxey for RICH. HARRIOT, in S.Dunftans Churcb-yard Fleetftrcet, Yet he, consummate master, knew When to recede and when pursue. His noble negligences teach What others' toils despair to reach. He, perfect dancer, climbs the rope, And balances your fear and hope ; If, after some distinguished leap, He drops his pole, and seems to slip, Straight gathering all his active strength, He rises higher half his length. With wonder you approve his slight, And owe your pleasure to your fright. PRIOR 64 H U D I B R A S- THE FIRST PART. Written in the time of the late Wan t LONDON, Printed by Jf.C. for nichtrd Marriot, coder Saint Donftari's Church in fleet ftrett. 1663. The third among the sons of light. SHELLEY 66 Paradife loft. A POEM "Written in TEN BOOKS By JOHN MILTON, Licenfed and Entred according to Order. LONDON Printed, and are to be fold by Peter Parser under Creed Church neer Aldgtite^ And by Robert Boulter at the Turfy HeaJ'm Bi/bopfeate-f/reet And Matthiat Walter , under St. Durftons Church in Wcet-flrcet , i 5 6 7. Ingenious dreamer ! in whose well-told tale Sweet fiction and sweet truth alike prevail ; Whose humorous vein, strong sense, and simple style, May teach the gayest, make the gravest smile ; Witty and well-employed, and, like thy Lord, Speaking in parables his slighted word : I name thee not, lest so despised a name Should move a sneer at thy deserved fame. COWPER 68 THE Pilgrim s Progrefs THIS WORLD, That which is to come: Delivered under the Similitude of a Wherein is Difcovered , The manner of his letting out, His Dangerous Journey^ And lafe Arrival at the Defired Countrey. I have xfed Similitudes, Hof. 12.10. By John Buny&n. fcitcente* anacfrurea accojotnof L N D O N, Printed for Nath. Ponder at the Peaeoc ^ in the Poultry near Cornhil, 1678, Behold where Dryden's less presumptuous car Wide o'er the fields of glory bear Two coursers of ethereal race, With necks in thunder clothed, and long-resounding pace. GRAY 70 ABSALOM AND ACHITOPHEL POEM Si Propiuf Jler Te Capiet Magis LONDON, Printed for J. T. and are to be Sold by W. Davis in Amen-Corner, i 68 I. Reduced Leaf in original, 7.75x12.56 inches Few books in the literature of philosophy have so widely represented the spirit of the age and country in which they appeared, or have so influenced opinion afterwards as Locke's Essay concerning Human Un- derstanding. The art of education, po- litical thought, theology and philosophy, especially in Britain, France and America, long bore the stamp of the Essay, or of reaction against it. FRASER 72 A N ESSAY CONCERNING In Four BOOKS. Quajn bellum eft velle confoeri potius nefcire quod nef* cias, quam ifta ejfutientem naufeare, atque ipfwn/ibi difplicere ! Cic. de Natur. Dcor. /. i. LONDON: Printed by Eli%. Holt, for 1C8oma5 25aflet, at the in Fkct/lrcet, near St. 'Dun/tans Church. MDCXG Reduced Leaf in original, 7.18x12.62 inches Oh ! that your brows my laurel had sustained, Well had I been deposed if you had reigned ! The father had descended for the son ; For only you are lineal to the throne. Yet I this prophesy : thou shalt be seen, (Though with some short parenthesis between,) High on the throne of wit ; and, seated there, Not mine (that 's little) but thy laurel wear. Thy first attempt an early promise made, That early promise this has more than paid ; So bold, yet so judiciously you dare, That your least praise is to be regular. Already I am worn with cares and age, And just abandoning the ungrateful stage; Unprofitably kept at heaven's expense, I live a rent-charge on his providence. But you, whom every Muse and Grace adorn, Whom I foresee to better fortune born, Be kind to my remains ; and, oh defend, Against your judgment, your departed friend ! Let not the insulting foe my fame pursue, But shield those laurels which descend to you : And take for tribute what these lines express : You merit more, but could my love do less. DRYDEN 74 THE WayoftheWorld, A COMEDY. As it is ACTED AT THE Theatre in Lincoln s-Inn-Fields, BY His Majefty's Servants. Written by Mr. CONCRETE. Judire eft Oper* prelium, procedere retfe ui mAcku nonvultis - Hor. Sat. 2. 1. i. " Metuat doti deprenfa. Ibid. LONDON: Printed for Jacob Ton/on^ within Graf$*lnn*Gate next 1700. Reduced Leaf in original, 6.5x8.5 inches For an Englishman there is no single historical work with which it can be so necessary for him to be well and thoroughly ac- quainted as with Clarendon. SOUTHEY THE HISTORY OF T HE REBELLION and CIVIL WARS ENGLAND, Begun in the Year 1641. With the precedent Paflages, and A&ions, that contributed thereunto, and the happy End, and Conclufion thereof by the KING'S blefled RESTORATION, and RETURN upon the ap' h of ft Primed : And fold by John Marphev, ncax Stationers-Hall. M DCC X. O M/r, The BooJtbuider is defaed to place the I N D E X aftei [Tt(, and th Hey-Marktt. I havo been takea for a Merchant Reduced Leaf in original, 8.12x13.12 inches It breathes throughout a spirit of piety and benevolence; it sets in a very striking light the importance of the mechanic arts, which they who know not what it is to be without them are apt to undervalue. It fixes in the mind a lively idea of the horrors of solitude, and, consequently, of the sweets of social life, and of the blessings we derive from con- versation and mutual aid ; and it shows how by labouring with one's own hands, one may secure independence, and open for one's self many sources of health and amusement. I agree, therefore, with Rousseau, that this is one of the best books that can be put into the hands of children. BEATTIE 82 THE LIFE AND STRANGE SURPRIZING ADVENTURES O F ROBINSON CRUSOE, Of TORK, MARINER: Who lived Eight and Twenty Years, all alone in an un-inhabited Ifland on the Coaft of AMERICA, near the Mouth o the Great River of OROONOQ.UE; Having been caft on Shore by Shipwreck, where in all the Men periflied but himfelf. WITH An Account how he was at laft as ftrangely deli ver'd by PYRATES. Written by Himfelf. LONDON: Printed for W. T A Y L OR at the Ship in Pater- Nofter- Row. MDCCXIX. Anima Rabelasii habitans in sicco COLERIDGE 84 INTO SEVERAL Remote NATIONS W O R u 3. By LEMUEL GULLIVER, Firft a SURGEON, and then a CAP- TAIN of feveral SHIPS. VOL. I. L N T> X: Trinted for BENJ. MOTTE, at the Middle Temple-Gate in Fleet-ftreet. MDCCXXVI. I think no English poet ever brought so much sense into the same number of lines with equal smoothness, ease, and poetical beauty. Let him who doubts of this peruse the Essay on Man with attention. SHENSTONE 86 A N ESS A Y O N M A N Addrefs'dtoa FRIEND. PART I LONDON: Printed for y. Wilford y at the Three Flower-de-luces, be- hind the Chapter-houfe, St. Tauls. [Price One Shilling.] Reduced Leaf in original, 8.5x12.62 inches It was about this date, I suppose, that I read Bishop Butler's Analogy ; the study of which has been to so many, as it was to me, an era in their religious opinions. Its inculcation of a visible church, the oracle of truth and a pattern of sanctity, of the duties of external religion, and of the historical character of Revelation, are characteristics of this great work which strike the reader at once; for myself, if I may attempt to determine what I most gained from it, it lay in two points which I shall have an opportunity of dwell- ing on in the sequel: they are the underlying principles of a great portion of my teaching. NEWMAN 88 THE ANALOGY O F RELIGION, Natural and Revealed, To which are added Two brief D I S S E RTATI O N S : I. Of PERSONAL IDENTITY. II. Of the NATURE of VIRTUE. B Y JOSEPH BUTLER, L L. D. Reftor of Stanhope, in the Bifhoprick of Durham. Ejus ( Analogiae ) bac vis ejl y ut id quod dubium eft, ad aliquid fimile de quo non >>->->>>>">->>>>>>>->>>>->->-->-." 0?&j 1 1 H Y V POEMS, j Y Y Y Y -<~<~4-4~4 CHIEFLY IN THE i Y V Y Y Y Y f SCOTTISH DIALECT, Y Y Y Y Y Y Y w Y Y T Y B Y Y j Y f Y Y Y ROBERT BURNS* 1 Y Y Y Y Y Y , Y Y , i V Y < 1 i I THE Simple Bard, unbroke by rules of Art, ! Y Y He pouts the wild effiifions of the heart : Y Y And if infpir'd, 'tis Nature's pow'rs infpire; I I Her's all the melting thrill, and her's the kindling fire. 4 Y Y 1 ANONYMOUS. Y Y V Y Y Y Y ..<..<..<.<< <<<<<< '<"4"<"4"4"4"<-"<"<""4-<"<"4"<"<""4"4"<-4 V Y * f Y t t Y Y Y Y Y ? J 1 KILMARNOCK: V T Y Y r Y PRINTED BY JOHN WILSON. Y Y - a Y Y BTt*"^"" ''''^^ Y Y Y M,DCC,LXXXVJ. Y > JL -^..^..^..^^^ -k tffl Open the book where you will, it takes you out-of-doors. In simplicity of taste and natural refinement he reminds you of Walton; in tenderness toward what he would have called the brute creation, of Cowper. He seems to have lived before the Fall. His volumes are the journal of Adam in Paradise. LOWELL 124 TH E NATURAL HISTORY AND ANTIQUITIES O F SELBORNE, IN THE COUNTY OF SOUTHAMPTON: WITH ENGRAVINGS, AND AN APPENDIX, " ego Apis Matinee " More modoque " Grata carpentis per laborern " Plurixnuin," . HOR. ' Omnla bene defcribere, quae in hoc xnundo, a Deo fafla, aut Nature creatse viribus " elaborata fuerunt, opus eft non unius hominis, nee unius jevi. Hinc Faurne & Florx utiliflimae j hine MoMgrafbi praeftantiffimi." SCOPOLI ANN. H/ST. NAT. LONDON: PRINTED BY T. BENSLEYJ FOR B. WHITE AWO SON, AT HORACE'S HEAD, FLEET STKEET. M t OCC ) LXXXIX, Leaf in original, 7.43x9.5 inches He is without parallel in any age or country, except perhaps Lord Bacon or Cicero; and his works contain an ampler store of political and moral wisdom than can be found in any other writer whatever. MACKINTOSH 126 REFLECTIONS ON THE REVOLUTION IN FRANCE, AND ON THE PROCEEDINGS IN CERTAIN SOCIETIES IN LONDON RELATIVE TO THAT EVENT. INTENDED TO HAVE BEEN SENT TO A GENTLEMAN / N P J R I S. BY THE RIGHT HONOURABLE EDMUND BURKE. LONDON: PRINTED FOR j. DODSLEY, IN PALL-MALL. M.DCC.XC. The great Commoner of mankind CONWAY 128 RIGHTS OF MAN: BEING AN ANSWER TO MR. BURKE's ATTACK ON THE FRENCH REVOLUTION* B Y THOMAS PAINE, SECRETARY FOR FOREIGN AFFAIRS TO CONGRESS IN THE AMERICAN WAR, AND AUTHOR OF THE WORK INT1TLED COMMON SENSE. LONDON: PRINTED FOR J. JOHNSON, ST PAU1 *s CHURCH- YARD. MDCCXCI. Homer is not more decidedly the first of heroic poets, Shakespeare is not more decidedly the first of the dramatists, Demosthenes is not more sensibly the first of or- ators, than Boswell is the first of biographers. MACAULAY 130 THE LIFE O F SAMUEL JOHNSON, LL.D. COMPREHENDING AN ACCOUNT OF HIS STUDIES AND NUMEROUS WORKS, IN CHRONOLOGICAL ORDER; A SERIES OF HIS EPISTOLARY CORRESPONDENCE AND CONVERSATIONS WITH MANY EMINENT PERSONS; AND VARIOUS ORIGINAL PIECES OF HIS COMPOSITION, NEVER BEFORE PUBLISHED. THE WHOLE EXHIBITING A VIEW OF LITERATURE AND LITERARY MEN IN GREAT-BRITAIN, FOR NEAR HALF A CENTURY. DURING WHICH HE FLOURISHEa IN TWO VOLUMES. BY JAMES BOSWELL, ESQ. Q? f l ut OMNIS Pot'tva pateat veluti Jef/rifta lobelia VITA SENIS. HORAT. VOLUME THE FIRST. LONDON: PRINTED BY HENRY BALDWIN, FOR CHARLES DILLY. IN THE POULTRY. M OCC XCI. Reduced Leaf in original, 8.18x10.68 inches He laid us as we lay at birth On the cool flowery lap of earth ; Smiles broke from us and we had ease, The hills were round us, and the breeze Went o'er the sun-lit fields again; Our foreheads felt the wind and rain. Our youth return'd ; for there was shed On spirits that had long been dead, Spirits dried up and closely fuiTd, The freshness of the early world. ARNOLD 132 LYRICAL BALLADS, WITH A FEW OTHER POEMS. LONDON: TRINT2D FOR J. & A. ARCH, ORACECHTJRCH-STREKT. 1798. The history was hailed with delight as the most witty and original pro- duction from any American pen. The first foreign critic was Scott, who read it aloud in his family till their sides were sore with laughing. WARNER A HISTORY OF NEW YORK, FROM THE BEGINNING OF THE WORLD TO THE END OF THE DUTCH DYNASTY. CONTAINING Among many Surprising and Curious Matters, the Unutterable renderings of WALTER THE DOUBTER, the Disastrous Projects of WILLIAM THE TESTY, and the Chivalric Achievments of PETER THE HEADSTRONG, the three Dutch Governors of NEW AMSTERDAM; being the only Authentic History of the Times that ever hath been, or ever will be Published. BY DIEDRICH KNICKERBOCKER. De toarljrtn Die in twlfier tag, Die kontt nut Maartjciu *m mn nag. IN TWO VOLUMES. VOL. I. PUBLISHED BY INSKEEP fc? BRADFORD, NEW YORK } BRADFORD & INSKEEP, PHILADELPHIA; WM. M*1L- HENNEY, BOSTON) COALE & THOMAS) BALTIMORBj AND MORFORD, WJLLINGTON, & CO. CHARLESTON. 1809. The Pilgrim of Eternity whose fame Over his living head like heaven is bent SHELLEY 136 Cfjttoe A ROMAUNT. BY LORD BYRON. L'univers est une espece de livre, dont on n'a lu que la premiere page quand on n'a vu que son pays. J'en ai feuillete un assez grand nombre, que j'ai troiire egalement mauvaises. Get examen ne m'a point ete infructueux. Je hafssais ma patrie. Toutes les impertinences des peuples divers, parmi lesquels j'ai vecu, m'ont reconcilie avec elle. Quand je n'aurais tire d'autre benefice de mes voyages que celui-la, je n'en re- gretterais ni les frais, ni les fatigues. LE COSMOPOLITE. LONDON: PRINTED TOE JOHN MURRAY, 32, FLEET-STREET; WILLIAM BLACKWOOD, EDINBURGH; AND JOHN GUMMING, DUBLIN. By Thomas Davison, White-Friars. 1812. Reduced Leaf in original, 7.93x10.18 inches I read again, and for the third time, Miss Austen's very finely written novel of Pride and Prejudice. That young lady had a talent for describing the involvements, feel- ings, and characters of ordinary life, which is to me the most wonderful I have ever met with. The big bow-wow I can do myself like any one going; but the ex- quisite touch, which renders commonplace things and characters interesting from the truth of the description and the sentiment, is denied me. What a pity so gifted a creature died so early ! SCOTT 138 PRIDE AND PREJUDICE A NOVEL. JN THREE VOLUMES. AUTHOR OF " SENSE AND SENSIBILITY." VOL. I. Hondo it: PRINTED FOR T. EGERTON, MILITARY LIBRARY, WHITEHALL. 1813. A subtle-souled psychologist SHELLEY 140 CHRISTABEL: KUBLA KHAN, A VISION; THE PAINS OF SLEEP. BY S. T. COLERIDGE, ESQ. LONDON : PRINTED FOR JOHN MURRAY, ALBEMARLE-STREET, BY WILLIAM BULMER AND CO. CLEVELAND-ROW, ST. JAMES'S. 1816. great and gallant Scott, True gentleman, heart, blood, and bone, 1 would it had been my lot To have seen thee, and heard thee, and known. TENNYSON 142 IVANHOE; A ROMANCE. BY " THE AUTHOR OF WAVERLEY," &c. Now fitted the halier, now traversed the cart, And often took leave, but seem'd loth to depart ! PRIOR. IN THREE VOLUMES. VOL. I. EDINBURGH: PRINTED FOR ARCHIBALD CONSTABLE AND CO. EDINBURGH AND HUJIST, ROBINSON, AND CO. 90, CHEAPS1DE, LONDON. 1820. He is made one with Nature: there is heard His voice in all her music, from the moan Of thunder to the song of night's sweet bird ; He is a presence to be felt and known In darkness and in light, from herb and stone, Spreading itself where'er that Power may move Which has withdrawn his being to its own ; Which wields the world with never-wearied love, Sustains it from beneath, and kindles it above. SHELLEY 144 LAMIA, ISABELLA, THE EVE OF ST. AGNES, AND OTHER POEMS. BY JOHN KEATS, AUTHOR OF ENDTMION. LONDON: PRINTED FOR TAYLOR AND HESSEY, FLEET-STREET. 1820. Cor cordium EPITAPH 146 ADONAIS AN ELEGY ON THE DEATH OF JOHN KEATS, AUTHOR OF ENDYMION, HYPERION ETC. BY PERCY. B. SHELLEY Afp vpiv /jttv e Nuv Sf davwv , Xot/uirr i'aittfos tv