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.