The Best Of The World's Classics: Restricted To Prose

Ever since civilized man has had a literature he has apparently sought to make selections from it and thus put his favorite passages together in a compact and convenient form. Certain it is, at least, that to the Greeks, masters in all great arts, we owe this habit. They made such col lections and named them, after their pleasant imaginative fashion, a gathering of flowers, or what we, borrowing their word, call an anthology. So to those austere souls who regard anthologies as a labor-saving contrivance for the benefit of persons who like a smattering of knowledge and are never really learned, we can at least plead in mitigation that we have high and ancient author ity for the practise. In any event no amount of scholarly deprecation has been able to turn man kind or that portion of mankind which reads books from the agreeable habit of making volumes of selections and finding in them much pleasure. When all these conquests had been added to the Lydian empire, and the prosperity of Sardis.