sad, brief elegies of Tennyson, when skillfully interpreted, enable us penetrate into the secrets of their hearts, and open to us the hidden springs of their character. It is the office of the critic to discriminate between what does and what does not express the man, and thus to interpret the man by many of his works; and the service which he renders to the reader is often of surpassing interest.

The features of modern criticism which have been enumerated, may suffice. We may perhaps more profitably, as well as more practically, consider our own literature as a field for its exercise. We may aver with confidence, that English literature furnishes the amplest, the most varied, and the most interesting material for the critic, of any whether ancient or modern. It ought not to surprise us that it should. The compound structure of the language gives an advantage to the writer as well as to the philologist, furnishing often a richer choice of terms, a greater variety of phrases, and a wider range of structure, than is possible for any other modern tongue. This affects its form alone is true, but the form in this instance happens to furnish large capacities for the investment and expression of a rich and manifold material. This material is rich and manifold, chiefly, because its people have been free, and being free, have been bold in thought, and earnest in feeling. They have been moved and stirred by the largest spirit of adventure in commerce, in war, in colonizing, and in self government. They have had an intense religious spirit, manifested in a sufficient variety of forms, and inspiring to fervent faith, to martyrlike boldness, and to consistent and heroic self-denial. They have had earnest political struggles for the crown and against the crown, for the liberty of the commons, and the traditional rights of the people, and for the divine right of kings, and the dignity of the royal prerogative. They have had sacred and happy homes,-fire side enjoyments hallowed by domestic love, and made doubly sacred and dear by ancestral recollections. They have had exhaustless and irrepressible humor-an inborn love of noisy hilarity, an infinitude of original characters to provoke this humor, and inspire the songs of a people ever ready to be excited to uproarious merriment. They have had a free press-a free

pulpit, and free newspapers, in spite of occasional censorship, packed juries, and venal judges.

If we trace the history and characteristics of this literature we may well be amazed at its varied riches, and be excited to avail ourselves of its inviting stores to a more earnest as well as a more critical use of its ample resources.

We begin with Chaucer. In the Canterbury Tales we have a worthy counterpart to the Odyssey, giving as they do, a graphic and varied picture of the many sided life, and the strongly marked characteristics which, even at this very early period, were manifest among the English people. Indeed we could not desire a more satisfactory illustration of the truth and justice of all that we have said of literature as a field for the study of history, than is furnished in these tales of Chaucer. The attentive reader cannot fail to observe how eminently true it is that the times illustrate the author and the author illustrates his times; how, through these tales, we have a direct insight into the manners and the sentiments, the customs and the philosophy of our ancestors, as they were, and as they lived some five hundred years ago. We have only to look through this magic show glass, and we are transported back to the very scenes which were then transacted, and those early times live again before our eyes. It is not a lifeless chronicle which we read, it is not a grave description, not a careful analysis, not a logical generalization, such as the annalist and the historian furnish. It is not even an historical novel in which a writer of a later period has endeavored to recreate the times as he conceived them, but it is an unconscious painter of the men and the manners with which he was conversant. How strong and bold-hearted were those men, how natural their manners,-how brave and sincere, how humorous and tender hearted, how beneficent and devout were the sentiments which they express.

After a long and somewhat dreary interval, we come to the age of Shakespeare, and not the age of Shakespeare alone, but that of Spencer and Sidney, and Raleigh, and Hooker, and Bacon, and Ben Jonson, and the train of dramatists of whom Jonson was the representative and the head. We call this truly the golden age of English literature, and we ask what agencies

could have produced such writers as these? We find our answer-first in the vigorous growth of the English stock, that, under all the burdens of royal and churchly oppression, had never been debased or crushed, but had held its own in the hall of the gentry, the farm house of the yeoman, and the cottage of the laborer. This living force was marvellously excited by the Protestant Reformation, and when after many struggles, a Protestant Queen had come to the throne, it experienced, as it were, a thrill of new creative energy. Foreign wars, commercial adventures, romantic discoveries, all united to keep this young life excited to its utmost tension, and to move it by an inward ferment. The thoughts of men were great; their hopes were unbounded, their feelings were fervent, their self confidence was untrammeled; their power of expression was untamed. They had at their command the language not as yet shaped by critics or developed into any normal structure,—a fit instrument of the young giants, rejoicing in their strength, who were ready to use it, each as he would. Could the student desire a study more inviting than that to which the literature of these active and hopeful days invites him? Whether he would study the authors or their times, or both together, whether he would study the matter or the form of literature,-thought, sentiment, and imagery, on the one hand, or diction, rythm, and periodic power on the other, he could ask for nothing more exciting or more rewarding than what is furnished here. The age of Milton follows, and not of Milton only but of Taylor, and Sir Thomas Browne, of Baxter, and Bunyan, of Hobbes,and Fuller. Here the English life and with it English literature appears in other forms, more fixed, and serious, and grave, but with not a whit of its force abated, nor aught of its fiery energy repressed. Imagination is still as soaring as ever, and the manifold and seeming exhaustless varieties of diction illustrate the resources and the plastic capacities of the English language. Thsi period was marked for its political struggles, and its religious strifes, for its intense feeling and its strong thinking; for its ardent longings, and its patient endurance, and above all, for its faith in God and in man; and all these influences shaped the literature, as the literature formed the period.

The age of Dryden followed, and not of Dryden only, but of South, and Locke, and Boyle, and Newton. It was a tamer period, in which accuracy of thought, and exactness of language, and symmetry and beauty of style, and repression of feeling, and caution in imagery, were all conspicuous. It was an age of repression and of criticism, as was natural after the real and imagined excesses of principle and feeling which had characterized the times of the commonwealth,-an age in which religion declined and immorality was less sustained, an age of free thinking and unbelief,-which were scarcely held in check by the efforts of Locke and Boyle. With an age thus characterized in the life of the people, the literature of the period sympathized. First of all, it was the period in which the modern and the better English style was developed and fixed-preeminently by Dryden. Next criticism itself was first applied with systematic aims and definite results. In both Dryden was preeminent. With more accurate thinking and careful writing, there were not wholly lost the fire of feeling and the splendor of imagination which had distinguished the earlier periods.

Then followed the age of Pope, and not of Pope alone, but also of Addison and Swift, of Shaftesbury and Bishop Butler, of Berkeley and Warburton, and they were followed by that of Richardson, Defoe, Fielding, and Smollett. It was an age in no wise distinguished for earnestness or for faith, an age of conventionalities, gaiety, and frivolity, an age of free living, and of free thinking, an age in which satire and sneering criticism would be likely to flourish, and in which both were abundant. As was the life, such was the literature of the pe. riod, with here and there an exception. For the ease and felicity of its prose diction, and for the correctness and smoothness of its verse to the ear-it has been called the Augustan age of English literature but the perfection of form to which it brought this literature was ill compensated for the loss of these higher qualities by which the earlier periods were distinguished.

In the latter half of the same century there was a change for the better. This was the period of Johnson, and of Burke, of Thomson, Goldsmith, and Cowper. The national life grew

more serious. The lower classes had been moved to greater religious earnestness by Wesley, Whitfield, and others. The higher were tired with the emptiness and dissoluteness, with the heartlessness and frivolity of the generations before them,there was a longing after better things, and to this longing the literature of the period gave expression in manifold signs.

Then came the French Revolution, filling many hopeful and sanguine spirits with ardent enthusiasm, and stirring their minds with inquiries which led to profounder studies of the principles of moral, political, and theological faith—then the inevitable reaction, involving strong repressive measures, and dividing society into angry sections, then the long and costly wars of the allies, and the exciting career of the first Napoleon. All these movements in English thought, attended, as they were, by the corrupt demoralization of the court and example of the last of the Georges, were reflected in English literature as it presents itself in the first thirty years of the present century. This is the period of Scott, of Byron and Shelley, of Coleridge and Southey, of Wordsworth, Wilson, and Lamb, of Macaulay and Hallam, of Jeffrey and Mackintosh. Literature is sharply divided into opposing schoolsexpressing the divided sentiment and opinion of the English nation. Foremost among them is that catholic and compre hensive school which dared to free itself from the fashion of the day in both thought and diction, and to go back to the English writers of the earlier periods, and to vindicate Shakespeare, and Milton, and Hooker, and Bacon, from the neglect into which they had fallen. More than all, this school dared to vindicate for itself the liberty to use all the resources of the English language, as well as to sound all the depths of English thought and feeling after the ancient ways. While in one direction, as with Byron, literature is passionate and satanic, and in another, as with Shelley, it is blasphemous and atheistic; while in Scott it is brilliantly romantic; while with Hallam and Mackintosh it is solidly earnest; withColeridge, Wordsworth, Southey, and Wilson, it is more thoughtful and affectionate, it is mindful of nature and of God, and above all it dares to be true to all that is best in human character and literature. With this school and its awakened interest in all the older