TRANSCRIBER'S NOTE

A section was inserted by the original printer between pages 54 and 55. The numbering of these pages, 54a to 54n, has been retained in the etext.

Obvious typographical errors and punctuation errors have been corrected after careful comparison with other occurrences within the text and consultation of external sources.

The cover image was created by the transcriber and is placed in the public domain.

More detail can be found at the [end of the book.]

The
Library of
Entertainment

A THOUSAND HOURS OF ENJOYMENT WITH THE WORLD'S GREAT WRITERS

HANDBOOK
By JOHN CHILTON SCAMMELL, A.B.

CHICAGO AND BOSTON
GEO. L. SHUMAN & CO.
MCMXX

Copyright, 1915,
By Geo. L. Shuman & Co.
Norwood Press
J. S. Cashing Co.—Berwick & Smith Co.
Norwood, Mass., U.S.A.
Boston Bookbinding Co., Cambridge, Mass.

[CONTENTS]

[PREFACE]

"Nowhere so happy as curled up in a corner with a book." So said, or is reputed to have said, no less a genius than St. Thomas à Kempis. And thousands of men and women, boys and girls, still testify to the truth and power of that saying. For of all friends or companions a book is the most reliable—often quite as helpful as any Jonathan to any David. For instance, what could have given Abraham Lincoln more lasting help than those early volumes which he so hungrily devoured over and over again? "Æsop's Fables," "Robinson Crusoe," "Benjamin Franklin's Autobiography," "The Pilgrim's Progress" absorbed every moment he could spare from his chores and his sleep. Not mere knowledge, but inspiration entered his soul from those oft-read pages; in them he gleaned visions of life, its strain and anguish, its exaltation and thrill; there, too, he caught the secret of that quaint faculty for terse anecdote by which he was to win his way not only to the heads but to the hearts of the hardy, courageous folk of the Middle West, and, later, those of the East as well. It was through this power to read and understand and enjoy that Lincoln learned to penetrate to the very soul of mankind, the deep recesses of the thoughts and feelings of his fellow men.

The will to try, the simple decision to make the effort, is all that is needed in order to grasp what an infinite fund of amusement and delight lies stored away in books. No unusual imaginative powers are requisite to get us on horseback with Dumas's swashbuckling, duelling musketeers, or to place us beside Poe's heroes in their dread predicaments. What friend or acquaintance can tell you half the tales of hair-breadth escape, side-splitting dilemma, or tender romance, such as scores of the cleverest writers have spent their lives in devising? These same writers have left this world, they can never more be seen or heard on earth; but the very essence of their talent and their personality, their brightest, most sparkling thoughts and ideas remain, and may readily be placed within reach of your own hand. Charles Dickens can never again voyage over the Atlantic and stroll across Boston Common in velvet coat and plaid waistcoat, gesticulating with eyes a-twinkle. But his Mr. Pickwick's adventure with the Middle-Aged Lady in Yellow Curl-Papers still remains, and the echo of Pickwick's "Bless my soul, what a dreadful thing" will ring in our ears forever, and forever stir a quiet chuckle. Rudyard Kipling is growing old, and his pen no longer flourishes with the reckless vivacity of the days when he was little more than a "cub" reporter and wrote "Mandalay." Yet that same "Mandalay" of the "old Moulmein pagoda" and the "tinkly temple bells" will rouse a thrill of romance and adventure in thousands of hearts that are still to be born. Poor Stevenson coughed his life away at Samoa, after a plucky fight for life that led him to France, 'Frisco, and the South Seas. None the less, though he has gone from us, the pictures of hope and courage that leap and laugh at us from his pages are as vivid to-day as when they first brought their new joy to the delighted world. Read once more that dainty sketch—that etching rather—"A Night among the Pines," and see for yourself how that great master of words has voiced our modern appreciation of the great outdoors. For each great author is an individual, no two of them are alike, any more than you are like your next-door neighbor. Their modes of expression, their joy in life are as varied and divergent as life itself. There is, moreover, nothing commonplace about them, their work is strong and fresh. Each has his tale to tell, his song to sing, his meditations to entrust to us, his own special message to the spirit or to the intellect of many a generation and many a race.

In other words, all great authors are artists, makers or shapers of truth and beauty, just as much and in the same measure as are painters and sculptors. Indeed, Literature is the chief of the Fine Arts. Music, with all its grandeur and charm, is but sound, and dies away; Painting, though never so rich in color and striking in form, is passive and for the most part devoid of action, and sad to say, very few of us have wealth enough to own even one canvas by a master; Sculpture, with all its dignity and grace, is cold and cheerless in the main; and Architecture is too bulky and ponderous to stir personal appreciation at a moment's notice.

In fact, Literature, and Literature alone, possesses the power of meeting our every mood and desire, for comfort, for excitement, for exaltation, for pathos, for laughter.

Literature alone can dwell within the walls of the humblest cabin, even in the squatter's camp in Labrador or Borneo. Raphael's glorious paintings may only be visited at the expense of months of time and hundreds of dollars; Beethoven's symphonies can only be presented by the most finished orchestras in a few of our largest cities; the statues wrought by Phidias and Rodin cannot be reproduced by the thousand and spread broadcast over our nation; Rheims Cathedral and her sister marvels must stand where first they rose, nor may they be successfully imitated. But, thank Heaven, Shakespeare, Dickens, Longfellow for a few cents send their messages to every soul on earth that can read English.

All of us are acquainted with some half dozen of the immortal writers of the world, but how many of them have we never met, perhaps have never heard of. If we could only obtain an introduction to them; if we only knew which writers and which of their works to select, all would be well. The most brilliant, the most lovable, the most sincere, the most thoughtful authors would gather round us and talk to us; they would bring their very best to entertain and delight us; they would offer us their guidance and companionship into every field of thought. Emerson's calm reflective tones reveal the answers to many of life's most pressing and significant problems; Swift, in "Gulliver's Travels," jestingly, yet bitterly, strips mankind of its pride and conceit, and lays bare the greed and selfishness that have ruined not individuals alone, but whole nations and empires; Lewis Carroll talks the most laughable, clever nonsense that ever inspired a humorist's pen; Burns, in the simplest of language, voices the pathos and tragedy of every life, even the humblest, and with our own Lincoln proves again and again that true nobility may dwell and flourish in the midst of poverty.

Truly, herein lies one of life's chief joys, in encountering what others have thought and achieved—in meeting the actors in the great world drama, the scenes in which they played their parts, the deeds by which they have won fame and fortune; still more delectable is the pleasure of whiling away leisure hours with those folk who are but products of the fancy, children of the poet's brain, dreams of the teller of tales: Odysseus, who, for the last three thousand years, as Sir Philip Sidney has put it, "held children from play and old men from the chimney corner"; Falstaff, chuckling at the comical ease with which he hoodwinks all about him; Lady Macbeth, who, even in her dreams, may not forget the dread stain upon her little hand; Faust, ever seeking to rid himself of his demon accomplice; the knights of King Arthur's round table, Robin Hood and his merry men, Dickens's troop of immortal grotesques, Bret Harte's rough miners, with their hearts of gold, Irving's droll New Yorkers of the Knickerbocker era, Longfellow's Blacksmith and his Evangeline,—these and a host of other undying notables have made life far richer for us all.

Ours is the fault if we do not avail ourselves of their magic. For here in America the special opportunity to mingle with them lies readier to the hand than in any other nation. Nowhere else, not in England, nor France, nor in Italy can the everyday man find books at his command for the asking. In a few of the largest European cities, and not anywhere else on that continent, there are libraries of size and worth, yet even these are hedged about with a hundred rules and regulations that hamper circulation. But here, through the length and breadth of this glorious land, are thousands and yet more thousands of free libraries, containing all manner of books, of every age and nation, awaiting your demand. They contain all that is splendid in the way of printed matter, but also much, alas, that is not worth any man's time; so that though the best lies open and free to us, it is mingled with a vast amount of wretched trash.

Here lies the chief difficulty for us Americans: How are we to distinguish the chaff from the wheat, the weeds from the harvest? The task is that of seeking the proverbial needle in the haystack. We are deluged with printed matter, tons upon tons of books and magazines are poured daily upon the bookseller's counters. What is our chance of choosing the treasures from out this hodgepodge?

To meet this very problem these volumes have been prepared; it is hardly our place to dwell upon the years of labor and thought in which they have gradually taken shape, but it is perhaps to the point to remark that they represent the patient effort of many judges and critics to supply an introduction and a guide to the best and most inspiring literature of the nations from the beginning of the art to the present day,—a means of recreation, amusement, and lasting profit.

In the past three thousand years, some four hundred authors have achieved such fame and standing as to distinguish them from the endless multitudes of commonplace penmen. To choose and present their very best work in complete, unified selections has constituted the fundamental purpose of these twelve volumes. In them, it is certain, an amazingly large proportion of the finest literature has been brought together; they form a boundless source of entertainment and a wellnigh infinite field for intellectual diversion and development.

By means of brief and suggestive biographical sketches, together with the Index and the Handbook, to serve as a guide to fuller enjoyment and appreciation, the editors have sought to amplify and enhance the value of the selective feature of the work. And through an abundance of illustrations, many of them painstaking reproductions of water color paintings of the homes and favorite haunts of the chief writers, additional understanding and pleasure is afforded.

The whole of this work has been built on the central idea of entertainment that shall be simple and unified. Every effort has been made to shun the elaborate, intricate methods that prevail so wastefully to-day in our educational and our recreational systems. At last educators are openly admitting that the only sane means of raising our standards of education must lie in simplifying the quantity of the studies so as to attain higher quality. In school and out of it, Johnny and his sister Molly will unquestionably profit by simple, straightforward teaching, play, reading, thinking. The more complex a game is, the fewer people can enjoy it or appreciate its fine points; the more involved a school system, the fewer children will be able to acquire thorough training. But simple games and simple instruction will enable all of us and of our little ones to get the habit of thoroughness and stability. These twelve volumes, then, are all constructed upon this principle of furnishing enjoyment in a simple, clean-cut manner; they constitute one of the most straightforward, clear, and forceful means toward the advance of our civilization.

The measure of a successful life is surely the amount of happiness, of true lasting pleasure which it has contained and which it has passed on to others. We do not count our years in terms of sorrow or vexation; we do not recall again and again our moments of failure or folly; only the bright and golden hours remain fast emblazoned in our memories, those days of sunshine and delight, when beauty and laughter sang in our hearts and the air was filled with music. Of all such days, those on which the friendly pages of some treasured author were first opened, or those when we reveled in the companionship of our favorite heroes of romance and adventure—those days indeed are among the brightest of all. The greater the number of red-letter days of such wonder and rapture, the greater the value of our lives, not only to ourselves, but to all who have shared them. In work and in play, at home and abroad, our undoubted ideal is that of finding perpetual joy in life. The Fountain of Youth, which Ponce de Leon vainly sought, is the quest of us all—we no longer seek to lengthen our lives, but instead we strive with might and main to fill them to the very brim with joyous thoughts and deeds. To be happy is to be forever young.

[THE PURPOSE OF THIS BOOK]

It is the easiest thing in the world to open the treasure-vaults of the Bank of England—if you have the combination; if you haven't, the task is hopeless. It is the easiest thing in the world to enjoy the most brilliant stories, the most laughable humor, the most heroic deeds that the world has known—if you know where to find them.

"Where's something to read, something so interesting that I can forget how tired I am and what a hard day I had at the office?" There is the problem of almost every home in this country. Tired men and women must have some means of refreshing themselves, of forgetting their worries and trials for a time. They must rest and gather strength for the next day's work. Where are they going to get it?

The purpose of this book is to give the owners of The Library of Entertainment an easy answer to that question. Its opening pages contain some unusual notes on the oddities of literary folk and some suggestions for hours and hours of entertainment and amusement that will drive away care and fatigue unfailingly. The brightest stories and the most fascinating humor are put right on the table beside you, all you have to do is to turn to them according to the directions in these pages.

But there is something better still in this little volume. It gives a true opportunity to enjoy the company of the ablest men and women who have ever put pen to paper. Until now a college course of three or four years has been the only means of getting in touch with the best of good, sensible reading. Our schools do not teach us how to understand and take pleasure in these books; our libraries only store them for us to use if we already know about them. Recent figures show that for some time past more than 10,000 new books have been published in the United States each year, an equal number in England, and even more in Germany and Russia. The public libraries contain millions upon millions printed in the past. It would be impossible for even a hundred men giving their whole lifetime of eighty years to do as much as scan the pages of all the world's literature.

Therefore it is only too evident that for the sensible use of the little time which we can give to reading we should be enabled to make a selection. We must be started on the right road. This is the express aim of The Library of Entertainment. Until now the pleasure and the distinction that come from being well-read have belonged to a few. The combination that opens the treasure-vaults of literature was only given in college lectures. The outside world has been left to shift for itself. But this is utterly wrong; with the simple introduction that is given in Part Two of this book the world of literature and its lasting delights are open to all.

[PART I]

[SIDE-LIGHTS ON GREAT WRITERS]

To many of us it seems as if an author with an assured reputation must be one of the happiest of men; yet some of the very greatest have suffered almost intolerably.

Bobby Burns was a victim of drink largely because of his brilliant imagination and extreme sensitiveness. He was petted by society and praised as the poet of the future; all England was at his feet. Yet he gave way to his passions, took to drink, and ruined the lives of several of his dearest friends, as well as his own. In almost anyone else this would condemn him absolutely; but the truth is that his poetic powers, the gift of his genius, rendered him too sensitive to moods of the moment, and his will could not hold out under the strain.

A somewhat similar case was that of Coleridge. In his youth he showed extraordinary talent, but he fell a victim to opium and the greater part of his life was wasted in a series of unfinished efforts. No opium was necessary to stimulate his imagination, as his weird ballad of "The Ancient Mariner" plainly shows. Indeed his genius even worked during his sleep, for "Kubla Khan" is but a fragment of a poem which he dreamed and then began to write down as soon as he awoke. If he had not been interrupted by a visitor, a man of no importance, we might have had the whole instead of a scanty portion of this unique masterpiece. Even as it stands it is one of the most picturesque and brilliant compositions ever produced. It seems incredible that it should be the work of a sleeping brain. And yet this is the man who gave himself up to opium, wrecking a career that promised to surpass even that of Byron or Shelley in poetic power.

Thomas De Quincey, the author of the "Confessions of an Opium Eater," drank laudanum by the glassful. He first took to using this liquid form of opium in order to gain relief from the dyspepsia that resulted from his days of privation in the streets of London. Of course he was unable to stop the use of the drug and had to increase the doses to the alarming extent mentioned. When he was living in Edinburgh this almost caused the death of a gentleman who dined with him there; for his visitor picked up a decanter of a rich, dark red liquor, which he thought was port wine, poured out a glass, and had it at his lips, when De Quincey hurriedly seized it and saved the situation. Smoking opium was not the custom then; Coleridge drank it, as De Quincey did, and unknowingly spread the habit; for a poor man who once lived near Coleridge's house admitted that he had obtained laudanum from a boy who worked for Coleridge and smuggled it out to his friend by the bottleful.

As we all know, our great American short story writer, Edgar Allan Poe, was the prey of alcohol and also of opium, as well as a genius. The combination seems to have been more unavoidable in his case than in any other we know of. His imagination could only bring forth those extraordinarily gruesome tales of mystery and horror when stimulated by wines and brandy or opium. His whole life was spent in the shadow of despondency and irritation; and although we are indebted to him for priceless literary gems, he paid the penalty with misery which we cannot imagine.

In contrast, look at the life of Charles Lamb. He was a poor clerk at a pitiful salary, struggling to increase his income by literary work in his spare time, with a dangerous appetite for alcohol, and an insane sister to take care of. He, himself, constantly dreaded insanity. Yet he kept up a cheerful and continual resistance to his craving for drink, although he often took a drop too much. In order to care for his sister, who had killed her mother in one of her attacks, he gave up his sweetheart and settled down to the brave and heartrending task of devotion to the unhappy invalid. This lasted for thirty-three years, during which he never murmured except when her attacks forced him to place her in an asylum. One of his friends leaves the record of meeting Charles and Mary Lamb walking across the fields to the hospital with tears streaming down their faces. Yet in spite of all his troubles Lamb's essays have a delicacy and a cheerfulness that never reveal the burden he had to bear. He is one of the great heroes of English literature.

John Milton was another such hero. As a young man he won great distinction as a poet and a scholar; so much so that when he went to Italy the greatest Italian authors and critics praised his Italian and Latin poetry as the best of that day, superior to anything written during that time in Italy itself. He was received there with boundless enthusiasm and was having the time of his life, so to speak, when the news reached him of the Puritan rebellion against Charles the First. Without a moment's hesitation he abandoned his tour and came back to England. There he acted as foreign correspondent for Cromwell's Government and kept England safe from attacks by France and the rest of Europe through his able diplomacy. He worked day and night until he fell ill and eventually lost his eyesight. To make matters worse, the Puritans were deprived of their power and Milton's enemies then persecuted him so that he had to fly for his life. He spent the rest of his days in a humble cottage, while his daughters grumbled because he made them transcribe "Paradise Lost" and "Paradise Regained." It seems as if his sacrifice for his country was utterly unrewarded, until we remember that his name to-day is almost the first in its long roll of poets.

One of the sorrows of literary men is lack of appreciation. Longfellow was laughed at by the Harvard students whom he taught, for his poems had no attraction for them and he was only appreciated elsewhere. Bret Harte wrote the finest stories of California life that have ever appeared, yet for years he was not recognized in this country as a writer of unusual powers, and as a matter of fact he spent the greater part of his life in London, six thousand miles from his old home; Lafcadio Hearn was so homely and eccentric that he could not be happy or comfortable in the United States or in Europe, and took refuge in Japan where his appearance would never be remarked. As he points out in his wonderful writings on Japanese life, politeness is one of the ruling habits of that race, so that he was made far more comfortable and did far better work than would have been possible in his own country.

Some writers have done their best work in prison. "The Star Spangled Banner," as we know, was written by Francis Scott Key, while he was a captive on a British battleship during the bombardment of Fort McHenry, near Baltimore, in the War of 1812, and as he wondered whether the flag was still flying he jotted down the lines of our National Anthem. The masterpiece of Spanish literature was written in jail; "Don Quixote" is so amusing, so pathetic, and so vivid that Spain can stake her whole reputation on that one work, written by Cervantes, an innocent man, imprisoned through envy and malice. John Bunyan, another guiltless author, wrote his immortal "Pilgrim's Progress" while he was locked up for his stubborn refusal to mold his religious belief according to the demands of authorities for whom he could have no respect. The opium of Coleridge and De Quincey and the brandy of Edgar Allan Poe never stimulated them to equal the work of these two geniuses. Innocence in prison has been proved superior to dissipation in the best of surroundings, for the opium victims, Coleridge and De Quincey, had the society of England's most brilliant men and the environment of her finest scenery.

Both Bunyan and Cervantes worked hard, but the hardest workers of all have been Frenchmen; Balzac and Dumas labored unceasingly for the greater part of their lifetimes. In twenty years Balzac wrote ninety-seven novels for a mere pittance that just kept body and soul together. The greatness of his work was recognized, but the French public, as a whole, did so little reading, that the publisher himself did not make anything like a fortune. Dumas was more popular and employed a staff of assistants to collect the material for his historical romances, but the actual writing was all his own and cost him from fourteen to eighteen hours a day in labor. His works are more numerous than those of Dickens, Thackeray, and Cooper combined. It seems incredible that one man could have turned out such a tremendous mass of fascinating stories.

The only man in English literature who is to be compared to these two Frenchmen is Sir Walter Scott. In his first success, when money flowed in on him almost in torrents, his vanity led him to build the mansion of Abbotsford and his one wish was to be regarded as the Squire or ruler of the countryside, but not long after, when his partner in the publishing business had caused the failure of the firm, he bravely went to work and wrote novel after novel, year after year, to pay off his debts. His vanity and love of show disappeared and the man's true nobility took its proper place; almost on his death-bed he continued to dictate his novels although he was agonized with pain and distress.

Similar patience was shown by Thomas Carlyle, who rewrote the whole of his great work, "The French Revolution," after the first copy had been carelessly burnt by a servant girl in the house of a friend who had borrowed the manuscript. He was a dyspeptic and a constant grumbler, but on this occasion he redeemed himself by sitting down quietly to work and hammering away at his dreary task until he had once more finished the masterpiece. Carlyle was so sensitive to noise and other disturbances that he had a sound-proof shed or room built on the roof of his house in London, where he did a great part of his writing, and even there he complained of the rumbling of the wagons in the street, which vibrated through the house.

Herbert Spencer, the great English philosopher, was also easily disturbed by noises, but he solved the problem by wearing ear muffs which were specially made under his instruction. Spencer was rather irritable, it is said; certainly on one occasion he made himself a source of amusement when he objected to being beaten at billiards by the son of a friend of his and remarked that it was not fitting that a young man should have spent so much time and money on so foolish a pastime; yet when he won, the expenditure of thought and time on the part of so great a philosopher seemed altogether wise.

Robert Browning had an amusing experience on one occasion toward the close of his life. He was walking through the residential district of London's fashionable West End to a meeting which he had been invited to attend. Mistaking the house, he walked into a literary gathering that was discussing his own poems. Presently he rose to his feet and offered a few suggestions as to the meaning of a rather difficult passage. Now Browning was not at all like a poet in appearance, but rather resembled a prosperous business man, and it happened that as he was well toward the back of the hall no one recognized him. On the contrary his suggestions were ridiculed by other critics who took the floor when he sat down and he retired unrecognized but vastly delighted. Of course some of Browning's work is intensely intricate and confused; he himself said of his early poem "Sordello" that once there were two beings who understood it, the Almighty and Robert Browning; now, he added, there was but one, for Browning had long lost the key to its problem.

Charles Dickens was one of the most impressionable writers who ever lived. His characters were absolutely real to him and when he was writing he would impersonate the various characters he was describing, talking, making faces, jumping up and looking in the mirror, and then dashing back to his desk to set down each inspiration. But his impressionable nature prevented complete happiness; he was either intensely happy or down in the dumps and miserable. This made him very hard to get along with, so that it is no wonder that his wife found it almost impossible to live with him.

Gladstone, the 'Grand Old Man' of English politics in the last century, was a scholar and a linguist as well as a statesman. On one occasion he was seated in the House of Commons while his bitter opponent, the clever Disraeli, was delivering a venomous and brilliant attack upon him. During the speech Gladstone was observed to be writing on a scrap of paper, apparently taking notes for his reply. At the conclusion of his enemy's speech Gladstone rose and delivered a most masterly refutation of the attack, answering and breaking down each point of Disraeli's invective with the utmost skill. A member sitting near by noticed that the scrap of paper was lying on Gladstone's seat and picked it up to see what the notes were like; to his surprise they consisted of a careful translation of "Rock of Ages" into smooth Greek verse, which the orator had made half-consciously while waiting for the occasion to reply to his opponent.

Macaulay, too, had wonderful scholastic talent and a fine memory. Even in his youth he showed great ability and read with amazing speed; most remarkable is the fact that he never seemed to forget a line he had read, but could repeat pages of an author many years after he had once perused his work. He read many works again and again, it is true, but for the pleasure of enjoying the fine points of style rather than for the sake of attaining greater familiarity with the book. His essays are regarded as among the most brilliant in the language, and seem to have been written posthaste, at full swing. In reality, however, he was well pleased if he produced five foolscap pages of longhand manuscript a day. It was his custom to spend the morning writing as fast as he could, the afternoon, in revising and pruning the morning's work and thus producing finished copy. He knew only too well that, as Sheridan said, "easy writing makes cursed hard reading," and that labor alone could produce a forceful and pleasant style.

Goethe, the greatest of the German immortals, is mainly remembered as a poet. Yet his fame would be great even if it depended only upon his scientific exploits. It was he who did much toward establishing the modern theory of evolution. Goethe also showed his insight into human progress by prophesying the construction of the Suez and the Panama Canals as long ago as 1827; this illustrates the marvelous imagination of the genius who was, as he himself said, a citizen of the world.

Shakespeare is certainly the supreme master of English literature, yet there was a time when he was regarded as a nuisance and a good-for-nothing. He was a poacher, a thieving vagabond arrested for stealing or killing deer in the park of the neighboring aristocrat, Sir Thomas Lucy. It was not long afterward that the future playwright went to London and gained his first acquaintance with the theater by holding horses for gentlefolk at the entrance of the principal playhouse of the city. Some authors would also call him a pirate and a thief, as Sir Thomas Lucy did, for he took plots and ideas wherever he found them and worked them over into the revised versions that now rank among the finest achievements of mankind. Yet all the while his one desire was to be a well-to-do business man of his native town of Stratford, and as soon as he had made a comfortable fortune he retired and spent his last years in quiet, building a new house and writing one or two last plays in the commonplace seclusion of a country town. There is still one place left in London where his plays were performed under his direction, although the old theaters have long since perished. This is the Temple Hall, in the grounds that belonged to the old Knights Templar of Crusading fame. Here he put on "The Winter's Tale" with great success. If you are ever in London you can visit the hall and on entering you can turn the very door-handle, so tradition says, which the poet himself used.

Molière was the greatest French dramatist. At the height of his career, legend relates, he was such a favorite with the grand monarch, Louis XIV, that this proud king made him come and dine in private with him, so as to convince his servants and courtiers that the genius whom they thought of as a vulgar, impossible boor, a mere actor, was worthy of the greatest consideration. Yet when Molière was dead the king ungratefully refused to see that he was properly buried and the great man was carried to his last resting-place with little ceremony.

At the present day one of France's most prominent writers is Rostand, the author of "Cyrano de Bergerac," a play which brought him into instant popularity through its brilliance, although a few weeks before scarcely anyone had heard his name. On the first night of the production, in 1897, the audience cheered and shouted until it seemed as if the performance would break up in the confusion created by its success, yet thanks to Rostand's coolness the actors and even the spectators were kept calm enough to carry the play through to its masterly conclusion. At the close, when the curtain had fallen on the last act, Rostand was sought for everywhere to make his bow to the enthusiastic audience, but he had quietly driven away to his country home, with his wife, and there he stayed for a week or more before the public had a chance to welcome him.

Byron is almost the only man in English letters to come so suddenly before the people. He woke up one morning to find himself famous, through the publication of "Childe Harold." Byron was another of the unhappy geniuses. He was hot-headed and married an equally irritable wife, so naturally they separated, with anger and yet with sorrow. His little daughter, who he said was the one friend he had in the world, died at an early age. He dreaded being fat and therefore starved himself, a process which did not make him happier. But his death was in itself enough to redeem him in spite of his irresponsible and rather selfish career, for he gave himself up to the cause of the freedom and independence of the Greeks, and died of fever contracted while preparing for the great campaign against the Turks.

Poor Dean Swift, the author of "Gulliver's Travels," the bitterest book ever written about human beings, suffered even more than Byron. He was keenly sensitive, and his political labors were poorly paid because he was none too courteous in his manner to the political leaders for whom he worked so hard. Boot-licking would have brought him the position he desired, but Swift was not a toady, so he was driven to accept the second-rate place offered him, and there vented his anger in the most savage attacks on human nature that can be imagined. All this while he had been fearing that his mind would give way; "I am like that tree," he said to a friend one day when they were out walking, "I shall die at the top first." He was right, for not long afterward his brain gave way.

"The Old Oaken Bucket" still has a touch of beauty for us, if we do not hear it too often. It was written under rather interesting circumstances. Samuel Woodworth, the author, was born and brought up on a little farm in Scituate, not far from Plymouth, Massachusetts. In his youth he went to New York and got a job as a reporter. One day he was in a bar, taking a glass of brandy and declaring that it was the finest drink on earth, when a friend with him said, "You're wrong; think of the delicious water you used to draw from the old well at home." Woodworth jumped up and hurried over to his rooms, where he sat down and dashed off the outline of the song that at once won a widespread vogue.

Perhaps the bravest fight against ill health was put up by Robert Louis Stevenson, the gentle, lovable poet and novelist. As a young man he found that consumption threatened to carry him off. With the cheerfulness characteristic of the victims of the White Plague he set off on a series of outdoor trips afoot and afloat. Two of these are preserved for us in his "Inland Voyage" and the more fascinating "Travels with a Donkey." This latter is almost unequaled as a picture of travel. He finally started for America to see if the climate there would not be better for him than the moist weather of Scotland, his home. Eventually he reached Samoa, in the South Seas of the Pacific, where he lived for several years, cheerful and brave in spite of his increasing weakness. His character, although mild and kindly, was so forceful that the chiefs among the natives held him in veneration, and at the time of his death no one lamented him more than the simple Samoans, some of whom bore him to the grave on the hill-top near his home.

Thoreau, one of New England's philosophers of the great and glorious Emerson days, was as eccentric as any one that can be found. For the sake of peace and independence he went off into the woods and lived as a hermit near Walden Pond, outside Concord. To earn what little money he needed he made lead pencils; like many country folks of those days he was amazingly dexterous with his knife and his pencils were a delight to use. In his leisure he made an exhaustive study of the Pond; but in two years' time he left this little cabin and never returned. He said that he had had enough of that sort of life and now he was going to try something else. His was the same spirit of adventure that stirred the old explorers and yet he was so fond of New England that he rarely set foot outside her boundaries. He could find enough to keep him busy thinking and writing within his own dooryard. But he showed that it was possible for a man in good health to live on less than $100 a year and have more than two thirds of his time to himself. On the other hand, as he died of consumption at the age of forty-four, he also proved that outdoor life is not in itself a preventive of that scourge.

Whittier, the gentle Quaker poet, was one of the sturdiest heroes of the antislavery movement. In those days he was a fighter, stoned and mobbed by the partisans of slavery in Philadelphia and Concord, New Hampshire. His genius was discovered by William Lloyd Garrison, the abolitionist, while he was editing a paper at Newburyport. Whittier's sister had sent some verses of her young brother's to the paper and Garrison not only printed them but hunted up the author to enlist him in his good work. In his latter years Whittier clung to the rural obscurity of Amesbury, where he enjoyed the rippling life of the little town, talking local politics with the 'natives' in the country store, chatting with his friends on the doorstep of the Friends' meeting-house which he had helped to build, or planting trees about it, like Holmes, who used to boast that at one time or another he had set out more than seven hundred saplings. Whittier, more than any other American, has left us glowing pictures of New England life and geniality. With his reverent sense of the need for emphasizing morals and duty there was a love of home, of the memory of youth's work and play that makes "Snow-Bound" immortal. Emerson was the Yankee philosopher; Hawthorne, the novelist of New England's moods; Thoreau, the nature-worshiper; Holmes, the Bostonian; Longfellow, the cosmopolitan poet; but Whittier was the poet of New England's heart.

['TO DRIVE DULL CARE AWAY']

The brightest and most delightful pages that have ever been written.

Short stories, humor, adventure, and fun.

SHORT STORIES

Aldrich: "Père Antoine's Date Palm."

Balzac: "The Purse."

Barrie: "Lads and Lassies."

Björnson: "The Railroad and the Churchyard."

Boccaccio: "The Story of Constantia," "The Story of Federigo and the Falcon."

Brown: "Rab and his Friends."

Collins: "A Terribly Strange Bed."

Crawford: "The Upper Berth."

Eliot: "Brother Jacob."

Hale: "The Man Without a Country."

Hardy: "The Three Strangers."

Harte: "Tennessee's Partner."

Hawthorne: "The Snow-Image."

Irving: "Rip Van Winkle."

Japanese Literature: "The Forty-Seven Rônins."

Kipling: "The Man Who Would Be King."

Macleod: "The Washer of the Ford."

Maupassant: "The Piece of String."

Meredith: "The Story of Noorna Bin Noorka, the Genie Karaz, and the Princess of Oolb," "The Punishment of Shahpesh, the Persian, on Khipil, the Builder."

Poe: "The Fall of the House of Usher," "The Cask of Amontillado."

Sterne: "The Story of Le Fevre."

Stevenson: "A Lodging for the Night."

Tolstoi: "Where Love is, There God is Also."

FAIRY TALES

Andersen: "The Hardy Tin Soldier," "The Ugly Duckling," "The Old Street Lamp."

Apuleius: "The Story of Cupid and Psyche."

Arabian Nights: "Ali Baba and the Forty Robbers," "Abon-Hassan the Wag, or the Sleeper Awakened," "The Story of the Three Apples."

Fouqué: "Undine."

Grimm: "Cinderella," "Hansel and Grethel," "The Two Brothers."

Perrault: "Little Red Riding-Hood," "Blue Beard," "Puss in Boots."

Russian Literature: "The Water King and Vasilissa the Wise."

HUMOR

Barham: "The Knight and the Lady."

Browne: "The Showman's Courtship."

Carroll: "A Mad Tea-Party," "The White Knight," "The Walrus and the Carpenter," "Jabberwocky."

Cowper: "The Diverting History of John Gilpin."

Gilbert: "The Yarn of the Nancy Bell."

Harris: "Old Mr. Rabbit, He's a Good Fisherman."

Harte: "Plain Language from Truthful James."

Hood: "Faithless Sally Brown."

Hope: "The House Opposite."

Jerrold: "Mrs. Caudle's Curtain Lectures."

Lamb: "A Dissertation on Roast Pig."

Lowell: "The Courtin'."

Raspe: "Baron Münchhausen."

Sterne: "A Sentimental Journey."

ADVENTURE

Audubon: "Hospitality in the Woods."

Carlyle: "The Fall of the Bastille."

Coleridge: "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner."

Froude: "A Cagliostro of the Second Century."

Hay: "Jim Bludso of the Prairie Belle."

Hearn: "In the Cave of the Children's Ghosts."

Heine: "Travel-Pictures."

Kinglake: "Eothen."

Mandeville: "Travels."

Melville: "Typee."

Polo: "Travels."

Stevenson: "A Night among the Pines."

[PART II]

[THE STUDY OF LITERATURE]

We are told there is no royal road to learning; no short cut to the understanding and appreciation of literature. We are told that we must admire Homer, or Addison, or some other immortal author, but no one tells us why or how. No explanation is given of the reason why their work is deservedly immortal. Our schools do not introduce us to the delights of good reading; instead, they handle a few stories and essays as if they were Latin or algebra, making drudgery out of what ought to be enjoyment. The result is that we are frightened away from the great writers; their work is supposed to be a mystery, only to be revealed to those who give years of labor to its study.

But no one is so dull or so heedless of pleasure as not to accept the means of lasting delight when it is put right in front of them. Thousands of people are waiting for the chance to get in touch with the good sense, rousing style, and splendid ideas of the masters of literature. That is why this volume has been prepared. It furnishes a direct and attractive road straight to the heart of literature. It has been laid out systematically so as to be a simple and practical guide.

The leading characteristics of each era, each nation, and each division of literature have been tersely stated, with the authors under each of these classifications listed beneath. The noblest and most fascinating works gain tenfold in interest through the knowledge of these fundamental facts. With them before you, you command a view, not merely of one single author, but of the whole movement of which he was a part. You see the ideas and lines of thought from which a book has sprung, the hidden forces which went into the making of it. Each book stands in association with those of the same literary class, or nation, or period; their relationship with the rest of literature is at once apparent. In this way the wasteful drudgery and folly of aimless reading is avoided. The study of literature pursued with the means here given cannot be tedious, for it is straightforward, simple, and clear.

The results that are to be expected from the limited time which most of us can devote to reading are more extensive than might be thought. In this connection read the following selections, practical and full of common sense, each of them throwing light on the subject of reading.

The Preface, I, 3.

Hamerton, "To a Man of Business," VI, 236.

Harrison, from "The Choice of Books," VI, 275.

Morley, "Popular Culture," IX, 236.

Schopenhauer, "On Books and Reading," X, 374.

[THE DECISIVE PERIODS IN LITERATURE]

First of all: What is Literature?

The expression of thought upon the countless phases of life and the universe as felt by the greatest intellects.

There are innumerable views to be taken of this world of ours; each of us sees it a little differently, the problem of life strikes a nation or an age or an individual in ever changing ways. Homer saw it in heroic terms, Swift, in "Gulliver's Travels," looked at it savagely and sadly, Bunyan, in the "Pilgrim's Progress," saw the religious side. These authors not only saw but felt; their feelings took possession of them, they had to write them down and give them expression. Gray, the author of the immortal "Elegy in a Country Churchyard," took seven years to perfect the expression of the feelings roused by what he saw in that secluded village nook. Poe chose every word of his "Tales of Mystery and Imagination" with the utmost care. The labor of composition was solely for the purpose of giving the reader exactly the impression and emotion desired; for the sake of clearness, force, and ease.

In the second place: Each of the great periods in history has had certain traits and has excelled in some particular field of literature. The traits and the works of an era have been molded by preceding ages and likewise have brought about the development of the periods which followed. Vergil was influenced by Homer and the whole tradition of Greek literature; Shakespeare and the rest of the Elizabethan writers are products of the fresh outburst of activity which we call the Renaissance; Kipling has profited by the work of Dickens, Poe, Milton, Chaucer, and a host of other authors. If we are to appreciate a writer, then, we must know the chief characteristics of these great literary epochs.

The Age of the Ancients. 1500 B.C.–500 A.D. From the dawn of history to the fall of the Roman Empire, all the principal forms of literary expression were developed, at least two of which, epic poetry and tragedy, have never been surpassed. Yet the world was very small then; it was merely the coast of the Mediterranean Sea. Its ideals were narrow, limited by paganism and slavery. For those who wrote and those who read there was no struggle for existence, they were waited on by their slaves, they had no faith in a life after death; whether thinkers or heedless wasters, they were selfishly living for to-day and not for the morrow. The bulk of the people were ignorant, even when not enslaved. As their literature was the product of an aristocracy, leading a life of leisure, it was inevitably stately, reserved, and formal in its tone, except in the earliest productions before society had emerged completely from barbarism.

POETRY
Catullus
Cleanthes
Egyptian Lit.
Homer
Horace
Ovid
Pindar
Sappho
Theocritus
Vergil

FICTION
Æsop
Apuleius

HISTORY
Cæsar
Herodotus
Josephus
Livy
Suetonius
Tacitus
Thucydides

BIOGRAPHY
Plato
Pliny
Plutarch

DRAMA
Æschylus
Euripides
Sophocles

PHILOSOPHY
Aurelius
Cicero
Epictetus
Lucretius
Plato
Seneca

The Dark Ages. 500 A.D.–1000 A.D. Crippled by pride and selfishness Roman civilization was swept away by wave after wave of barbarian invasions. Goths, Visigoths, Ostrogoths, Huns, Lombards, and Vandals in turn swarmed over the face of Europe, spreading terror and desolation. Learning, art, industry, and government perished. But the invaders brought a love of freedom, a hatred of bondage and captivity, to offset their contempt for the progress effected by the great thinkers and rulers of antiquity.

There is but little left to us of the scanty literature produced in those dim centuries. It is all primitive, Homeric; rhythmic tales of the heroic lives and deaths of national leaders constitute the sole endeavor that has lasted. But in these is the note of freedom, for the masses of the people as well as the rulers and nobles delighted in Charlemagne and his peerless knight Roland, or in Eric, the Viking adventurer, who dared to sail far forth to Vinland. The great ruler was not a mere commander but a leader whom men of every class gladly followed with love as well as respect. Yet the ideals were low, mainly of physical prowess and sheer brute strength.

Anglo-Saxon Lit. French Lit. German Lit. Norse Lit. Spanish Lit.

The Middle Ages. 1000 A.D.–1400 A.D. However, as soon as the dread of barbarian havoc had passed and peace and government had been restored to some extent, a new and brighter era began. The thirst for learning has never been greater than at this time. Students flocked to the universities of Paris, Oxford, and Bologna in thousands, begging their way, traveling on foot for hundreds of miles. Religion seized men even more firmly, finding them active or meditative occupations either in the monasteries or in the Crusades. The aspirations of the time appear in the legends of King Arthur and the Round Table, as told in the prose of the day by Sir Thomas Malory or in the more recent verse of Tennyson's "Idylls of the King." This is the chivalric ideal of perfect knighthood. The religious feeling is shown in such hymns as the "Stabat Mater," the "Dies Iræ," or "Jerusalem the Golden." Dante, commonly reckoned the second of the world's poets, proves the zeal for learning and scholarship. The spirit of freedom gleams from the "Old English Ballads" of Robin Hood, the enemy of the oppressive nobles and the friend of the poor and the humble. It is even more evident in the work of John Wyclif, who translated the Bible into English so that the common peasant might have the advantage of hearing the Gospel message read to him in a tongue that he understood, and that he might feel that the teachings of religion were meant for him as much as for the wealthy and the learned.

But science and thought had not yet startled men into recognition of the wonder round about them. Knowledge was assumed to be complete. To probe into the mysteries of nature was unholy and wicked in those days. The awakening from unseeing and unreasoning childhood to the adventuresome zest of youth and young manhood was yet to come.

POETRY
Chaucer
Dante
Old English Ballads
Petrarch
Tasso

FICTION
Boccaccio
Malory

HISTORY
Froissart

TRAVEL
Mandeville
Polo

RELIGION
Bernard, St.
Bernard of Cluny
Jacopone
à Kempis
Thomas of Celano
Wyclif

The Renaissance. 1400–1600. The gradual increase of knowledge and better government toward the close of the Middle Ages caused a desire for higher things. This hidden desire suddenly broke loose with astonishing force when the art of printing was discovered, about 1450. Information had hitherto been spread only by word of mouth or by laboriously copying a volume by hand. The process in either case was slower than we can imagine. But now new ideas, rare books, foreign teaching could be spread broadcast like wildfire.

It also happened at just this time that Constantinople was taken by the Turks (1453). The greatest treasures of Greek literature had been jealously hidden away there for centuries. Now that the scholars had to fly for their lives they let loose a store of new thought on the nations of western Europe. Taking refuge in Italy they brought with them these rich volumes. The Italian enthusiasm and the ardor with which these discoveries were published to the world spread like fire through France and Germany and England.

Everywhere mankind awoke; never before or since have people lived so strenuously. Their newly awakened curiosity drove them round the Cape of Good Hope and across the Atlantic Ocean. Exploration and adventure, the invasion of Mexico and the Americas as well as the Orient, the search for gold and for happiness went hand in hand. At the same time Luther roused northern Europe with his demand for religious reform and founded the Protestant church. In England Shakespeare and his companions had discovered a new field of literary venture and produced plays by the hundred, many of them immortal. The modern world of action and progress had at last come of age.

The passing of the old ideals, of chivalry and monkish study, is nowhere better shown than in "Don Quixote." The love of creative art hand in hand with adventure echoes through every page of Cellini's "Autobiography." Francis Bacon discovered a new method of reasoning; Montaigne did what had not been thought of for hundreds of years, and began to study his own personality, the workings of his mind, and the problems which he found in his own life within himself; Sir Thomas More also took up a subject that had not been touched for seventeen centuries and drew a wonderful picture of an ideal government in his "Utopia." Columbus and a whole squadron of others sailed the unknown seas. The Elizabethan nobles, like Sir Philip Sidney and Sir Walter Raleigh, were poets, statesmen, courtiers, and generals all at once.

POETRY
Michelangelo
Ronsard
Shakespeare
Spenser
Villon

FICTION
Cervantes
Rabelais

HISTORY
Holinshed
Raleigh

BIOGRAPHY
Cellini

DRAMA
Jonson
Marlowe
Shakespeare

PHILOSOPHY
& SCIENCE
Ascham
Bacon
Luther
Machiavelli
Montaigne
More
Sidney

The Age of Classicism. 1600–1776. By 1600 imagination and the creative spirit were running riot. The exuberance of wonder and discovery had led to a wordy and confused style of writing. It was time for this unbalanced disorderly manner to be subjected to sound criticism and to be regulated by laws of composition.

This is precisely what happened. Enthusiasm and inventive power were wearied, and thinking men began to criticize and judge the work that was being done. It was clear to them that there was need of proportion and symmetry, that each act of a play, for example, should do its special part in the development of the plot and in the revelation of the characters. The problem in the scholar's mind was: What is the best possible form or model to follow in making a play, a song, or a speech? Wise men came to the conclusion that the classic authors of ancient literature furnished the best examples, and this is why the period is called the Age of Classicism.

It was characterized by the use of reason and judgment, rather than feeling and inspiration, by convention and law, by restraint and dignity. In fact the wilder side of nature was actually disliked; the Alps were not grand, but barbaric and odious, in the eyes of the literary men of that day. Dr. Johnson, in his famous Dictionary, defines a mountain as "a protuberance on the face of nature." The rich land-owners altered the landscapes on their great estates, smoothed out the inelegances of the meadows, cut trees down and planted others, laid out geometrically correct roads and paths, and altogether 'improved' nature until the whole scene was thoroughly artificial; very trim and neat, but very unnatural.

In literature it was much the same. Poetry, such as Pope's, seems stilted and affected to us; the plays of Racine, the opposite of Shakespeare's, are formal and long-winded, so exalted in tone and so restrained in their phrasing that they are dignity indeed, but nothing else.

Yet the movement was beneficial because it cut away the extravagances of the earlier period. It also produced a new branch of literature, the critical essay. The essays of Bacon and Montaigne had been philosophical. Those of Addison and Steele dealt with life and literature critically, using fable and fiction to give point to their verdicts in enforcement of law and convention.

But writing based on the ancient classics demanded a highly educated public. Only the wealthy could obtain the education necessary. Besides, the aristocracy held that the common people should be kept in their place, that learning and scholarship were not for them. The life of thought and progress was remote from the mass of the population, just as the government was carried on without reference to their needs or wishes.

POETRY
Dryden
Goldsmith
Gray
Herbert[1]
Milton[1]
Pope

FICTION
Bunyan[1]
Defoe
Fénelon
Fielding
Goldsmith
Johnson
Le Sage
Sterne
Swift

HISTORY &
ORATORY
Burke
Gibbon

ESSAY &
BIOG.
Addison
Boswell
Steele
Voltaire

DRAMA
Calderon
Lessing
Molière
Racine
Sheridan

RELIGION &
PHILOSOPHY
Browne[1]
Bunyan[1]
Herbert[1]
Kant
Smith, A.
Watts
Wesley

The Age of Romanticism. 1776–1832. The Revolution in America, soon followed by that in France, is the historical sign of the passing of the aristocratic spirit of classicism. Freedom, equality, the destruction of the bondage that had held the common people back from education and advancement, these are the new ideas. In literature as in life a reaction broke out against the formal, stilted, unemotional style of classicism. Wordsworth and Byron in England, Rousseau in France, and Goethe and Schiller in Germany were the leaders in the intellectual activity. Their writings and their principles were directly opposed to their predecessors. Liberty, instead of convention; free expression of passion and feeling, in the place of cold reasoning; individual expression instead of imitation and studied restraint; simple words and direct, clear statement in the place of an affected and artificial style; a love for the wild and picturesque in scenery rather than for the smooth and cultivated parks of the past century. Contrast Byron with Pope, or Scott's novels with Johnson's "Rasselas" to see the radical difference in tone.

This outburst of freedom and self-expression meant progress. To increase the advance, steam and machinery came into use; just as printing accomplished marvels in the days of the Renaissance, so now there was again a blaze of creative genius and inventiveness. National education at the expense of the state and the growth of newspapers and magazines put rich and poor, noble and peasant more nearly on a level than any bloodshed or lawmaking could ever have done.

POETRY
Blake
Burns
Byron
Coleridge
Keats
Musset
Shelley
Uhland
Wordsworth

FICTION
Chateaubriand
Fouqué
Hugo
Manzoni
Scott

ESSAY
De Quincey
Hazlitt
Heine
Lamb
Richter
Southey

DRAMA
Goethe
Schiller

PHILOSOPHY
Rousseau
Schopenhauer

The Nineteenth Century. The first glow of the romantic enthusiasm soon died away and the new forces of industry and commerce took possession of Europe and America.

But the swift onrush of manufacturing and trading called for armies of accountants, skilled workers, and salesmen. These made up a new class of society; hitherto there had been aristocrats and peasants, educated and ignorant, rich and poor. The army of business employees, alert, vigorous, ready for any quantity of reading-matter that would amuse or furnish knowledge, added their countless numbers to the reading public. Fiction, at first in the novel, and later in the short story, was published as fast as it could be printed. This great middle class itself provided material for genius to work on. Dickens and George Eliot are striking examples of authors who wrote about this new middle class in order to amuse it. The influence of business life made the world more matter of fact and in consequence literature became rather more prosaic, with a tendency to present a realistic picture of everyday life and manners. Science, aided by a multitude of mechanical inventions, made unprecedented progress and assumed a more important place in the minds of men than ever before. History was treated scientifically, thought was more systematic than ever, the nineteenth century presented a union of the enthusiasm of the Renaissance, the love of system of the Classic Age, and the devotion to nature of the Romantic Period.

The following lists have been selected from the great array of nineteenth-century authors with the view of presenting those whose work has been peculiarly significant of the period.

POETRY
Arnold, M.
Browning, E. B.
Browning, R.
Bryant
Longfellow
Lowell
Morris, W.
Poe
Rossetti
Swinburne
Tennyson
Whitman

FICTION
Austen
Balzac
Dickens
Dumas
Eliot
Hardy
Harte
Hawthorne
Irving
Kipling
Poe
Stevenson
Thackeray
Tolstoi
Zola

HISTORY
Bancroft
Carlyle
Ferrero
Green
Guizot
Hodgkin
Michelet
Mommsen
Motley
Parkman
Prescott
Symonds
Taine

ESSAY
& BIOG.
Arnold, M.
Chesterton
Emerson
La Ramée
Lewes
Lockhart
Lowell
Morley
Pater
Sainte-Beuve
Stephen
Thoreau
Villari

PHILOSOPHY
& SCIENCE
Carlyle
Darwin
Emerson
Galton
Hamilton
Ruskin
Shaler
Spencer

RELIGION
Bowne
Brierley
Brooks
Channing
Robertson

[NATIONAL CHARACTERISTICS]

Each of the nations, like each of the great eras of human progress, possesses definite characteristics of its own. Frenchmen differ from Englishmen in their faces, their customs, and also in intellectual trend. Shakespeare is unlike Ibsen not simply because he lived at an earlier date, in another epoch, but also because he was the native of another country. Kipling's point of view is not the same as that of Thomas Bailey Aldrich; their national traditions and surroundings varied sufficiently to leave a mark upon their work so legible that one is recognized as English and the other as American without need of referring to their biographies.

It is necessary, then, to have in mind the traits that individualize nations and races. For this reason the national characteristics are here set forth briefly, with lists of the principal authors of each country.

Greek Literature. An unequaled perception of beauty, with a love of symmetry and proportion: the reason and the feelings, the intellect and the emotions are perfectly blended. The powers of imagination and creation are highly trained, as well as the logical faculty, resulting in the perfection of skill and insight in epic poetry (Homer), tragedy (Æschylus, Euripides, and Sophocles), and philosophy (Plato).

POETRY
Cleanthes
Homer
Pindar
Sappho
Theocritus

FICTION
Æsop

HISTORY
Herodotus
Thucydides

BIOGRAPHY
Plato
Plutarch

DRAMA
Æschylus
Euripides
Sophocles

PHILOSOPHY
Epictetus
Plato

Latin Literature. The power of organization, with an ardor for law and order, combined with a genius for adapting and utilizing the best products of the nations which came under the Roman rule. This talent for adaptation and imitation stands in contrast to the Greek creative talent. Inasmuch as Rome's greatest literary works belong to a period four centuries after the best Greek production, it follows that the Roman authors profited not only by Greek achievement but also by the increased knowledge of the world due to the vast extension of the Roman Empire. Apart from this broader point of view, Latin authors borrowed method and style from the Greek; Vergil follows Homer and Theocritus, who was also imitated by Horace. Cicero and Seneca took both thought and style from Greek philosophers. In fact, Athens was the university at which all well-educated Romans had studied.

POETRY
Catullus
Horace
Ovid
Vergil

FICTION
Apuleius

HISTORY
Cæsar
Josephus[2]
Livy
Suetonius
Tacitus

BIOGRAPHY
Pliny

PHILOSOPHY
Aurelius
Cicero
Lucretius
Seneca

English Literature. England's isolation as an island has enabled her to develop a national literature continuously for nine centuries with only the slightest interruption from the world without. Foreign ideas have been introduced, certainly, but by Englishmen instead of by foreigners. Where a slothful race would have lain dormant and inactive, the vigorous and adventurous islanders have even led the way in two fields of literary endeavor, for fiction and the essay reached their successive stages of growth more quickly in England than elsewhere. Throughout poetry and prose, with but few exceptions, there is a blend of shrewdness and inspiration which in daily life is called common sense; Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, Browning continually sound the practical note, evincing their knowledge and appreciation of material affairs. Another trait is that of searching out the moral lessons in life and thought. "Books in the running brooks, sermons in stones" are constantly sought by English authors. Chaucer, Bunyan, Milton, Dickens, Carlyle, Browning, and many others from the forefront of English letters play the part of teacher and preacher again and again.

POETRY
Anglo-Saxon Literature
Arnold, M.
Blake
Browning, E. B.
Browning, R.
Burns
Byron
Chaucer
Clough
Coleridge
Dryden
Goldsmith
Gray
Henley
Keats
Kingsley
Macaulay
Milton
Morris, W.
Old English Ballads
Patmore
Pope
Rossetti, C.
Rossetti, D. G.
Scott
Shakespeare
Shelley
Sidney
Spenser
Swinburne
Tennyson
Wordsworth

FICTION
Austen
Barrie
Blackmore
Borrow
Brontë
Caine
Defoe
Dickens
Doyle
Eliot
Fielding
Gaskell
Goldsmith
Hardy
Hughes
Kingsley
Kipling
Lever
Lytton
Macdonald
Macleod
Malory
Meredith
Reade
Richardson
Scott
Stevenson
Swift
Thackeray
Watson

HISTORY
Carlyle
Creasy
Farrar
Freeman
Froissart
Froude
Gibbon
Gladstone
Green
Grote
Hodgkin
Holinshed
McCarthy
Mahaffy
Raleigh
Smith, G.
Symonds

BIOGRAPHY
Boswell
Chesterton
Evelyn
Lewes
Lockhart
Pepys
Southey

ESSAY
Addison
Arnold, M.
Bacon
Benson
De Quincey
Hamerton
Harrison
Hazlitt
Lamb
Lang
La Ramée
Macaulay
Milton
Morley
Pater
Ruskin
Sidney
Steele
Stephen
Stevenson
Thackeray
Walton
White, G.

HUMOR
Barham
Carroll
Cowper
Dickens
Gilbert
Hood
Hope
Jerrold
Sterne
Swift
Thackeray

TRAVEL
Hearn
Kinglake
Mandeville
Stevenson
Tyndall

DRAMA
Jonson
Marlowe
Shakespeare
Sheridan

ORATORY
Bright
Burke

SCIENCE &
PHILOSOPHY
Bacon
Carlyle
Darwin
Galton
Mill
More
Ruskin
Smith, A.
Spencer

RELIGION
Bonar
Bowring
Brierley
Browne, Sir T.
Cowper
Faber
Heber
Herbert
Hooker
Keble
Lyte
Milman
Newman
Robertson
Toplady
Watts
Wesley
Wyclif

American Literature. Obviously akin to English literature, yet more democratic in tone, owing to national tendencies, such as the character of the settlers, and the subsequent historical developments. Longfellow, Emerson, Whitman, and the other leading American authors wrote for the nation and not for any restricted class; the aristocratic note characteristic of much of eighteenth-century English literature is not to be found in American writers.

POETRY
Aldrich
Bryant
Emerson
Field
Holmes
Howe
Key
Lanier
Longfellow
Lowell
Morris, G. P.

Payne
Poe
Read
Riley
Smith, S. F.
Story
Taylor
Whitman
Whittier
Woodworth

FICTION
Aldrich
Cooper
Crawford
Hale
Harte
Hawthorne
Irving
Poe
Stowe

HISTORY
Bancroft
Fiske
Irving
McMaster
Motley
Parkman
Prescott

ESSAY
Emerson
Fields
Howells
Lowell
Mitchell
Thoreau
Warner

HUMOR
Browne, C. F.
Harris
Harte
Holmes
Irving
Lowell

TRAVEL
Audubon
Dana
Melville

ORATORY
Choate
Henry
Lincoln
Phillips
Sumner
Washington
Webster

SCIENCE &
PHILOSOPHY
Emerson
Hamilton
Shaler

RELIGION
Bowne
Brooks
Channing
Palmer
Sears

French Literature. A marked love of beauty, almost Greek in its nature, with a feeling for accuracy and organization which is decidedly Latin. These qualities have produced delicacy and clearness of expression; but their tendencies lead to perfection of style and form rather than to depth of thought, giving an effect of lightness and brilliance, and at times of superficiality.

POETRY
French Lit.
La Fontaine
Musset
Ronsard
Rouget de Lisle
Verlaine
Villon

FICTION
Balzac
Bernardin de
Saint-Pierre
Chateaubriand
Daudet
Dumas
Fénelon
Feuillet
French Lit.
Hugo
Laboulaye
Le Sage
Maupassant
Perrault
Zola

HISTORY
French Lit.
Guizot
Michelet
Taine
Voltaire

ESSAY
Montaigne
Sainte-Beuve

DRAMA
Molière
Racine
Rostand

PHILOSOPHY
Pascal
Rousseau

RELIGION
Bernard, St.
Bernard of Cluny

German Literature. Depth of thought and forceful expression, which are in part responsible for the complex character of the national style as opposed to the clarity of the French. Owing to the unsettled condition of Germany for many centuries, the arts in general, and literature especially, did not begin to flourish to a noteworthy degree until the eighteenth century. While Luther was the first great author to use the language in its present form, it was not until two centuries later that the next eminent writers, Lessing, Schiller, and Goethe, appeared, whose work marks the highest point in the history of German letters.

POETRY
Arndt
German Lit.
Goethe
Heine
Schneckenburger
Uhland

FICTION
Fouqué
Grimm
Raspe

HISTORY
Mommsen

DRAMA
Lessing
Schiller
Goethe

PHILOSOPHY
Kant
Schopenhauer

RELIGION
à Kempis
Luther

Italian Literature. Emotional and imaginative rather than reflective, and therefore at its best in the brilliant and exuberant era of the Renaissance, which first came into full bloom in Italy.

POETRY
Dante
Jacopone
Michelangelo
Petrarch
Tasso

FICTION
Boccaccio
Manzoni

HISTORY
Ferrero

TRAVEL
& BIOG.
Cellini
Pellico
Polo
Villari

PHILOSOPHY
Machiavelli

RELIGION
Jacopone
Mazzini
Thomas of Celano

Spanish Literature. Marked by the dignity that is the predominating characteristic of the nation. Just as Spain has had but one brief period when she was supreme among the European nations, so she has produced but one supreme author, Cervantes. Her literature, for the most part, and notably at the present day, is imitative, behind rather than ahead of the times.

POETRY
Spanish Lit.

FICTION
Cervantes

DRAMA
Calderon

Scandinavian Literature. Norway, Sweden, and Denmark are nations of the same race; their history, literature, and civilization are inseparably associated. Climate, racial character, historical developments, and other causes have combined to retard the growth of their literature. Apart from the sagas little of universal interest appeared until the nineteenth century, in which Ibsen created a sensation with his dramas of relentless criticism of the vanity and pettiness of life in the prosperous, democratic society of Norway.

POETRY
Ewald
Norse Lit.

FICTION
Andersen
Björnson

HISTORY
Norse Lit.

DRAMA
Ibsen

Russian Literature. In some respects more closely related to the East than to the West, and hampered by despotism until the twentieth century, Russia produced nothing of value until a century ago. The novelists mentioned below then began a series of vivid pictures of the struggle for freedom, knowledge, and civilization as opposed to tyranny, universal ignorance, and barbarism. Their work has a strong national flavor, coupled with a youthful energy and an enthusiasm for the mission of enlightenment that recalls the spirit of the Renaissance and its zeal for discovery and progress.

POETRY
Derzhavin

FICTION
Russian Lit.
Sienkiewicz
Tolstoi
Turgenieff