INTRODUCTORY.

A GREAT preacher of the past, writing many hundred years before the invention of printing, has said: "Of making many books there is no end." I often wonder what he would think of this century in which we live. More than any other since the world began, this is an age of books. Every year the great printing-presses turn out thousands of volumes, and innumerable magazines and newspapers, which find their way to the most remote parts of the country. Every year books become more and more a factor in the education of all classes of people, the poor as well as the rich. In days when there were no printing-presses, when everything had to be copied with tedious labor upon parchment or paper, the knowledge of books was confined to few. Now the boys and girls in our common schools can know more books, and can easily own a larger number, than the kings and nobles of early days. This does not prove that the man without books need be ignorant, or the man with them altogether learned. There is a great deal of culture to be gained outside a printed page, and a man may be a narrow-minded pedant with his head stuffed with booklearning; a great poet has told us about

"The bookful blockhead, ignorantly read,

With loads of learned lumber in his head."

But the man who combines the largest knowledge of good books, with breadth of thought, wide experience, and prac

tical knowledge of the world, is likely to be a man of the highest and best culture.

Since we believe, therefore, that books are among the most important tools with which we are to carve out our lives, we want to know something about the best books in the world. Among the great quantity of matter which comes day after day from our printing presses there must of course be a great deal of refuse and rubbish; and the books preserved to us from the past are likely to be the best, because time has sifted much of the chaff from the wheat, and preserved only the wisest and wittiest things that have issued from men's minds. In the old books of the past we find a record of the best thoughts of the greatest minds that have ever lived. And in the books written by men of the past who spoke the language that we speak, we shall find a record of the thoughts and deeds of that race from which we descended. See, then, what

an influence these deeds and thoughts of the great Englishmen of the past must have on us to-day. I want you to picture in your imagination this stream of thought like a great river, flowing down through hundreds of years, bearing in its bosom so much to fertilize and enrich the age in which we live, and bearing onward to the future all that is noblest and greatest from our own time. This wonderful river of thought flowing down to us and beyond us, is ENGLISH LITERATURE. And if you can feel how interesting to you is the knowledge of the books that keep a record of this thought, written in our English speech from earliest days, and how important it is for you to know something about it, we can begin together with real interest and sympathy, these Talks on English Literature.

In one sense literature comprises all the books ever written: books on philosophy, science, text-books on all subjects, as well as poetry, essays and fiction. But, by general understanding there has come to be a division in the world of books; and the department of poetry, fiction, and the elegant classics is separated from the more profound and scien

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tific order of writings. This first department is sometimes called pure literature, or polite literature. The French have a better word than we; they say belles lettres, from two words, meaning beautiful (belles) literature (lettres). It is this beautiful literature-the writings of the poets, the ists, and the novelists-that these talks are designed to touch. Among these writers the poet is the chief, and it is the poet and his work to whom in such a book we give the most attention. Of all writers the poet has done most in all ages to refine and elevate. There is something in the melodious arrangement of words, clothing a beautiful thought, that has been able to influence the mind in all ages. The poet makes even common things seem rich; and if he puts a noble spirit in his verse, makes life seem purer and higher. As one of this company of writers says,* whom we shall hear more of bye-and-bye, "Therefore, of all sciences is the poet the monarch, for he cometh unto you with words set in delightful proportion, either accompanied with, or prepared for the enchanting skill of music, and with a tale, forsooth, he cometh unto you; with a tale that holdeth children from play and old men from the chimney corner. And pretending no more, doth intend the winning of the mind. from wickedness to virtue, even as the child is brought to take most wholesome things by hiding them in others that have a pleasant taste." Therefore, although we intend in these talks to follow the whole course of English literature, we shall dwell longest upon the poets and their works.

I have thus given you in brief the plan of our talks. I hope as we go on together, that you will find such an interest in literature, and will so feel its worth and richness, that from such brief accounts of the great authors and their works as I can give you, you will be led to know them more thoroughly, and to make them your friends. "And the love of books," says a French writer, "is one which, having taken possession of a man, will never leave him; a book is a friend which never changes."

*Sir Philip Sidney.

TALK I

TELLING ABOUT THE ENGLISH PEOPLE, WHO THEY WERE, AND HOW THEY FIRST CAME TO THE ISLANDS OF BRITAIN.

BEFORE we begin to talk of English literature, we naturally want to know something about the people from whom the name of England and English is derived, since from their language our modern speech has been formed, and it is this race whom we are proud to call our forefathers. Let us first ask, then, who these people were who have stamped their name and speech so powerfully on the world's history?

We find them first, a union of tribes known by the names of Saxons, Jutes, and Angles, or English, dwelling in that part of Europe which borders the North Sea, and in the islands close to this mainland. Whence they came hither, and how long they had possessed that soil we are not certain. We know that most of the nations of Europe spring from a great mother-race called the ARYAN race; that this Aryan race has many branches, and that the Teutonic branch of the family is among the strongest of them all. Wherever we find these fair-haired, blue-eyed, strong-limbed men, who speak with Teutonic tongues,* we find them playing an important part in history. It was a tribe of these Teutons, the Goths—who in the fourth and fifth centuries swooped down on the great Roman empire, and trampled it under their feet. It was another band of these strong heroes called

*The languages derived from the Teutonic branch of the Aryan are: 1st, Gothic; 2d, Scandinavian; 3d, High German; 4th, Low German. The Gothic is the oldest of these. From the high German comes modern German; from the Scandinavian the languages of Denmark, Sweden, Norway and Iceland; from the low German, English and Dutch.