his "French book" with an ear for new varieties of cadence, and makes the book his own, in virtue of this art of his. Much of the "French book" has the common fault of medieval literature, the want of personal character in the style; like so many medieval books, it is thought of as belonging to a class rather than a personal author, as if it were one of many similar things turned out by a company with common trade methods. This is the case with some, not with the whole, of Malory's original; it is not the case with Malory. He is an author and an artist, and his style is his own. Malory, in much the same way as Chaucer, is one of the moderns. He is not antiquated; he is old fashioned, perhaps -a different thing, for so are Bacon and Jeremy Taylor old fashioned, and Addison, and Fielding. The modern and intelligible and generally acceptable nature of Malory's book may serve to prove, if that were necessary, how very far from true or adequate is the belief that the beginning of the modern world was a revolt against the Middle Ages. The progress out of the Middle Ages had its revolutionary aspects, as when Duns Scotus was torn up in the New College quadrangle, and Florismarte of Hyrcania delivered to the secular arm in Don Quixote's backyard. But in literature, as a general rule, progress was made in a direct and continuous line, by taking up what was old and carrying it on. This at least was the method of Ariosto and Spenser, of Shakespeare and Cervantes, and their predecessors in this were Chaucer and Malory. It is impossible to draw any dividing line. There was no Protestant schism in literature. One cannot separate the Morte D'Arthur from the old romances on the one hand, nor from the Elizabethans on the other. Malory is succeeded by Lord Berners with his Froissart and his Huon of Bordeaux, and Lord Berners is a link with Thomas North, Euphues, and Sir Philip Sidney. Innumerable classical and foreign influences went to make the new world, but among them all the old currents from the old well-springs kept on flowing. If any apology is needed for concerning oneself with the older English literature it must be this, that the older literature has never been cut off by any partition wall from the newer. Even the writers least in sympathy with Goths and monks and superstitions had at one time or other made excursions into the enchanted ground. One finds evidence enough of the favour shown to old books and old styles of literature in days when there was no want of brilliant new books. The Countess of Pembroke's Arcadia kept its place in rooms to which the Spectator found his way, and Dr. Johnson himself (who accomplished the adventure of the Loingtaines Isles) could be heartily interested in Amadis or Palmerin. Perhaps the historians of literature have paid too little attention to the effect on the upper literary currents of this underflow of popular romance. At any rate this popular appreciation of old books will explain in part the success which attended the labours of Gray, Warton, and Percy, and go far to prove that the taste for medieval scholarship is not an imported fashion, and not anything to be ashamed of. Scholars like Gray, Warton, and Percy, like Scott and Ellis, had not to create the taste, for every one who read at all had passed through the stage of the Seven Champions and the Seven Wise Masters; all they had to do was to clear up people's views of the importance of such like childish books, and display more and more fully the rich world to which they properly belonged, and from which they had come down. If any one objects now to the very early beginning of English literature, he may lay the blame on the nature of things; for it is no capricious choice, no antiquarian perversity, that prevents these selections from beginning comfortably with the Elizabethans. There are good enough reasons, too, for not giving any pieces out of older authors than Chaucer. They are not reasons which affect the history of prose, or of English literature generally; for the literature does not begin, any more than the constitution, in the reign of Edward III. It is convenient to begin where the language has come nto something like its modern form, so as to get rid of the need for any large apparatus of glossary or notes. But the pedigree of English prose goes back beyond Wycliffe and Chaucer. It is not quite as long as that of the royal family of England; it stops short of Noah and Woden and Cerdic; but at any rate it goes back to Ælfred Ethelwulfing. That great king has been frequently threatened with ostracism, yet neither the political nor the literary history can do without him, and the literary like the political history of England is continuous. In a book like this, which might be compared to a sculptured procession in bas-relief of orators and sages, one is forced to take a historical view, to consider the writers in their general relations to one another and to the whole of English history. Elsewhere and at other times they may be studied more minutely, each for his own individual sake. There are many dangers attendant on both kinds of criticism, and the critic who deals in generalities has not always the easiest time of it. These volumes, and their companion selections from the poets, ought to clear away some of the difficulties. The characters of the several authors, and of the schools or fashions of thinking and phrasing to which they belong, are here set out in such a way that they illustrate one another, and represent, page after page, the changing moods of the national life. These books do the historian's work for him better than he can do it himself. There are sceptics and nominalists who say that it is an abstract futility to talk of the "progress of poesy," or the history of English thought; that the real existences are not poesy, or thought, but poets and thinkers; that the historian, when he tries to be philosophical and bring in his cunning apparatus, his "evolution and his "environment," is merely setting his petards to an open door. If those sceptics are wrong and to be confuted, they will be confuted, not by argument from the philosophical historian (to which they will not listen), but by the gradual and tentative creation, in the minds of readers, of a picture of literary succession, such a picture as is sketched out in these volumes, where one author is set off against his fellow, and where groups of authors compare themselves with other groups. It is not perhaps of much importance to have a theory of literary history stated in fine terms, but it is a poor thing to lose appreciation of the different tracts and levels over which literature has passed, to be without the perspective of literature. It is in the earlier periods especially that a truer perspective is wanted. The earlier stages have been left too much to themselves and to the specialists, with the natural result that the value of the later stages has been wrongly judged, most of all in the case of Tudor literature, bordering as it does immediately on the terra incognita. The revolutions and innovations, the glory and the rapture and the daring of the Elizabethans, these things have been recognised; not so fully their indebtedness to the poetry, the rhetoric, the literary skill of the Middle Ages. The Elizabethans are praised at the expense of older writers: they were not the first to whom beauty seemed beautiful; the humanities were not brought into the island of Britain first of all in the Tudor times, nor are the humanities exclusively Greek or Italian. VOL. I C The Elizabethans lose nothing, but gain, on the contrary, by rendering their due to their ancestors; to the older practical writers who kept their senses unclouded by mists of allegory or superstition, and described the real world clearly; to the visionaries who went before Sidney or Spenser. W. P. KER. SIR JOHN MANDEVILLE [It has been doubted, and not without reason, whether there ever was such a person as Sir John Mandeville or Maundeville, who gives himself out as the author of an exceedingly popular and interesting book of travels. This book appeared (probably in French originally, then in Latin and English) towards the end of the third quarter of the fourteenth century. It has been with still more reason doubted whether the book itself, even supposing that there was a Sir John Mandeville and that he was its author, is anything more than an ingenious patchwork constructed out of the writings of Marco Polo, of Friar Odoric, of Hayton the Armenian, and of others. Indeed, the passages borrowed have been identified with great precision. Neither of these points can be argued out here, though the opinion of the present writer, if it is of any importance, is decidedly against both the existence and the experience of Sir John. Almost all that is known on the subject will be found summarised in an article by Mr. E. B. Nicholson, and the late Colonel Yule, in the ninth edition of the Encyclopædia Britannica. Mr. Nicholson's final conclusion, since strengthened by fresh discoveries, is that a certain physician of Liège assumed the name of Mandeville and wrote the book. Here it is sufficient to say that the writer of the book asserts himself to have been a native of St. Albans, and to have spent about forty years (from 1322 onwards) in the service of the Sultan and Great Chan (Emperor of China), and in travelling about the greater part of Asia and a smaller part of Africa. Later writers add that he died at Liège, and give particulars of a monument there to him. Unluckily they also specify its armorial bearings, which are not those of any known family of Mandeville. No contemporary or nearly contemporary authority says anything about him. But the book which goes by his name was enormously popular, and a vast number of MSS. exist of it in different languages. It was first printed in English by Pynson, but the standard edition, which requires re-editing, is that of 1727, reprinted with a few notes and an introduction by the late Mr. J. O. Halliwell (-Phillipps) in 1839, 1866, and 1883. There is also an edition of one MS. printed for the Roxburghe Club.] THE perplexities which concern the authorship of the book passing under the name of Mandeville, and the personality of Mandeville himself, do not at all affect the literary interest and value of that book. Whether it be an authentic record of the experiences, imaginations, and credulities of an actual traveller, or a clever literary imposture executed at a time when profes |