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. [pg xxviii] 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