title="[pg xviii]"/> 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