








generously made available by the Posner Memorial Collection
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            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 LITERATURE




                           ONE HUNDRED BOOKS
                               FAMOUS IN
                           ENGLISH LITERATURE

                           WITH FACSIMILES OF
                            THE TITLE-PAGES

                         AND AN INTRODUCTION BY
                          GEORGE E. WOODBERRY




                            THE GROLIER CLUB
                        OF THE CITY OF NEW YORK
                                M CM II




                          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                              1549       9

  The Vision of Pierce Plowman              Langland      1550      11

  Chronicles of England, Scotlande, and
    Ireland                                 Holinshed     1577      13

  A Myrrour for Magistrates                               1563      15

  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       1611      31

  The Holy Bible                            King James's  1611      33
                                                Version

  The Workes of Benjamin Jonson             Jonson        1616      35

  The Anatomy of Melancholy                 Burton        1621      37

  Mr. William Shakespeares Comedies,
    Histories, & 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                    Beaumont      1647      57
                                            and Fletcher

  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     Steele        1710      79
    Esq.

  The Spectator                             Addison       1711      81

  The Life and Strange Surprizing
    Adventures of Robinson Crusoe           Defoe         1719      83

  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     111

  The Expedition of Humphry Clinker         Smollett   16[7]71     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

  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 Beginning
    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                                 Brontë        1847     167

  Evangeline                                Longfellow    1847     169

  Sonnets                                   Mrs. Browning 1847     171

  The Biglow Papers                         Lowell        1848     173

  Vanity Fair                               Thackeray     1848     175

  The History of England                    Macaulay      1849     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

  Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám                  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.




                             [Illustration]

                              INTRODUCTION


A 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 nation. A different
selection would only mean another 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 unchangeable as a mountain landscape. Perspective thrusts its
unconscious judgment upon the organs of 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 except 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, Shakespeare;
but those which embody some rare intellectual power, or illuminate some
seldom visited tract of the spirit, or merely display some peculiar
taste in learning or pastime, must yet have something 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, uncommon. Such are the books of the poets--the Faërie Queene;
books of the nobles--Arcadia; books of the scholar--the Anatomy of
Melancholy. 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. The Wealth
of Nations, Locke's Essay, Blackstone'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 classics
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 indifferent, 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 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 imagination, 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 immortals 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 disencumberment 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 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 seemingly 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 nation stands heir, it is man that survives,--the
aspect of an epoch, the phase of a religion, the mood of a generation,
the taste, sentiment, thought, pursuit, 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 Federalist; nor to the use of
initials, as in the case of Donne and Mrs. Browning. The characteristic
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, Brontë, 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 genius has been so unfailing in the
English race that men of this blood live in the error that literature,
like light and air, is a common element in the life of populations.
Literature is really the work of selected nations, and with them is not
a constant product. Many nations have no literature, and in fertile
nations there are barren centuries. 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 beginning, and grow less. One soil, one
government, one evenly unfolded civilization--long life in the settled
and peaceful land--contribute to this continuity of literature in the
English; but its explanation 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 external change in form, rule
and institution, fused conventicle 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. English piety is of one stock, and
through every book 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 Plutarch 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 Wellington,
from the Black Prince to Gordon, English 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 literature is brave,
martial, and brings forth men-children. 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 development, 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 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 literatures, 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 impact 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 irresistible, it remains itself, it does not become another. The
Greeks conquered Rome, men say, through the mind; and Rome conquered the
barbarians 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 personal view, even under the
overwhelming might of Greece, Virgil remained, what Tennyson calls him,
"Roman Virgil"; and in the other capital instance 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 synonyms 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 European
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 Canterbury pilgrimage, whatever the source of the
world-wandering tales, gives the first crowded scene of English life. In
Langland, whose form was mediæval, 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 nations; 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 empire 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 permanence of this tradition in literary
education has been of vast importance, and is to the literary 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 being 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 assimilative power, being hospitable to all knowledge, it is
most deeply and intimately, because continuously, 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
discovering artistic freedom found its greatest good. This academic
tradition has created English culture, which is perhaps best described
as an instinctive 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 otherwise;
but, in literature, it has had the most open mind of any nation.

A third trait of high distinction in English literature, 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
mediæval 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 encyclopædic of a period, is matched
at the end of these centuries by Newman, whose capaciousness of
intellect was inclusive 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,
Shakespeare, on whose universality later genius has exhausted metaphor;
but for everything that he knew in little, English can show a large
literature, 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 historic 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
etiquette; and parody retires with Buckingham. 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 presence 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 belongs to genius to tire not in creation, thereby imitating the
excess of nature flowing from unhusbanded 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
geologic strata,--mediæval tale and history, humanistic 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 literature
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-gathering, 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 literature with the history of all
tongues. The acquisitive 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
curiosity is only half the word. It is singular that the first quality
which occurs to the mind in connection with the English is, almost
universally and often exclusively, their practicality. They are really
the most romantic of all nations; romanticism is the other half of their
genius, and supplements that positive element of knowledge-hunting or
truth-seeking which is indicated by their endless 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 acknowledged, is primarily regarded as more strictly a
literary and not a national characteristic in its time; but, like all
interesting history, English history 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 character, in adventurous travel, in personal
fate, in contacts, as were the times of Shakespeare's world or of the
world of Waterloo. What a reinforcement 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 invitations 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.

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 untamed 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,
romanticism 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
debasement, 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
discovery, 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 courage 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 knowledge and this spectacle of man now imperializing
through nature's forces, as formerly through discovery 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 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 proportion 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 domineering 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 inappropriable 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 individuals and made hereditary in a
civilization and a race and idealized in conscience, constitute the
motor-genius of a nation, which is its finding faculty; 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 romantic 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. Greatness 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 civilization 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 romantic 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 example 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 mediævalism, though in its later career masked under Renaissance
forms; and since Shakespeare, a similar diffused romantic prescience, in
the region of the common life and of revolutionary causes most
significantly, 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 eighteenth century gave to
English an age of cultivated 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, exhibited 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
Collins, 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, important 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 examination of the service of
this literature to civilization and the individual soul of man, which is
the great function of literature, and of its place in the world of art.

"How shall the world be served?" was Chaucer's question; and it has
never been absent from any great mind of the English stock. The
literature 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
separable 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 inwardly 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 ability 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 compass 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
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 embodiment of that cold, intellectual habit,
distinctive of a certain kind of English mind, and usually regarded 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
account." 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 temperate authors. In
the last age, Darwin, by his Origin of Species, most arrested the
attention of the scientific mind, and stimulated the highly educated
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 criticism 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 readjustment of
man's thoughts with regard to his temporal and natural relation to the
universe in which he finds himself; and the vast generalities of all
evolutionary thought received from Darwin immense 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 advancement 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-living 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 political 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, exhibit 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 operation 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 generation has added. They are
exceeded in the dignity 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 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 necessary 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
celebration of ideal liberty, and its practical life in English
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 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 literature of knowledge, here it lies on the
literature of power,--on imaginative and reflective works. Its initial
office is educative; it feeds the imagination 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
actual 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 training 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 information, 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 expand 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
faculties and the feelings, humane letters achieve their most essential
task. Literature furnishes the gymnasia for all youth, in that part of
their nature 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 diminishing in
inclusive power, are Thackeray, Austen, Brontë, 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 civilization.
It is singular that humor, so prime and 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 national
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 intellect, 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, however,
is a sign of the general health of the English genius, which has turned
to morbidity far less than that of other nations ancient or modern. 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 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 national 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 reproach, that English
literature is predominantly moral and religious, and the fact is plainly
so. The strain that began with Piers Plowman flourished 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 and breathing peace of sacred song. The portion
of English literature expressly religious is enlarged 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 imagination, such as Spenser in
the Faërie Queene and Wordsworth in his works generally, or Gray in the
solemn thought of the Elegy. To particularize 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 influential, 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 adorns its best book; but it is by a higher blessing 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 perfection in the form,
of permanence in the matter, and the like, arise. If the standards of an
academic 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 originated
romantic forms proper to itself, and by these it should be judged. The
time is, perhaps, not wholly gone by when the formlessness of
Shakespeare may be found spoken of as a matter of course, as the
formlessness of Shelley is still generally alleged; but if neither of
these has form in the pseudo-classic, the Italian and French, sense of
convention, decorum and limit, they were creators of that romantic form
in which English, together with Spanish, marks the furthest original
modern advance. The subject is too large, and too much a matter of
detail, for this place; but 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 examine 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 achievement, excelled all others, both for substance and
art. The instinct of fame may be safely followed in assigning a like
primacy to Milton. The moment which Milton occupied, in the climax of a
literary movement, is, perhaps, not commonly observed with accuracy. The
drama developed out of allegorical and abstract, and through historical,
into entirely human and ideal forms; and in Shakespeare this process is
completed. The same movement, on the religious as opposed to the secular
line, took place more slowly. Spenser, like Sackville, works by
impersonation of moral qualities, 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 narrative truly humanized, and given ideal power in character and
event, until Milton carried it to its proper artistic culmination in
Paradise Lost. Milton stands to the evolution of this branch of poetic
literature, springing from the miracle-plays, precisely as Shakespeare
does to the branch of ideal drama; and thus, although he fell outside of
the great age, and was sixty years later than Shakespeare in completing
the work, the singularity of his literary greatness, his loneliness as a
lofty genius in his time, becomes somewhat less inexplicable. 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 companions 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 workmanship bears
to what is most excellent and shining 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 fairest dreams of changeful imaginative grief with the soul's
intellectual passion for immortality full-voiced. It is detached from
time and place; the hunger of the soul for eternity, which is its
substance, human nature can never lay off; its literary 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 formalism to which romantic art is
related as the spirit of life to the death-mask of the past. Such pallor
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 academic taste, the
genius of English has shown a native obstinacy. The novel is so Protean
in form as to seem amorphous, but essentially repeats the drama, and
submits in its masters to Shakespearian 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
observed, 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 substance and not for form,
whether this be due to a natural incapacity, or to a retardation in
development 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 copiousness, this original genius, this
serviceableness to civilization and the private life, this supreme
romantic art, be maintained, now that the English and their speech are
spread through the world, or is the history of the intellectual
expansion of Athens 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 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 Æneid, 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 remains;
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-countrymen. The genius of the English
shows no sign of decay; age has followed age, each more gloriously, 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 democracy through the next ages,--is immaterial; so long
as the genius of the people, its piety and daring, 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 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 written
there, contained and handed down in famous books and made the spiritual
food of the vast multitude 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 nec metas rerum nec tempora pono:
        Imperium sine fine dedi.




                           One Hundred Books
                      Famous in English 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




    Whan that Apprill with his shouris sote
    And the droughte of marche hath pa'd [.y] rote
    And badid euery veyne in suche licour
    Of whiche vertu engendrid is the flour
    Whanne zepherus eke with his sote breth
    Enspirid hath in euery holte and heth
    The tendir croppis and the yong sonne
    Hath in the ram half his cours y conne
    And smale foulis make melodie
    That slepyn al nyght with opyn ye
    So prikith hem nature in her corage
    Than longyng folk to gon on pilgremage
    And palmers to seche straunge londis
    To serue halowis couthe in sondry londis
    And specially fro euery shiris ende
    Of yngelond to Cauntirbury thy wende
    The holy blisful martir for to seke
    That them hath holpyn when they were seke

    And fil in that seson on a day
    In Suthwerk atte tabard as I lay
    Redy to wende on my pilgremage
    To Cauntirbury with deuout corage
    That nyght was come in to that hosterye
    Wel nyne & twenty in a companye
    Of sondry folk be auenture y falle
    In feleship as pilgrymys were they alle
    That toward Cauntirbury wolden ryde
    The chambris and the stablis were wyde
    And wel were they esid atte beste


    Reduced                          Leaf in original, 7 × 10 inches




                             O moral Gower
                                                             CHAUCER




    This book is intituled confessio amantis / that is to saye in
    englysshe the confessyon of the louer maad and compyled by Johan
    Gower squyer borne in walys in the tyme of kyng richard the
    second which book treteth how he was confessyd to Genyus preest
    of venus vpon the causes of loue in his fyue wyttes and seuen
    dedely synnes / as in thys sayd book al alonge appyereth / and
    by cause there been comprysed therin dyuers hystoryes and fables
    towchyng euery matere / I haue ordeyned a table here folowyng of
    al suche hystoryes and fables where and in what book and leef
    they stande in as here after foloweth


    ¶ Fyrst the prologue how johan gower in the xvi yere of kyng
    rychard the second began to make thys book and dyrected to harry
    of lancastre thenne erle of derby folio                     ¶ ii

    Of thestate of the royames temporally the sayd yere folio  ¶ iii

    Of thestate of the clergye the tyme of robert gylbonensis namyng
    hym self clemente thenne antipope folio                     ¶ iv

    Of the estate of the comyn people folio                      ¶ v

    How he treteth of the ymage that nabugodonosor sawe in his sleep
    hauyng an heed of golde / a breste of syluer / a bely of brasse
    / legges of yron / and feet haffe yron & halfe erthe folio    vi

    Of thenterpretacion of the dreme / and how the world was fyrst
    of golde / & after alwey werse & werse  folio                vii

    ¶ Thus endeth the prologue

    ¶ Here begynneth the book

    And fyrst the auctor nameth thys book confessio amantis / that
    is to say the shryfte of the louer / wheron alle thys book shal
    shewe not onely the loue humayn / but also of alle lyuyng
    beestys naturally folio                                     ¶ ix

    How cupydo smote Johan Gower with a fyry arowe and wounded hym
    so that venus commysed to hym genyus hyr preest for to here hys
    confessyon folio                                             ¶ x

    How Genyus beyng sette / the louer knelyng tofore hym prayeth
    the sayd confessor to appose hym in his confessyon folio    ¶ xi

    The confessyon of the amant of two of the pryncipallist of his
    fyue wyttes folio                                           ¶ xi

    How atheon for lokyng vpon Deane was turned in to an herte
    folio                                                       ¶ xi

    Of phorceus and hys thre doughters whiche had but one eye / &
    how phorceus slewe them  folio                             ¶ xii

    How the serpente that bereth the charbuncle stoppeth his one ere
    wyth hys tayle and that other wyth the erthe whan he is
    enchaunted  folio                                          ¶ xii

    How vlyxes escaped fro the marmaydys by stoppyng of hys eerys
    folio                                                      ¶ xii

    Here foloweth that there ben vii dedely synnes / of whome the
    fyrste is


    Reduced                   Leaf in original, 8.68 × 12.75 inches.




                          Flos regum Arthurus
                                                      JOHN OF EXETER




    After that I had accomplysshed and fynysshed dyuers hystoryes as
    wel of contemplacyon as of other hystoryal and worldly actes of
    grete conquerours & prynces / And also certeyn bookes of
    ensaumples and doctryne / Many noble and dyuers gentylmen of
    thys royame of Englond camen and demaunded me many and oftymes /
    wherfore that j haue not do made & enprynte the noble hystorye
    of the saynt greal / and of the moost renomed crysten kyng /
    Fyrst and chyef of the thre best crysten and worthy / kyng
    Arthur / whyche ought moost to be remembred emonge vs englysshe
    men tofore al other crysten kynges / For it is notoyrly knowen
    thorugh the vnyuersal world / that there been ix worthy & the
    best that euer were / That is to wete thre paynyms / thre jewes
    and thre crysten men / As for the paynyms they were tofore the
    jncarnacyon of Cryst / whiche were named / the fyrst Hector of
    Troye / of whome thystorye is comen bothe in balade and in prose
    / The second Alysaunder the grete / & the thyrd Julyus Cezar
    Emperour of Rome of whome thystoryes ben wel kno and had / And
    as for the thre jewes whyche also were tofore thyncarnacyon of
    our lord of whome the fyrst was Duc Josue whyche brought the
    chyldren of Israhel in to the londe of byheste / The second
    Dauyd kyng of Jherusalem / & the thyrd Judas Machabeus of these
    thre the byble reherceth al theyr noble hystoryes & actes / And
    sythe the sayd jncarnacyon haue ben thre noble crysten men
    stalled and admytted thorugh the vnyuersal world in to the
    nombre of the ix beste & worthy / of whome was fyrst the noble
    Arthur / whos noble actes j purpose to wryte in thys present
    book here folowyng / The second was Charlemayn or Charles the
    grete / of whome thystorye is had in many places bothe in
    frensshe and englysshe / and the thyrd and last was Godefray of
    boloyn / of whos actes & lyf j made a book vnto thexcellent
    prynce and kyng of noble memorye kyng Edward the fourth / the
    sayd noble jentylmen jnstantly requyred me temprynte thystorye
    of the sayd noble kyng and conquerour kyng Arthur / and of his
    knyghtes wyth thystorye of the saynt greal / and of the deth and
    endyng of the sayd Arthur / Affermyng that j ouzt rather
    tenprynte his actes and noble feates / than of godefroye of
    boloyne / or


    Reduced                   Leaf in original, 7.87 × 11.25 inches.




    So judiciously contrived that the wisest may exercise at once
    their knowledge and devotion; 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




                                  THE
                       booke of the common praier
                       and administracion of the
                            Sacramentes, and
                            other rites and
                               ceremonies
                                 of the
                           Churche: after the
                         vse of the Churche of
                               Englande.

                LONDINI, _in officina Richardi Graftoni,
                          Regij impressoris_.

                 _Cum priuilegio ad imprimendum solum._

                        _Anno Domini._ M.D.XLIX.
                            _Mense Martij._


    Reduced                        Leaf in original 7 × 10.5 inches.




    The author of Piers Ploughman, no doubt, embodied in a poetic
    dress just what millions felt. His poem as truly expressed the
    popular sentiment on the subjects it discussed as did the
    American Declaration of Independence the national thought and
    feeling on the relations between the Colonies and Great Britain.
    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 favorite word of the
    day--sentiments almost universally 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
    sowing among them.
                                                               MARSH




                               THE VISION
                         of Pierce Plowman, now
                      fyrste imprynted by Roberte
                        Crowley, dwellyng in Ely
                          tentes in Holburne.
                              Anno Domini.

                                 1550.
                    Cum priuilegio ad imprimend[=u]
                                 solum.




    By far the most important of our historical records, in print,
    during the time of Queen Elizabeth.
                                                              DIBDIN




                                 1577.

                                  THE
                          Firste volume of the
                  _Chronicles of England, Scotlande_,
                             and Irelande.
                              CONTEYNING,

    The description and Chronicles of England, from the first
    inhabiting vnto the conquest

    The description and Chronicles of Scotland, from the first
    originall of the Scottes nation, till the yeare of our Lorde.
    1571.

    The description and Chronicles of Yrelande, likewise from the
    firste originall of that Nation, vntill the yeare. 1547.

                _Faithfully gathered and set forth, by_
                           Raphaell Holinshed.

                               AT LONDON,
                      Imprinted for George Bishop.


                          God saue the Queene.


    Reduced                      Leaf in original, 7.75 11.12 inches




    Our historic plays are allowed to have been founded on the
    heroic narratives in the Mirror for Magistrates; to that plan,
    and to the boldness of Lord Buckhurst's new scenes, perhaps we
    owe Shakespeare.
                                                             WALPOLE




                            ¶_A MYRROVR FOR_
                              Magistrates.

                        Wherein maye be seen by
                  example of other, with howe greuous
                     plages vices are punished: and
                    howe frayle and vnstable werldly
                     prosperity is founde, even of
                      those whom Fortune seemeth
                              most highly
                                  to fauour.


              _Fælix quem faciunt aliena pericula cautum._

                             _Anno._ 1563.

                  ¶_Imprinted at London in Fletestrete
                     nere to Saynct Dunstans Churche
                           by Thomas Marshe._




    Two chieftaines who having travailed into Italie, and there
    tasted the sweete and stately measures and stile of Italian
    Poesie, as novices newly crept out of the schooles of Dante,
    Arioste, and Petrarch, they greatly pollished our rude and
    homely maner of vulgar Poesie, from that it had bene before, and
    for that cause may justly be sayd the first reformers of our
    English meetre and stile.
                                                           PUTTENHAM




                         ¶_SONGES AND SONETTES
                     Written by the right honorable
                           Lord Henry Haward late
                          Earle of Surrey, and
                                others._


                       _Apud Richardum Tottell._
                                 1567.


                            _Cumpriuilegio._




    It is full of stately speeches, and well-sounding phrases,
    clyming to the height of Seneca his stile, and as full of
    notable moralitie, which it doth most delightfully teach, and so
    obtayne the very end of Poesie.
                                                              SIDNEY




                        ¶The Tragidie of Ferrex
                              and Porrex,
                set forth without addition or alteration
                 but altogether as the same was shewed
                 on stage before the Queenes Maiestie,
                   about nine yeares past, _vz._ the
                     xviij. day of Ianuarie. 1561.
                        by the gentlemen of the
                             Inner Temple.


                        =Seen and allowed, &c.=


                         Imprinted at London by
                        Iohn Daye, dwelling ouer
                              Aldersgate.




    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
    scollers; and that beautie in court, which could not parley
    Eupheueisme was as little regarded as shee which now there
    speakes not French.
                                                              BLOUNT




                                EVPHVES.
                              THE ANATOMY
                               _of Wit_.

                         Verie pleasant for all
                         _Gentlemen to reade_,
                         and most necessary to
                               remember.

                      _Wherein are contayned the_
                    delightes that wit followeth in
               _his youth, by the pleasantnesse of loue_,
                     and the happinesse he reapeth
                       in age, by the perfectnes
                              of wisedome.


                   _By_ Iohn Lylie, _Maister of Art_.

                        Corrected and augmented.

                              _AT LONDON_
                      Printed for Gabriell Cawood,
                    dwelling in Paules Church-yard.




    The noble and vertuous gentleman most worthy of all titles both
    of learning and chevalrie M. Philip Sidney.
                                                             SPENSER




                                      THE
                                   COVNTESSE
                                  OF PEMBROKES
                                    ARCADIA,

                            WRITTEN BY SIR PHILIPPE
                                    SIDNEI.

                                     LONDON
                       Printed for William Ponsonbie.
                              _Anno Domini_, 1590.




    Our sage and serious poet Spenser (whom I dare be known to think
    a better teacher than Scotus or Aquinas).
                                                              MILTON




                                   THE FAERIE
                                    QVEENE.

                          Disposed into twelue books,
                                  _Fashioning_
                              XII. Morall vertues.


                       VBIQUE FLORET (in printer's mark)


                                     LONDON
                         Printed for William Ponsonbie.
                                     1590.




    Who is there that upon hearing the name of Lord Bacon does not
    instantly recognize everything of literature the most extensive,
    everything of discovery the most penetrating, everything of
    observation of human life the most distinguished and refined?
                                                               BURKE




                                    Essaies.

                             Religious Meditations.

                              Places of perswasion
                                and disswasion.

                               Seene and allowed.

                                     LONDON
                           Printed for Humfrey Hooper
                          and are to bee solde at the
                           blacke Beare in Chauncery
                                  lane. 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 modern 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 beating 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




                                  THE
       PRINCIPAL NAVIGATIONS, VOIAGES, TRAFFIQVES AND DISCOUERIES
        of the English Nation, made by Sea or ouer-land, to the
          remote and farthest distant quarters of the Earth,
            at any time within the compasse of these 1500.
              yeeres: Deuided into three seuerall Volumes,
                according to the positions of the
                      Regions, whereonto they were
                               directed.

        This first Volume containing the woorthy Discoueries,
         &c. of the English toward the North and Northeast by
          Sea, as of _Lapland_, _Scriksinia_, _Corelia_, the
           Baie of S. _Nicholas_, the Isles of _Colgoieue_,
            _Vaigatz_, and _Noua Zembla_, toward the great
            riuer _Ob_, with the mighty Empire of _Russia_,
              the _Caspian_ sea, _Georgia_, _Armenia_,
               _Media_, _Persia_, _Boghar_ in _Bactria_,
                 and diuers kingdoms of _Tartaria_:

          Together with many notable monuments and testimonies
           of the ancient forren trades, and of the warrelike
             and other shipping of this realme of _England_
                            in former ages.

           _Whereunto is annexed also a briefe Commentarie of
            the true_ state of _Island_, and of the Northren
                    Seas and lands situate that way.

               _And lastly, the memorable defeate of the
                  Spanish huge Armada, Anno_ 1588. and
                     the famous victorie atchieued
                        at the citie of _Cadiz_,
                          1596. are described.


                   _By_ RICHARD HACKLVYT _Master of_
                     Artes, and sometime Student of
                        Christ-Church in Oxford.

                             [Illustration]

                     Imprinted at London by GEORGE
                         BISHOP, RALPH NEWBERIE
                           and ROBERT BARKER.
                                 1598.


    Reduced                      Leaf in original, 7 × 10.87 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




     _Mulciber in Troiam,                  pro Troia stabat Apollo._

                                 HOMER

                                  THE
                              WHOLE WORKS
                                   OF
                                 HOMER;
                            PRINCE OF POETTS
                           In his Iliads, and
                                Odysses.

                  _Translated according to the Greeke,
                                   By
                             Geo: Chapman._

                           De Ili: et Odiss:

    _Omnia ab his: et in his sunt omnia: siue beati_
    _Te decor eloquij, seu rer[=u] pondera tangunt.      Angel Pol:_

                               * * * * *

               _At London printed for Nathaniell Butter.
                          William Hole Sculp:_


                            Qui Nil molitur
                                 Ineptè

    ACHILLES                                                  HECTOR


    Reduced                   Leaf in original, 7.06 x 10.93 inches.




        Within that awful volume lies
        The mystery of mysteries!
        Happiest they of human race,
        To whom God has granted grace
        To read, to fear, to hope, to pray,
        To lift the latch, and force the way;
        And better had they ne'er been born
        Who read to doubt, or read to scorn.
                                                               SCOTT




                                  THE
                                  HOLY
                                 BIBLE,

                     Conteyning the Old Testament,
                              and the New:


                       ¶_Newly translated out of_
                  the Originall Tongues: and with
                 the former Translations diligently
                    compared and reuised by his
                  Maiesties speciall Commandement,

                ¶_Appointed to be read in Churches._

                               * * * * *

                               ¶IMPRINTED
                          at London by _Robert
                        Barker_, Printer to the
                          Kings most excellent
                               Maiestie.

                               * * * * *

                            ANNO DOM. 1611.


    Reduced                    Leaf in original  9.37 x 13.25 inches




                           O rare Ben Jonson
                                                             EPITAPH




                                THEATRVM

    GVL                     LOCVM TENEANT S                      CEN


                                  THE
                                 WORKES
                                   of
                           _Beniamin Jonson_


                     --_neque, me vt miretur turba
                                laboro:
                     Contentus paucis lectoribus._


                             _Imprinted at
                               London, by
                             Will Stansby_
    PLAVSTRVM                                               VISORIVM
                             _An. D._ 1616.       Guhel _Hole fecit_


    Reduced                       Leaf in original, 5 × 7.62 inches.




                  Scarce any book of philology in our
                  land hath in so short a time passed
                  so many impressions.
                                                              FULLER




                                 _THE_
                               ANATOMY OF
                              MELANCHOLY,

                             _WHAT IT IS_.

                          WITH ALL THE KINDES,
                   CAVSES, SYMPTOMES, PROG_NOSTICKES,
                              AND SEVERALL
                             CVRES OF IT_.

                       IN THREE MAINE PARTITIONS
                 with their seuerall SECTIONS, MEMBERS,
                            and SVBSECTIONS.

                     _PHILOSOPHICALLY, MEDICINALLY,
                          HISTORICALLY, OPENED
                              AND CVT VP._

                                   BY

                          DEMOCRITVS _Iunior_.

                With a Satyricall PREFACE, conducing to
                       _the following Discourse_.

                                MACROB.
                         Omne meum, Nihil meum.

                              _AT OXFORD_,

                  Printed by IOHN LICHFIELD and IAMES
                        SHORT, for HENRY CRIPPS.

                           _Anno Dom._ 1621.




        He was not of an age, but for all time!
                                                              JONSON




                              M^R. WILLIAM
                              SHAKESPEARES
                               COMEDIES,
                              HISTORIES, &
                               TRAGEDIES.

           Published according to the True Originall Copies.

                             [Illustration]

        _Martin Droahout sculpsit London_

                                 LONDON
            Printed by Isaac Jaggard, and Ed. Blount. 1623.


    Reduced                    Leaf in original  8.56 x 13.25 inches




        This most tragic of all tragedies
        save King Lear.
                                                           SWINBURNE




                                  THE
                                TRAGEDY
                            OF THE DUTCHESSE
                               OF Malfy.

          _As it was Presented priuatly, at the Black-Friers;
                  and publiquely at the Globe, By the_
                       Kings Maiesties Seruants.

               The perfect and exact Coppy, with diuerse
          _things Printed, that the length of the Play would_
                     not beare in the Presentment.

                       Written by _John Webster._

    Hora.----_Si quid----
    ----Candidus Imperti si non bis vtere mecum._

                               * * * * *

                               _LONDON:_

                   Printed by NICHOLAS OKES, for IOHN
                  WATERSON, and are to be sold at the
                    signe of the Crowne, in _Paules_
                           Church-yard, 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 human
                nature, for his sympathy with what is
                generous and high-minded and honorable
                and for his equable flow of a good
                every-day kind of poetry, with few
                rapids or cataracts, but singularly
                soothing and companionable.
                                                  LOWELL




                            A NEW WAY TO PAY
                               OLD DEBTS
                              A COMOEDIE


              _As it hath beene often acted at the Phoenix
                      in Drury-Lane, by the Queenes
                          Maiesties seruants._

                              The Author.

                           PHILIP MASSINGER.

                 NOLI ALTVM SAPERE (in printer's mark)

                                LONDON,
         Printed by _E. P._ for _Henry Seyle_, dwelling in _S.
                Pauls_ Church-yard, at the signe of the
                       Tygers head. Anno. M. DC.
                                XXXIII.




                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 sufferings 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 Annabella we discover
                traces of that fiery particle, 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 greatness in the lowest
                descents and degradation of our nature.
                                                    LAMB




                                  THE
                                 BROKEN
                                 HEART.

                               A Tragedy.

                                _ACTED_
                    By the KINGS Majesties Seruants
                      at the priuate House in the
                             BLACK-FRIERS.


                             _Fide Honor._


                             [Illustration]

                               _LONDON:_
            Printed by _I. B._ for HVGH BEESTON, and are to
               be sold at his Shop, neere the _Castle_ in
                        _Corne-hill_.  1 6 3 3.




                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




                              _The Famous_
                                TRAGEDY
                                   OF
                              THE RICH JEW
                              OF _MALTA_.

                            AS IT WAS PLAYD
                          BEFORE THE KING AND
                        QVEENE, IN HIS MAJESTIES
               Theatre at _White-Hall_, by her Majesties
                      Servants at the _Cock-pit_.


                    _Written by_ CHRISTOPHER MARLO.


                             [Illustration]

                               _LONDON_,
     Printed by _I. B._ for _Nicholas Vavasour_, and are to be sold
              at his Shop in the Inner-Temple, neere the
                            Church. 1 6 3 3.




                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




                                  THE
                                TEMPLE.
                              SACRED POEMS
                                  AND
                         PRIVATE EJACULATIONS.


                        By M^r. GEORGE HERBERT.


                               PSAL. 29.
                       _In his Temple doth every
                       man speak of his honour._

                             [Illustration]


                               CAMBRIDGE

                       Printed by _Thom._ _Buck_,
                      and _Roger Daniel_, printers
                          to the Universitie.
                                1 6 3 3.




        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




                                 POEMS,

                               _by_ J. D.

                                  WITH
                                ELEGIES
                             ON THE AUTHORS
                                 DEATH.

                                LONDON.
                  Printed by _M. F._ for IOHN MARRIOT,
            and are to be sold at his shop in S^t _Dunstans_
                  Church-yard in _Fleet-street_. 1633.




                It is not on the praises of others, but
                on his own writings that he is to depend
                for the esteem of posterity; 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, profane or
                sacred, abstruse or elegant, which he
                does not appear to have cultivated with
                success.
                                                 JOHNSON




                             à coelo salus

                                Religio,
                                Medici.

         _Printed for Andrew Crooke. 1642. Will Marshatt. scu._




                Waller was smooth.
                                                    POPE




                                  THE
                                 WORKES
                                   OF
                             EDMOND WALLER
                                Esquire,
                   Lately a Member of the Honourable
                                HOUSE of
                                COMMONS,
                      In this present Parliament.

            _Imprimatur_
                NA. BRENT.               _Decem. 30. 1644._

                                LONDON,
                     Printed for _Thomas Walkley_.
                                 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
                               TRAGEDIES

                           {FRANCIS BEAVMONT}
            Written by     {      AND       }     Gentlemen.
                           {IOHN FLETCHER   }

                         Never printed before,

                   And now published by the Authours
                            Originall Copies.

                               * * * * *

              _Si quid habent veri Vatum præsagia, vivam._

                               * * * * *

                               _LONDON_,

   Printed for _Humphrey Robinson_, at the three _Pidgeons_, and for
        _Humphrey Moseley_ at the _Princes Armes_ in _S^t Pauls
                          Church-yard_. 1647.


    Reduced                    Leaf in original, 8.37 x 13.12 inches




        What mighty epics have been wrecked by time
        Since Herrick launched his cockle-shell of rhyme!
                                                             ALDRICH




                             _HESPERIDES_:
                                  OR,
                               THE WORKS
                                  BOTH
                            HUMANE & DIVINE
                                   OF
                         ROBERT HERRICK _Esq._

                               * * * * *

                                 OVID.
                _Effugient avidos Carmina nostra Rogos._

                               * * * * *

                             [Illustration]

                               * * * * *

                                _LONDON_
         Printed for _John Williams_, and _Francis Eglesfield_,
              and are to be sold at the Crown and Marygold
                    in Saint _Pauls_ Church-yard. 1648.




        Taylor, the Shakespeare of divines.
                                                         EMERSON




                                  _THE
                                RULE AND
                               EXERCISES
                                OF HOLY
                                 LIVING_

                         _By Jer. Taylor D:D._

                          _Non magna loquimur
                              sed vivimus_

                   _LONDON printed for R. Royston
                        in Ivye Lane. 1650._
                                  _Ro: Vaughan sculp._




                That is a book you should read: such
                sweet religion in it, next to Woolman's,
                though the subject be bait, and hooks,
                and worms, and fishes.
                                                    LAMB




                                  _The
                            Compleat Angler
                                 or the
                          Contemplative man's
                               Recreation_


                          Being a Discourse of
                           FISH and FISHING,
              Not unworthy the perusal of most _Anglers_.

                               * * * * *

         Simon Peter said, _I go a_ fishing: _and they said, We
         also wil go with thee_. John 21. 3.

                               * * * * *

         _London_, Printed by _T. Maxey_ for RICH. MARRIOT, in
              S. _Dunstans_ Church-yard Fleetstreet, 1653.




            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




                                HUDIBRAS

                               * * * * *

                            THE FIRST PART.

                               * * * * *

                _Written in the time of the late Wars._

                               * * * * *

                               _LONDON._
         Printed by _J. G._ for _Richard Marriot_, under Saint
               _Dunstan_'s Church in _Fleetstreet_. 1663.




                   The third among the sons of light.
                                                     SHELLEY




                             Paradise lost.

                                   A
                                  POEM
                               Written in
                               TEN BOOKS

                           By _JOHN MILTON._

                               * * * * *

                     Licensed and Entred according
                               to Order.

                               * * * * *

                             _L O N D O N_

             Printed, and are to be sold by _Peter Parker_
              under _Creed_ Church neer _Aldgate_; And by
     _Robert Boulter_ at the _Turks Head_ in _Bishopsgate-street_;
           And _Matthias Walker_, under St. _Dunstons_ Church
                        in _Fleet-street_, 1667.




        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




                                  THE
                           Pilgrim's Progress
                                  FROM
                              THIS WORLD,
                                   TO
                         That which is to come:

                  Delivered under the Similitude of a
                                 DREAM
                         Wherein is Discovered,
                     The manner of his setting out,
                    His Dangerous Journey; And safe
                    Arrival at the Desired Countrey.

                               * * * * *

               _I have used Similitudes_, _Hos._ 12. 10.

                               * * * * *

                           By _John Bunyan._

                               * * * * *

                 Licensed and Entred according to Order.

                               * * * * *

                              L O N D O N,
              Printed for _Nath. Ponder_ at the _Peacock_
                in the _Poultrey_ 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




                                ABSALOM
                                  AND
                              ACHITOPHEL.

                               * * * * *

                                   A
                                 POEM.

                               * * * * *

                        ----_Si Propiùs stes
                        Te Capiet Magis_----

                               * * * * *

                              L O N D O N,
        Printed for _J. T._ and are to be Sold by _W. Davis_ in
                          _Amen-Corner_, 1681.


    Reduced                   Leaf in original, 7.75 × 12.56 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 Understanding_.
                The art of education, political thought,
                theology and philosophy, especially in
                Britain, France and America, long bore
                the stamp of the _Essay_, or of reaction
                against it.
                                                  FRASER




                                   AN
                               E S S A Y
                               CONCERNING
                        =Humane Understanding=.

                               * * * * *

                             In Four BOOKS.

                               * * * * *

    _Quam bellum est velle confiteri potius nescire quod nescias,
        quam ista effutientem nauseare, atque ipsum sibi
        displicere!_ =Cic. de Natur. Deor.= _l._ 1.

                               * * * * *

                             _L O N D O N:_
          Printed by _Eliz. Holt_, for =Thomas Basset=, at the
            _George_ in _Fleetstreet_, near St. _Dunstan_'s
                             Church. MDCXC.


    Reduced                    Leaf in original, 7.18 × 12.62 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




                                  THE
                           Way of the World,

                                   A
                                COMEDY.

                             As it is ACTED
                                 AT THE
                   Theatre in _Lincoln's-Inn-Fields_,
                                   BY
                        His Majesty's Servants.

                               * * * * *

                       Written by Mr. _CONGREVE_.

                               * * * * *

            _Audire est Operæ pretium, procedere recte
            Qui mæchis non vultis----_    Hor. Sat. 2. l. 1.
            _----Metuat doti deprensa.----_          Ibid.

                               * * * * *

                              L O N D O N:
       Printed for _Jacob Tonson_, within _Gray's-Inn-Gate_ next
                        _Gray's-Inn-Lane_. 1700.


    Reduced                      Leaf in original, 6.5 × 8.5 inches.




                For an Englishman there is no single
                historical work with which it can be so
                necessary for him to be well and
                thoroughly acquainted as with Clarendon.
                                                 SOUTHEY




                                  THE
                                HISTORY
                                 OF THE
                          REBELLION and CIVIL WARS
                                   IN
                                ENGLAND,
                           Begun in the Year 1641.

    With the precedent Passages, and Actions, that contributed
        thereunto, and the happy End, and Conclusion thereof by
        the KING's blessed RESTORATION, and RETURN upon the
        29^{th} of _May_, in the Year 1660.

                    Written by the Right Honourable
                       EDWARD Earl of CLARENDON,
       Late Lord High Chancellour of _England_, Privy Counsellour
        in the Reigns of King CHARLES the First and the Second.

                               * * * * *

                     [Greek: Ktêma es aei.] Thucyd.

    _Ne quid Falsi dicere audeat, ne quid Veri non audeat._ Cicero.

                               * * * * *

                           VOLUME THE FIRST.

                               * * * * *

                             [Illustration]

                             _O X F O R D_,
               Printed at the THEATER, _An. Dom._ MDCCII.


    Reduced                      Leaf in original, 11 × 17.5 inches.




    It is incredible to conceive the effect his writings have had
    upon the Town; how many thousand follies they have either quite
    banished or given a very great check to! how much countenance
    they have added to Virtue and Religion! how many people they
    have rendered happy, by showing them it was their own fault if
    they were not so! and lastly how entirely they have convinced
    our young fops and young fellows of the value and advantages of
    Learning! He has indeed rescued it out of the hands of pedants,
    and fools, and discovered the true method of making it amiable
    and lovely to all mankind. In the dress he gives it, it is a
    most welcome guest at tea-tables and assemblies, and is relished
    and caressed by the merchants on the Change. Accordingly, there
    is not a Lady at Court, nor a Broker in Lombard Street, who is
    not easily persuaded that Captain _Steele_ is the greatest
    Scholar and Casuist of any man in England.
                                                                 GAY




                                  THE
                              LUCUBRATIONS
                                   OF
                         Isaac Bickerstaff Esq;

                               * * * * *

                                VOL. I.

                               * * * * *

      [Greek: ou chrê pannychion heudein boulêphoron andra.] Homer.

                               * * * * *

                             [Illustration]

                               * * * * *

                             _L O N D O N_,
  Printed: And sold by _John Morphew_, near _Stationers-Hall_. MDCCX.

    _Note_, The Bookbinder is desired to place the INDEX after
    [_Tosler, N^o. 114_] which ends the _First Volume_ in Folio.


    Reduced                    Leaf in original, 9.50 × 14.37 inches




                Whoever wishes to attain an English
                style, familiar but not coarse, and
                elegant but not ostentatious, must give
                his days and nights to the volumes of
                Addison.
                                                 JOHNSON




                                                             NUMB. 1

                           The SPECTATOR.

                               * * * * *

           _Non fumum ex fulgore, sed ex fumo dare lucem
         Cogitat; ut speciosa dehinc miracula promat._ Hor.

                               * * * * *

                       To be Continued every Day.

                               * * * * *

                       _Thursday, March 1. 1711._

    I Have observed, that a Reader seldom peruses a Book with
    Pleasure 'till he knows whether the Writer of it be a black or a
    fair Man, of a mild or cholerick Disposition, Married or a
    Batchelor, with other Particulars of the like nature, that
    conduce very much to the right Understanding of an Author. To
    gratify this Curiosity, which is so natural to a Reader, I
    design this Paper, and my next, as Prefatory Discourses to my
    following Writings, and shall give some Account in them of the
    several Persons that are engaged in this Work. As the chief
    Trouble of Compiling, Digesting and Correcting will fall to my
    Share, I must do my self the Justice to open the Work with my
    own History.

    I was born to a small Hereditary Estate, which I find, by the
    Writings of the Family, was bounded by the same Hedges and
    Ditches in _William_ the Conqueror's Time that it is at present,
    and has been delivered down from Father to Son whole and entire,
    without the Loss or Acquisition of a single Field or Meadow,
    during the Space of six hundred Years. There goes a Story in the
    Family, that when my Mother was gone with Child of me about
    three Months, she dreamt that she was brought to Bed of a Judge:
    Whether this might proceed from a Law-Suit which was then
    depending in the Family, or my Father's being a Justice of the
    Peace, I cannot determine; for I am not so vain as to think it
    presaged any Dignity that I should arrive at in my future Life,
    though that was the Interpretation which the Neighbourhood put
    upon it. The Gravity of my Behaviour at my very first Appearance
    in the World, and all the Time that I sucked, seemed to favour
    my Mother's Dream: For, as she has often told me, I threw away
    my Rattle before I was two Months old, and would not make use of
    my Coral 'till they had taken away the Bells from it.

    As for the rest of my Infancy, there being nothing in it
    remarkable, I shall pass it over in Silence. I find that, during
    my Nonage, I had the Reputation of a very sullen Youth, but was
    always a Favourite of my School-Master, who used to say, _that
    my Parts were solid and would wear well_. I had not been long at
    the University, before I distinguished my self by a most
    profound Silence: For, during the Space of eight Years,
    excepting in the publick Exercises of the College, I scarce
    uttered the Quantity of an hundred Words; and indeed do not
    remember that I ever spoke three Sentences together in my whole
    Life. Whilst I was in this Learned Body I applied my self with
    so much Diligence to my Studies, that there are very few
    celebrated Books, either in the Learned or the Modern Tongues,
    which I am not acquainted with.

    Upon the Death of my Father I was resolved to travel into
    Foreign Countries, and therefore left the University, with the
    Character of an odd unaccountable Fellow, that had a great deal
    of Learning, if I would but show it. An insatiable Thirst after
    Knowledge carried me into all the Countries of _Europe_, where
    there was any thing new or strange to be seen; nay, to such a
    Degree was my Curiosity raised, that having read the
    Controversies of some great Men concerning the Antiquities of
    _Egypt_, I made a Voyage to _Grand Cairo_, on purpose to take
    the Measure of a Pyramid; and as soon as I had set my self right
    in that Particular, returned to my Native Country with great
    Satisfaction.

    I have passed my latter Years in this City, where I am
    frequently seen in most publick Places, tho' there are not above
    half a dozen of my select Friends that know me; of whom my next
    Paper shall give a more particular Account. There is no Place of
    publick Resort, wherein I do not often make my Appearance;
    sometimes I am seen thrusting my Head into a Round of
    Politicians at _Will_'s, and listning with great Attention to
    the Narratives that are made in those little Circular Audiences.
    Sometimes I smoak a Pipe at _Child_'s; and whilst I seem
    attentive to nothing but the _Post-Man_, over-hear the
    Conversation of every Table in the Room. I appear on _Sunday
    Nights_ at _St. James's Coffee_-House, and sometimes join the
    little Committee of Politicks in the Inner-Room, as one who
    comes there to hear and improve. My Face is likewise very well
    known at the _Grecian_, the _Cocoa-Tree_, and in the Theaters
    both of _Drury-Lane_, and the _Hay-Market_. I have been taken
    for a Merchant


    Reduced                   Leaf in original, 8.12 × 13.12 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 conversation 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




                                  THE
                                  LIFE
                                  AND
                           STRANGE SURPRIZING
                               ADVENTURES
                                   OF
                           _ROBINSON CRUSOE_,
                          Of _YORK_, MARINER:

                Who lived Eight and Twenty Years, all
                alone in an un-inhabited Island on the
                Coast of AMERICA, near the Mouth of the
                Great River of OROONOQUE;

                Having been cast on Shore by Shipwreck,
                wherein all the Men perished but himself.

                                  WITH

                    An Account how he was at last as
                    strangely deliver'd by PYRATES.

                               * * * * *

                         _Written by Himself._

                               * * * * *

                             _L O N D O N:_
       Printed for W. TAYLOR at the _Ship_ in _Pater-Noster-Row_.
                                MDCCXIX.




                     Anima Rabelasii habitans in sicco
                                                           COLERIDGE




                                TRAVELS
                              INTO SEVERAL
                             Remote NATIONS
                                 OF THE
                                 WORLD.

                               * * * * *

                             In FOUR PARTS.

                               * * * * *

                         By _LEMUEL GULLIVER_,
                    First a SURGEON, and then a CAPTAIN
                    of several SHIPS.

                               * * * * *

                                VOL. I.

                               * * * * *

                             _L O N D O N:_

                     _Printed for_ BENJ. MOTTE, _at the
                   Middle_ Temple-Gate _in_ Fleet-street.
                               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




                                   AN
                                 ESSAY
                                   ON
                                  MAN
                         Address'd to a FRIEND.

                               * * * * *

                                PART I.

                               * * * * *

                             [Illustration]

                               * * * * *

                             _L O N D O N:_

    Printed for _J. Wilford_, at the _Three Flower-de-luces_, behind
                    the _Chapter-house_, St. _Pauls_.
                         [Price One Shilling.]
                                 _1733_


    Reduced                    Leaf in original, 8.5 × 12.62 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 dwelling on in the sequel: they are
                the underlying principles of a great
                portion of my teaching.
                                                  NEWMAN




                                  THE
                                ANALOGY
                                   OF
                               RELIGION,
                         Natural and Revealed,
                                 TO THE
                   Constitution and Course of NATURE.

                           To which are added
                        Two brief DISSERTATIONS:
                        I. Of PERSONAL IDENTITY.
                      II. Of the NATURE of VIRTUE.

                                   BY
                   JOSEPH BUTLER, L L. D.  Rector of
                 Stanhope, in the Bishoprick of Durham.

    _Ejus_ (Analogiæ) _hæc vis est, ut id quod dubium est, ad
    aliquid simile de quo non quæritur, referat; ut incerta certis
    probet._
                                     Quint. Inst. Orat. L. I. c. vi.

                              L O N D O N:
            Printed for JAMES, JOHN and PAUL KNAPTON, at the
                    Crown in Ludgate Street. MDCCXXXVI.


    Reduced                   Leaf in original, 7.87 × 10.18 inches.




                I never heard the olde song of Percy and
                Duglas that I found not my heart mooved
                more than with a Trumpet.
                                                  SIDNEY




                                RELIQUES
                                   OF
                        ANCIENT ENGLISH POETRY:

                             CONSISTING OF
                  Old Heroic BALLADS, SONGS, and other
                      PIECES of our earlier POETS,
                      (Chiefly of the LYRIC kind.)
                 Together with some few of later Date.

                           VOLUME THE FIRST.

                      [Illustration: DURAT OPUS VATUM]

                              L O N D O N:
                    Printed for J. DODSLEY in Pall-Mall.
                               M DCC LXV.




            From dewy pastures, uplands sweet with thyme,
                A virgin breeze freshened the jaded day.
            It wafted Collins' lonely vesper chime,
                It breathed abroad the frugal note of Gray.
                                                      WATSON




                                  ODES
                               ON SEVERAL
                     _Descriptive_ and _Allegoric_
                               SUBJECTS.

                               * * * * *

                          By WILLIAM COLLINS.

                               * * * * *



                ----[Greek: Eiên
        Heurêsiepês, anageisthai
        Prosphoros en Moisan Diphrô;
        Tolma de kai amphilaphês Dynamis
        Espoito,----                      Pindar. Olymp. Th.]

                             [Illustration]


                             _L O N D O N:_
                Printed for A. MILLAR, in the _Strand_.
                              M.DCC.XLVII.
                         (Price One Shilling.)




                The first book in the world for the
                knowledge it displays of the human heart.
                                                 JOHNSON




                               CLARISSA.

                                OR, THE
                                HISTORY
                                  OF A
                              YOUNG LADY:

                             Comprehending
            _The most_ Important Concerns _of_ Private LIFE.
                       And particularly shewing,
             The DISTRESSES that may attend the Misconduct
                     Both of PARENTS and CHILDREN,
                        In Relation to MARRIAGE.

                               * * * * *

                 _Published by the_ EDITOR _of_ PAMELA.

                               * * * * *

                                VOL. I.

                               * * * * *

                             [Illustration]

                               * * * * *

                             _L O N D O N:_
                         Printed for S. Richardson:
 And Sold by A. MILLAR, over-against _Catharine-street_ in the _Strand_:
           J. and JA. RIVINGTON, in _St. Paul's Church-yard_:
                  JOHN OSBORN, in _Pater-noster Row_;
                      And by J. LEAKE, at _Bath_.
                               M.DCC.XLVIII.




                Upon my word I think the _oedipus
                Tyrannus_, the _Alchymist_, and _Tom
                Jones_ the three most perfect plots ever
                planned.
                                               COLERIDGE




                                  THE
                                HISTORY
                                   OF
                              _TOM JONES_,
                                   A
                               FOUNDLING.

                               * * * * *

                            In SIX VOLUMES.

                               * * * * *

                        By HENRY FIELDING, Esq.

                               * * * * *

                 ----_Mores hominum multorum vidit_----

                               * * * * *

                             _L O N D O N:_
                  Printed for A. MILLAR, over-against
                  _Catharine-street_ in the _Strand_.
                               MDCCXLIX.




                Now, gentlemen, I would rather be the
                author of that poem than take Quebec.
                                                   WOLFE




                                   AN
                                 ELEGY
                               WROTE IN A
                          Country Church Yard.

                               * * * * *

                               _LONDON:_
                 Printed for R. DODSLEY in _Pall-mall_;
           And sold by M. COOPER in _Pater-noster-Row_. 1751.
                           [Price Six-pence.]


    Reduced                     Leaf in original, 7.37 × 9.81 inches




                I have devoted this book, the labour of
                years, to the honour of my country, that
                we may no longer yield the palm of
                philology without a contest to the
                nations of the Continent.
                                                 JOHNSON




                                   A
                               DICTIONARY
                                 OF THE
                           ENGLISH LANGUAGE:
                                IN WHICH
              The WORDS are deduced from their ORIGINALS,
                                  AND
             ILLUSTRATED in their DIFFERENT SIGNIFICATIONS
                                   BY
                    EXAMPLES from the best WRITERS.
                         TO WHICH ARE PREFIXED,
                       A HISTORY of the LANGUAGE,
                                  AND
                          AN ENGLISH GRAMMAR.
                        BY SAMUEL JOHNSON, A. M.
                            IN  TWO  VOLUMES

                                VOL.  I.

          Cum tabulis animum censoris sumet honesti:
        Audebit quæcunque parum splendoris habebunt,
        Et sine pondere erunt, et honore indigna serentur.
        Verba movere loco; quamvis invita recedant,
        Et versentur adhuc intra penetralia Vestæ:
        Obscurata diu populo bonus eruet, atque
        Proferet in lucem speciosa vocabula rerum,
        Quæ priscis memorata Catonibus atque Cethegis,
        Nunc situs informis premit et deserta vetustas.     HOR.

                              L O N D O N,
                         Printed by W. STRAHAN,
    For J. and P. KNAPTON; T. and T. LONGMAN; C. HITCH and L. HAWES;
                   A. MILLAR; and R. and J. DODSLEY.
                                MDCCLV.


    Reduced                     Leaf in original, 10 × 16.18 inches.




            Eripuit coelo fulmen sceptrumque tyrannis
                                                      TURGOT




                         Poor RICHARD improved:

                               * * * * *

                                BEING AN
                                ALMANACK
                                  AND
                              _EPHEMERIS_
                                 OF THE
                      MOTIONS of the SUN and MOON;
                                THE TRUE
                   PLACES and ASPECTS of the PLANETS;
                                  THE
                  _RISING_ and _SETTING_ of the _SUN_;
                                AND THE
             Rising, Setting _and_ Southing _of the_ Moon,
                                FOR THE
                         YEAR of our LORD 1758:
                   Being the Second after LEAP-YEAR.

                            Containing also,

                The Lunations, Conjunctions, Eclipses,
                Judgment of the Weather, Rising and
                Setting of the Planets, Length of Days
                and Nights, Fairs, Courts, Roads, &c.
                Together with useful Tables,
                chronological Observations, and
                entertaining Remarks.

                               * * * * *

                Fitted to the Latitude of Forty Degrees,
                and a Meridian of near five Hours West
                from _London_; but may, without feasible
                Error, serve all the NORTHERN COLONIES.

                               * * * * *

                     By _RICHARD SAUNDERS_, Philom.

                               * * * * *

                            _PHILADELPEIA:_
             Printed and Sold by B. FRANKLIN, and D. HALL.




                There your son will find analytical
                reasoning diffused in a pleasing and
                perspicuous style. There he may imbibe,
                imperceptibly, the first principles on
                which our excellent laws are founded;
                and there he may become acquainted with
                an uncouth crabbed author, Coke upon
                Lytleton, who has disappointed and
                disheartened many a tyro, but who cannot
                fail to please in a modern dress.
                                               MANSFIELD




                              COMMENTARIES
                                 ON THE
                                  LAWS
                                   OF
                                ENGLAND.

                            BOOK THE FIRST.

                                   BY
                        WILLIAM BLACKSTONE, ESQ.
                       VINERIAN PROFESSOR OF LAW,
                                  AND
                   SOLICITOR GENERAL TO HER MAJESTY.

                              O X F O R D,
                    PRINTED AT THE CLARENDON PRESS.
                              M. DCC. LXV.


    Reduced                   Leaf in original, 8.37 × 13.37 inches.




                I received one morning a message from
                poor Goldsmith that he was in great
                distress, and, as it was not in his
                power to come to me, begging that I
                would come to him as soon as possible. I
                sent him a guinea, and promised to come
                to him directly. I accordingly went as
                soon as I was dressed, and found that
                his landlady had arrested him for his
                rent, at which he was in a violent
                passion. I perceived that he had already
                changed my guinea, and had got a bottle
                of madeira and a glass before him. I put
                the cork into the bottle, desired he
                would be calm, and began to talk to him
                of the means by which he might be
                extricated. He then told me he had a
                novel (_The Vicar of Wakefield_) ready
                for the press, which he produced to me.
                I looked into it, and saw its merit;
                told the landlady I should soon return;
                and, having gone to a bookseller, sold
                it for sixty pounds. I brought Goldsmith
                the money, and he discharged his rent,
                not without rating his landlady in a
                high tone for having used him so ill.
                                                 JOHNSON




                                  THE
                               V I C A R
                                   OF
                               WAKEFIELD:
                              A  T A L E.
                   Supposed to be written by HIMSELF.

                               * * * * *

                   _Sperate miseri, cavete fælices._

                               * * * * *

                                VOL. I.

                               * * * * *

                               SALISBURY:
                         Printed by B. COLLINS,
              For F. NEWBERY, in Pater-Noster-Row, London.
                               MDCCLXVI.




                His exquisite sensibility is ever
                counteracted by his perception of the
                ludicrous and his ambition after the
                strange.
                                                TALFOURD




                                   A
                          SENTIMENTAL JOURNEY
                                THROUGH
                           FRANCE AND ITALY.

                                   BY
                              MR. YORICK.

                               * * * * *

                                VOL. I.

                               * * * * *

                              L O N D O N:
               Printed for T. BECKET and P. A. DE HONDT,
                       in the Strand. MDCCLXVIII.




                I know not indeed of any work on the
                principles of free government that is to
                be compared, in instruction, and
                intrinsic value, to this small and
                unpretending volume of _The Federalist_,
                not even if we resort to Aristotle,
                Cicero, Machiavel, Montesquieu, Milton,
                Locke, or Burke. It is equally admirable
                in the depth of its wisdom, the
                comprehensiveness of its views, the
                sagacity of its reflections, and the
                fearlessness, patriotism, candor,
                simplicity, and elegance with which its
                truths are uttered and recommended.
                                         CHANCELLOR KENT




                                 T H E
                              FEDERALIST:
                              A COLLECTION
                                   OF
                              E S S A Y S,

                        WRITTEN IN FAVOUR OF THE
                           NEW CONSTITUTION,

               AS AGREED UPON BY THE FEDERAL CONVENTION,
                          SEPTEMBER 17, 1787.

                            IN  TWO  VOLUMES

                                VOL. I.

                               NEW-YORK:
                 PRINTED AND SOLD BY J. AND A. M'LEAN,
                         No. 41, HANOVER-SQUARE,
                            M,DCC,LXXXVIII.




                The novel of _Humphrey Clinker_ is, I do
                think, the most laughable story that has
                ever been written since the goodly art
                of novel-writing began. Winifred Jenkins
                and Tabitha Bramble must keep Englishmen
                on the grin for ages to come; and in
                their letters and the story of their
                loves there is a perpetual fount of
                sparkling laughter, as inexhaustible as
                Bladud's well.
                                               THACKERAY




                                  THE
                               EXPEDITION
                                   OF
                            HUMPHRY CLINKER.

                            By the AUTHOR of
                            RODERICK RANDOM.

                               * * * * *

                           IN THREE VOLUMES.
                               V O L. I.

                               * * * * *

                ----Quorsum hæc tam putida tendunt,
                Furcifer? ad te, inquam----      HOR.

                               * * * * *

                              L O N D O N,
              Printed for W. JOHNSTON, in Ludgate-Street;
                     and B. COLLINS, in Salisbury.
                                MDCLXXI.




                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
                account.
                                                  BUCKLE




                                   AN
                             I N Q U I R Y
                                INTO THE
                           Nature and Causes
                                 OF THE
                           WEALTH of NATIONS.

                   By ADAM SMITH, LL. D. and F. R. S.
  Formerly Professor of Moral Philosophy in the University of Glasgow.

                             IN TWO VOLUMES
                                VOL. I.

                               * * * * *

                                LONDON:
         PRINTED FOR W. STRAHAN; AND T. CADELL, IN THE STRAND.
                               MDCCLXXVI.


    Reduced                   Leaf in original, 8.62 × 10.87 inches.




            Sapping a solemn creed with solemn sneer;
            The lord of irony--
                                                       BYRON




                                  THE
                                HISTORY
                                 OF THE
                            DECLINE AND FALL
                                 OF THE
                             ROMAN EMPIRE,

                          By EDWARD GIBBON, Esq;

                            VOLUME THE FIRST.

    Jam provideo animo, velut qui, proximis littori vadis inducti,
    mare pedibus ingrediuntur, quicquid progredior, in vastiorem me
    altitudinem, ac velut profundum invehi; et crescere pene opus,
    quod prima quæque perficiendo minui videbatur.

                               * * * * *

                              L O N D O N:
         PRINTED FOR W. STRAHAN; AND T. CADELL, IN THE STRAND.
                               MDCCLXXVI.


    Reduced                      Leaf in original, 8.25-10.31 inches




                Whatever Sheridan has done, or chosen to
                do, has been _par excellence_ always the
                best of its kind. He has written the
                best comedy (_School for Scandal_), the
                best drama (in my mind far beyond that
                St. Giles lampoon, the _Beggar's
                Opera_), the best farce (the
                _Critic_,--and it is only too good for a
                farce), and the best address (_Monologue
                on Garrick_), and, to crown all,
                delivered the very best oration (the
                famous Begum speech) ever conceived or
                heard in this country.
                                                   BYRON




                                  THE
                                _SCHOOL_
                                  FOR
                               _SCANDAL._
                                   A
                                COMEDY.

                               * * * * *

        Satire has always shone among the rest,
        And is the boldest way, if not the best,
        To tell men freely of their foulest faults,
        To laugh at their vain deeds, and vainer thoughts.
        In satire, too, the wise took diff'rent ways,
        To each deserving its peculiar praise.
                                                         DRYDEN.

                               * * * * *

                               _DUBLIN:_
                         Printed for J. EWLING.




                Of all the verses that have been ever
                devoted to the subject of domestic
                happiness, those in his Winter Evening,
                at the opening of the fourth book of the
                _Task_, are perhaps the most beautiful.
                                                CAMPBELL




                                  THE
                                 TASK,

                                   A
                                  POEM,
                             IN SIX BOOKS.


                          BY  WILLIAM  COWPER,
                       OF THE INNER TEMPLE, ESQ.


                       Fit surculus arbor.
                                          ANONYM.


                        To which are added,

                        BY THE  SAME AUTHOR,

         AN EPISTLE TO JOSEPH HILL, Esq. TIROCINIUM, or a
         REVIEW OF SCHOOLS, and the HISTORY OF JOHN GILPIN.

                               * * * * *

                                LONDON:
               PRINTED FOR J. JOHNSON, N^o 72, ST. PAUL'S
                              CHURCH-YARD.
                                 1785.




                Through busiest street and loneliest glen
                Are felt the flashes of his pen:
                He rules 'mid winter snows, and when
                     Bees fill their hives:
                Deep in the general heart of men
                     His power survives.
                                                  WORDSWORTH




                               P O E M S,
                             CHIEFLY IN THE
                           SCOTTISH DIALECT,

                                   BY
                              ROBERT BURNS.

                               * * * * *

    THE Simple Bard, unbroke by rules of Art,
    He pours the wild effusions of the heart:
    And if inspir'd, 'tis Nature's pow'rs Inspire;
    Her's all the melting thrill, and her's the kindling fire.
                                                          ANONYMOUS.

                               * * * * *

                              KILMARNOCK:
                        PRINTED BY JOHN WILSON.
                             M,DCC,LXXXVI.




                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




                                  THE
                            NATURAL HISTORY
                                  AND
                              ANTIQUITIES
                                   OF
                               SELBORNE,
                                 IN THE
                         COUNTY OF SOUTHAMPTON:

                                  WITH
                      ENGRAVINGS, AND AN APPENDIX.

                               * * * * *

                -- -- -- "ego Apis Matinæ
                         "More modoque
                Grata carpentis -- -- -- per laborem
                Plurimum," -- -- -- -- --           HOR.

    "Omnia benè describere, quæ in hoc mundo, a Deo facta, aut
    Naturæ creatæ viribus elaborata fuerunt, opus est non unius
    hominis, nec unius ævi.  Hinc _Faunæ & Floræ_ utilissimæ; hine
    _Monographi_ præstantissimi."

                                             SCOPOLI ANN. HIST. NAT.

                               * * * * *

                              L O N D O N:
                         PRINTED BY T. BENSLEY;
          FOR B. WHITE AND SON, AT HORACE'S HEAD, FLEET STREET.
                             M,DCC,LXXXIX,


    Reduced                     Leaf in original, 7.43 × 9.5 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




                              REFLECTIONS
                                 ON THE
                          REVOLUTION IN FRANCE,
                               AND ON THE
                    PROCEEDINGS IN CERTAIN SOCIETIES
                               IN LONDON
                        RELATIVE TO THAT EVENT.
                                  IN A
                                 LETTER

               INTENDED TO HAVE BEEN SENT TO A GENTLEMAN
                              _IN PARIS._

                        BY THE RIGHT HONOURABLE
                            _EDMUND BURKE._

                               * * * * *

                              L O N D O N:
                  PRINTED FOR J. DODSLEY, IN PALL-MALL.
                               M.DCC.XC.




            The great Commoner of mankind
                                                      CONWAY




                            _RIGHTS OF MAN:_
                                BEING AN
                      ANSWER TO MR. BURKE'S ATTACK
                                 ON THE
                          _FRENCH REVOLUTION._

                                   BY
                             THOMAS PAINE,

            SECRETARY FOR FOREIGN AFFAIRS TO CONGRESS IN THE
                           AMERICAN WAR, AND
              AUTHOR OF THE WORK INTITLED _COMMON SENSE_.

                               * * * * *

                              L O N D O N:
             PRINTED FOR J. JOHNSON, ST PAUL'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 orators, than Boswell is the
            first of biographers.
                                            MACAULAY




                                  THE
                                  LIFE
                                   OF
                          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 FLOURISHED.

                           IN  TWO  VOLUMES.

                        BY JAMES  BOSWELL, ESQ.

                    ----_Quò fit ut_ OMNIS
            _Votiva pateat veluti descripta tabella_
            VITA SENIS.----                           HORAT.

                               * * * * *

                           VOLUME THE  FIRST.

                               * * * * *

                             _L O N D O N:_
                       PRINTED BY HENRY BALDWIN,
                    FOR CHARLES DILLY, IN THE POULTRY.
                               M DCC XCI.


    Reduced                   Leaf in original, 8.18 × 10.68 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 furl'd,
                The freshness of the early world.
                                                  ARNOLD




                            LYRICAL BALLADS,

                                  WITH

                          _A FEW OTHER POEMS_.


                                LONDON:
              PRINTED FOR J. & A. ARCH, GRACECHURCH-STREET.
                                 1798.




                The history was hailed with delight as
                the most witty and original production
                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
    Ponderings 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 waarheid die in duister lag,
                Die komt met klaarheid aan den dag.=

                               * * * * *

                            IN TWO VOLUMES.

                                VOL. I.

                               * * * * *

            PUBLISHED BY INSKEEP & BRADFORD, NEW YORK;
            BRADFORD & INSKEEP, PHILADELPHIA; WM. M'ILHENNEY,
            BOSTON; COALE & THOMAS, BALTIMORE;
            AND MORFORD, WILLINGTON, & CO. CHARLESTON.

                               * * * * *

                                 1809.




            The Pilgrim of Eternity whose fame
        Over his living head like heaven is bent.
                                                         SHELLEY




                     =Childe Harold's Pilgrimage.=

                                ROMAUNT.

                                   BY

                              LORD BYRON.

                               * * * * *

    L'univers est une espèce de livre, dont on n'a lu que la
    première page quand on n'a vu que son pays. J'en ai feuilleté un
    assez grand nombre, que j'ai trouvé également mauvaises. Cet
    examen ne m'a point été infructueux. Je haïssais ma patrie.
    Toutes les impertinences des peuples divers, parmi lesquels j'ai
    vécu, m'ont réconcilié avec elle. Quand je n'aurais tiré d'autre
    bénéfice de mes voyages que celui-là, je n'en regretterais ni
    les frais, ni les fatigues.
                                                      LE COSMOPOLITE.

                               * * * * *

                                _LONDON:_
               PRINTED FOR JOHN MURRAY, 32, FLEET-STREET;
        WILLIAM BLACKWOOD, EDINBURGH; AND JOHN CUMMING, DUBLIN.
                   _By Thomas Davison, White-Friars._
                                 1812.


    Reduced                  Leaf in original,  7.93 × 10.18 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, feelings, 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 exquisite 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




                                 PRIDE

                                  AND

                               PREJUDICE:

                                A NOVEL.

                          _IN THREE VOLUMES._

                               * * * * *

                                 BY THE
                   AUTHOR OF "SENSE AND SENSIBILITY."

                               * * * * *

                                VOL. I.

                               * * * * *

                               =London:=
                        PRINTED FOR T. EGERTON,
                      MILITARY LIBRARY, WHITEHALL.
                                 1813.




            A subtle-souled psychologist
                                                     SHELLEY




                              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.




        O great and gallant Scott,
            True gentleman, heart, blood, and bone,
        I would it had been my lot
            To have seen thee, and heard thee, and known.
                                                        TENNYSON




                                IVANHOE;

                               A ROMANCE.

                    BY "THE AUTHOR OF WAVERLEY," &c.

                               * * * * *

        Now fitted the halter, 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 HURST, ROBINSON, AND CO. 90, CHEAPSIDE, 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




                                 LAMIA,

                               ISABELLA,

                         THE EVE OF ST. AGNES,

                                  AND

                              OTHER POEMS.

                               * * * * *

                             BY JOHN KEATS,
                          AUTHOR OF ENDYMION.

                               * * * * *

                                LONDON:
                     PRINTED FOR TAYLOR AND HESSEY,
                             FLEET-STREET.
                                 1820.




                Cor cordium
                                                 EPITAPH




                                ADONAIS

                               * * * * *

                  AN ELEGY ON THE DEATH OF JOHN KEATS,
                   AUTHOR OF ENDYMION, HYPERION ETC.

                                   BY

                           PERCY. B. SHELLEY

        [Greek: Astêr prin men elampes eni zôoisin heôos.
            Nun de thanôn, lampeis hesperos en phthimenois.]
                                                          PLATO.


                                  PISA
                        WITH THE TYPES OF DIDOT
                               MDCCCXXI.


    Reduced                   Leaf in original, 7.43 × 10.06 inches.




                And the more we walk around his image,
                and the closer we look, the more nearly
                we arrive at this conclusion, that the
                _Elia_ on our shelves is all but the
                same being as the pleasant Charles who
                was so loved by his friends, who
                ransomed from the stalls, to use old
                Richard of Bury's phrase, his Thomas
                Browne and the "dear silly old angel"
                Fuller, and who stammered out such
                quaint jests and puns--"Saint Charles,"
                as Thackeray once called him, while
                looking at one of his half-mad letters,
                and remembering his devotion to that
                quite mad sister.
                                              FITZGERALD




                                 ELIA.


            ESSAYS WHICH HAVE APPEARED UNDER THAT SIGNATURE
                                 IN THE
                            LONDON MAGAZINE.

                               * * * * *

                                LONDON:
                     PRINTED FOR TAYLOR AND HESSEY,
                             FLEET-STREET.
                                 1823.




                The most confiding of diarists, the most
                harmless of turncoats, the most
                wondering of _quidnuncs_, the fondest
                and most penitential of faithless
                husbands, the most admiring, yet
                grieving, of the beholders of the ladies
                of Charles II, the Sancho Panza of the
                most insipid of Quixotes, James II, who
                did bestow on him (in naval matters) the
                government of a certain "island," which,
                to say the truth, he administered to the
                surprise and edification of all who
                bantered him. Many official patriots
                have, doubtless, existed since his time,
                and thousands, nay millions of
                respectable men of all sorts gone to
                their long account, more or less grave
                in public, and frail to their
                consciences; but when shall we meet with
                such another as he was?
                                                    HUNT




                                MEMOIRS

                                   OF

                       SAMUEL PEPYS, ESQ. F.R.S.

                       SECRETARY TO THE ADMIRALTY
               IN THE REIGNS OF CHARLES II. AND JAMES II.

                               COMPRISING

                            H I S  D I A R Y

                           FROM 1659 TO 1669,

    DECIPHERED BY THE REV. JOHN SMITH, A. B. OF ST. JOHN'S COLLEGE,
         CAMBRIDGE, FROM THE ORIGINAL SHORT-HAND MS. IN THE
             PEPYSIAN LIBRARY, AND A SELECTION FROM HIS

              P R I V A T E  C O R R E S P O N D E N C E.

                             [Illustration]

                               EDITED BY
                     RICHARD, LORD BRAYBROOKE.

                               * * * * *

                            IN TWO VOLUMES.

                                VOL. I.

                               * * * * *

                                LONDON:
                 HENRY COLBURN, NEW BURLINGTON STREET.
                               MDCCCXXV.


    Reduced                   Leaf in original, 9.25 × 11.87 inches.




                While the love of country continues to
                prevail, his memory will exist in the
                hearts of the people.
                                                 WEBSTER




                                THE LAST

                                   OF

                             THE MOHICANS;

                             A NARRATIVE OF

                                 1757.

                   BY THE AUTHOR OF "THE PIONEERS."

                               * * * * *

        "Mislike me not, for my complexion,
        The shadowed livery of the burnished sun."

                               * * * * *

                            IN TWO VOLUMES.
                                VOL. I.

                               * * * * *

                             PHILADELPHIA:
                  H. C. CAREY & I. LEA--CHESNUT-STREET.

                               * * * * *

                                  1826.




        And through the trumpet of a child of Rome
        Rang the pure music of the flutes of Greece.
                                                   SWINBURNE




                          PERICLES AND ASPASIA

                                   BY

                       WALTER SAVAGE LANDOR, ESQ.


                            IN TWO VOLUMES.

                                VOL. I.


                                 LONDON
                  SAUNDERS AND OTLEY, CONDUIT STREET.
                                 1836.




                Thankfully I take my share of love and
                kindness which this generous and gentle
                and charitable soul has contributed to
                the world. I take and enjoy my share and
                say a benediction for the meal.
                                               THACKERAY




                                  THE

                            PICKWICK PAPERS.

                                   BY

                            CHARLES DICKENS.


                      [Illustration: PHIZ. feat.]


                                 LONDON
                      CHAPMAN AND HALL 186 STRAND
                               MDCCCXXXVII.




                Carlyle alone with his wide humanity
                has, since Coleridge, kept to us the
                promises of England. His provokes rather
                than informs. He blows down narrow
                walls, and struggles, in a lurid light,
                like the Jótuns, to throw the old woman
                Time; in his work there is too much of
                the anvil and the forge, not enough
                hay-making under the sun. He makes us
                act rather than think; he does not say,
                know thyself, which is impossible, but
                know thy work. He has no pillars of
                Hercules, no clear goal, but an endless
                Atlantis horizon. He exaggerates. Yes:
                but he makes the hour great, the future
                bright, the reverence and admiration
                strong: while mere precise fact is a
                coil of lead.
                                                 THOREAU




                             SARTOR RESARTUS.


                           IN THREE BOOKS.

                               * * * * *

             =Reprinted for Friends from Fraser's Magazine.=

                               * * * * *

        _Mein Vermächtniss, wie herrlich weit und breit!_
        _Die Zeit ist mein Vermächtniss, mein Acker ist die Zeit._

                               * * * * *

                                LONDON:
                    JAMES FRASER, 215 REGENT STREET.

                               * * * * *

                             M.DCCC.XXXIV.




                It was good to meet him in the
                wood-paths with that pure intellectual
                gleam diffused about his presence, like
                the garment of a shining one; and he so
                quiet, so simple, so without pretension,
                encountering each man as if expecting to
                receive more than he could impart.
                                               HAWTHORNE




                                NATURE.

                               * * * * *

                "Nature is but an image or imitation of
                wisdom, the last thing of the soul;
                nature being a thing which doth only do,
                but not know."
                                               PLOTINUS.

                               * * * * *

                                BOSTON:
                       JAMES MUNROE AND COMPANY.
                             M DCCC XXXVI.




                The result of all his labors of
                research, thought and composition was a
                history possessing the unity, variety
                and interest of a magnificent poem.
                                                 WHIPPLE




                                HISTORY

                                 OF THE

                           CONQUEST OF PERU,

                        WITH A PRELIMINARY VIEW

                                 OF THE

                       CIVILIZATION OF THE INCAS.

                               * * * * *

                                   BY
                          WILLIAM H. PRESCOTT,
   CORRESPONDING MEMBER OF THE FRENCH INSTITUTE; OF THE ROYAL ACADEMY
                       OF HISTORY AT MADRID, ETC.

                               * * * * *

            "Congestæ cumulantur opes, orbisque rapinas
            Accipit."
                         CLAUDIAN, In Ruf., lib. i., v. 194.

            "So color de religion
            Van a buscar plata y oro
            Del encubierto tesoro."
                       LOPE DE VEGA, El Nuevo Mundo, Jorn. 1.

                               * * * * *

                            IN TWO VOLUMES.
                               VOLUME I.

                               * * * * *

                               NEW YORK:
                  HARPER AND BROTHERS, 82 CLIFF STREET.
                             M DCCC XLVII.




                When all is said, Poe remains a master
                of fantastic and melancholy sound. Some
                foolish old legend tells of a musician
                who surpassed all his rivals. His
                strains were unearthly sad, and ravished
                the ears of those who listened with a
                strange melancholy. Yet his viol had but
                a single string, and the framework was
                fashioned out of a dead woman's
                breast-bone. Poe's verse--the parallel
                is much in his own taste--resembles that
                player's minstrelsy.
                                                    LANG




                               THE RAVEN

                                  AND

                              OTHER POEMS


                                   BY

                             EDGAR A. POE.

                               * * * * *

                               NEW YORK:
                    WILEY AND PUTNAM, 161 BROADWAY.
                                 1845.




                Strew with laurel the grave
                Of the early-dying! Alas,
                Early she goes on the path
                To the silent country, and leaves
                Half her laurels unwon,
                Dying too soon!--yet green
                Laurels she had, and a course
                Short, but redoubled by fame.
                                                  ARNOLD




                               JANE EYRE.

                          =An Autobiography.=


                               EDITED BY
                              CURRER BELL.


                           IN THREE VOLUMES.
                                VOL. I.


                                LONDON:
                  SMITH, ELDER, AND CO., CORNHILL.
                                 1847.




                The poem already is a little classic,
                and will remain one, just as surely as
                _The Vicar of Wakefield_, _The Deserted
                Village_, or any other sweet and pious
                idyl of our English tongue.
                                                 STEDMAN




                              EVANGELINE,

                                   A

                            TALE OF ACADIE.

                                   BY

                      HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW.

                               * * * * *

                                BOSTON:

                     WILLIAM D. TICKNOR & COMPANY.
                                 1847.




                The most exquisite poetry hitherto
                written by a woman.
                                                 STEDMAN




                                SONNETS.


                                   BY
                                E. B. B.


                                READING:
                         [NOT FOR PUBLICATION.]
                                 1847.




                What racy talks of Yankee-land he had!
                Up-country girl, up-country farmer-lad;
                The regnant clergy of the time of old
                In wig and gown:--tales not to be retold.
                                                  CLOUGH




                         _MELIBOEUS-HIPPONAX._

                               * * * * *

                                  THE

                            =Biglow Papers=,

                                EDITED,

                  WITH AN INTRODUCTION, NOTES, GLOSSARY,
                           AND COPIOUS INDEX,

                                   BY
                          HOMER WILBUR, A. M.,
    PASTOR OF THIS FIRST CHURCH IN JAALAM, AND (PROSPECTIVE) MEMBER
          OF MANY LITERARY, LEARNED AND SCIENTIFIC SOCIETIES,
                       (_for which see page v._)


        The ploughman's whistle, or the trivial flute,
        Finds more respect than great Apollo's lute.
                               _Quarles's Emblems_, B. II. E. 8.

        Margaritas, munde porcine, calcâsti: en, siliquas accipe.
                               _Jac. Car. Fil. ad Pub. Leg._ §1.


                               CAMBRIDGE:
                      PUBLISHED BY GEORGE NICHOLS.
                                 1848.




                There is a man in our own days whose
                words are not framed to tickle delicate
                ears; who, to my thinking, comes before
                the great ones of society much as the
                son of Imlah came before the throned
                Kings of Judah and Israel; and who
                speaks truth as deep, with a power as
                prophet-like and as vital--a mien as
                dauntless and as daring. Is the satirist
                of _Vanity Fair_ admired in high
                places?--They say he is like Fielding;
                they talk of his wit, humour, comic
                powers. He resembles Fielding as an
                eagle does a vulture: Fielding could
                stoop on carrion, but Thackeray never
                does. His wit is bright, his humour
                attractive, but both bear the same
                relation to his serious genius that the
                mere lambent sheet-lightning, playing
                under the edge of the summer cloud, does
                to the electric death-spark hid in its
                womb.
                                                  BRONTË




                              VANITY FAIR

                       =A Novel without a Hero.=

                                  _BY_

                      WILLIAM MAKEPEACE THACKERAY.


                                _LONDON_
                   BRADBURY & EVANS, BOUVERIE STREET,
                                 _1848_




                The cleverest and most
                fascinating of narrators.
                                                 FREEMAN




                                  THE
                           HISTORY OF ENGLAND
                                  FROM
                       THE ACCESSION OF JAMES II.


                                   BY
                       THOMAS BABINGTON MACAULAY.


                               VOLUME I.


                                LONDON:
                              PRINTED FOR
                  LONGMAN, BROWN, GREEN, AND LONGMANS,
                            PATERNOSTER-ROW.
                                 1849.




        Shakespeare and Milton--what third blazoned name
            Shall lips of after-ages link to these?
            His who, beside the wild encircling seas,
        Was England's voice, her voice with one acclaim,
        For threescore years; whose word of praise was fame,
            Whose scorn gave pause to man's iniquities.

        What strain was his in that Crimean war?
            A bugle call in battle, a low breath,
            Plaintive and sweet above the fields of death!
        So year by year the music rolled afar,
        From Euxine wastes to flowery Kandahar,
            Bearing the laurel or the cypress wreath.

       Others shall have their little space of time,
            Their proper niche and bust, then fade away
            Into the darkness, poets of a day;
        But thou, O builder of enduring rhyme,
        Thou shalt not pass! Thy fame in every clime
            On earth shall live where Saxon speech has sway.
                                                         ALDRICH




                              IN MEMORIAM.


                                LONDON.
                      EDWARD MOXON, DOVER STREET.
                                 1850.




        New England's poet, soul reserved and deep,
        November nature with a name of May.
                                                          LOWELL




                                  THE
                            SCARLET LETTER,


                               A ROMANCE.


                                   BY
                          NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE.


                                BOSTON:
                       TICKNOR, REED, AND FIELDS
                               M DCCC L.




                Works of imagination written with an aim
                to immediate impression are commonly
                ephemeral; but the creative faculty of
                Mrs. Stowe, like that of Cervantes in
                _Don Quixote_ and of Fielding in _Joseph
                Andrews_, overpowered the narrow
                specialty of her design, and expanded a
                local and temporary theme with the
                cosmopolitanism of genius.
                                                  LOWELL




                           UNCLE TOM'S CABIN;
                                  OR,
                         LIFE AMONG THE LOWLY.


                                   BY
                         HARRIET BEECHER STOWE.


                             [Illustration]

                                 VOL. I.


                                BOSTON:
                       JOHN P. JEWETT & COMPANY.
                            CLEVELAND, OHIO:
                     JEWETT, PROCTOR & WORTHINGTON.
                                 1852.




                A strange, unexpected and, I believe,
                most true and excellent _sermon_ in
                Stones--as well as the best piece of
                school-mastery in architectonics.
                                                 CARLYLE




                                  THE

                          =Stones of Venice.=


                           VOLUME THE FIRST.

                           =The Foundations.=


                            BY JOHN RUSKIN,
    AUTHOR OF "THE SEVEN LAMPS OF ARCHITECTURE," "MODERN PAINTERS,"
                               ETC. ETC.


                WITH ILLUSTRATIONS DRAWN BY THE AUTHOR.


                                LONDON:
                  SMITH, ELDER, AND CO., 65. CORNHILL.
                                 1851.


    Reduced                           Leaf in orignal 7 x 10 inches.




            There is delight in singing, tho' none hear
            Besides the singer; and there is delight
            In praising, tho' the praiser sit alone
            And see the prais'd far off him, far above.
            Shakespeare is not our poet, but the world's;
            Therefore on him no speech! and brief for thee,
            Browning! Since Chaucer was alive and hale,
            No man hath walkt along our roads with step
            So active, so inquiring eye, or tongue
            So varied in discovery. But warmer climes
            Give brighter plumage, stronger wing: the breeze
            Of Alpine hights thou playest with, borne on
            Beyond Sorrento and Amalfi, where
            The Siren waits thee, singing song for song.
                                                      LANDOR




                             MEN AND WOMEN.


                                   BY
                            ROBERT BROWNING.


                            IN TWO VOLUMES.
                                VOL. I.


                                LONDON:
                   CHAPMAN AND HALL, 193, PICCADILLY.
                                 1855.




                Far from making his book a mere register
                of events, he has penetrated deep below
                the surface and explored the causes of
                these events. He has carefully studied
                the physiognomy of the times and given
                finished portraits of the great men who
                conducted the march of the revolution.
                                                PRESCOTT




                                THE RISE
                                 OF THE
                            DUTCH REPUBLIC.

                              =A History.=


                        BY JOHN LOTHROP MOTLEY.


                           IN THREE VOLUMES.
                                 VOL I.


                                NEW YORK:
                           HARPER & BROTHERS,
                        329 & 331 PEARL STREET.
                                 1856.




                The sphere which she has made specially
                her own is that quiet English country
                life which she knew in early youth. She
                has done for it what Scott did for the
                Scotch peasantry, or Fielding for the
                eighteenth century Englishman, or
                Thackeray for the higher social stratum
                of his time.
                                                 STEPHEN




                               ADAM BEDE


                                   BY
                              GEORGE ELIOT
                               AUTHOR OF
                       "SCENES OF CLERICAL LIFE"


                            "So that ye may have
            Clear images before your gladden'd eyes
            Of nature's unambitious underwood
            And flowers that prosper in the shade. And when
            I speak of such among the flock as swerved
            Or fell, those only shall be singled out
            Upon whose lapse, or error, something more
            Than brotherly forgiveness may attend."
                                                 WORDSWORTH.


                            IN THREE VOLUMES
                                VOL. I.


                       WILLIAM BLACKWOOD AND SONS
                          EDINBURGH AND LONDON
                                MDCCCLIX


                _The Right of Translation is reserved._




                The most potent instrument for the
                extension of the realm of natural
                knowledge which has come into men's
                hands since the publication of Newton's
                _Principia_ is Darwin's _Origin of
                Species_.
                                                  HUXLEY




                                   ON
                         THE ORIGIN OF SPECIES
                     BY MEANS OF NATURAL SELECTION,

                                 OR THE

             PRESERVATION OF FAVOURED RACES IN THE STRUGGLE
                               FOR LIFE.


                        BY CHARLES DARWIN, M.A.,

       FELLOW OF THE ROYAL, GEOLOGICAL, LINNÆAN, ETC., SOCIETIES;
     AUTHOR OF 'JOURNAL OF RESEARCHES DURING H.M.S. BEAGLE'S VOYAGE
                           ROUND THE WORLD.'


                                LONDON:
                     JOHN MURRAY, ALBEMARLE STREET.
                                 1859.

                 _The right of Translation is reserved._




                A planet equal to the sun
                Which cast it, that large infidel
                Your Omar.
                                                TENNYSON




                                RUBÁIYÁT
                                   OF
                             OMAR KHAYYÁM,
                     THE ASTRONOMER-POET OF PERSIA.

                    =Translated into English Verse.=

                               * * * * *

                                 LONDON:
                           BERNARD QUARITCH,
                    CASTLE STREET, LEICESTER SQUARE.
                                 1859.




                I know of no writings which combine, as
                Cardinal Newman's do, so penetrating an
                insight into the realities of the human
                world around us in all its details, with
                so unwavering an inwardness of standard
                in estimating and judging that world; so
                steady a knowledge of the true vanity of
                human life with so steady a love for
                that which is not vanity or vexation of
                spirit.
                                                  HUTTON




                         APOLOGIA PRO VITA SUA:

                                 BEING

                        =A Reply to a Pamphlet=

                                ENTITLED

                  "WHAT, THEN, DOES DR. NEWMAN MEAN?"


    "Commit thy way to the Lord, and trust in Him, and He will do it.
      And He will bring forth thy justice as the light, and thy judgment
      as the noon-day."


                       BY JOHN HENRY NEWMAN, D.D.


                                LONDON:
              LONGMAN, GREEN, LONGMAN, ROBERTS, AND GREEN.
                                 1864.




                In his prose writings there was
                discernible an intellectual _hauteur_
                which contrasted with the uneasiness and
                moral incertitude of his versified
                moods, and which implied that a
                dogmatist stood erect under the shifting
                sensitiveness of the poet. A
                dogmatist--for Mr. Arnold is not merely
                a critic who interprets the minds of
                other men through his sensitiveness and
                his sympathies; he delivers with
                authority the conclusions of his
                intellect; he formulates ideas.
                                                  DOWDEN




                          ESSAYS IN CRITICISM.


                                   BY
                            MATTHEW ARNOLD,
            PROFESSOR OF POETRY IN THE UNIVERSITY OF OXFORD.


                        =London and Cambridge:=
                           MACMILLAN AND CO.
                                 1865.




                The most faithful picture of our
                northern winter that has yet been put
                into poetry.
                                               BURROUGHS




                              SNOW-BOUND.

                             A WINTER IDYL.

                                   BY

                        JOHN GREENLEAF WHITTIER.




                                BOSTON:
                          TICKNOR AND FIELDS.
                                 1866.




                           Transcriber Notes:

Passages in italics are indicated by _underscores_.

Passages in bold are indicated by =equal signs=.

Small caps were replaced with ALL CAPS.

OE ligatures are indicated by "oe".

"o" with a macron are indicated by "[=o]".

"u" with a macron are indicated by "[=u]".

A single superscripted letter is represented by that single letter
preceded by a caret.

More than one superscripted letters are represented by the letters
enclosed by curly brackets.

Throughout the document there were many instances where there was no
hyphens where one would expect hyphens to be.

The text below images is an attempt to capture what was written in the
images. In some cases, this was difficult because the nature of the
alphabet has changed dramatically since the book was printed, and
because some characters are somewhat illegible.

In the text below images, text within printer marks are identified by
"(in printer's mark)". Such text is often illegible, but the best
efforts are made to read that text.

Errors in punctuation and inconsistent hyphenation were not corrected.






