not only because of their timeliness but also because they help to give unity and solidity to the entire structure of the book. For example, we are accustomed to the use of selections from the essays of Lord Bacon. These, however, have not hitherto been related to present thought; they have been studied chiefly for their difficulties of style and vocabulary. But the Advancement of Learning, which is practically unknown to college students, contains many passages which are much easier for them to understand; it is also a trumpet-call for ambitious youth. Furthermore, when these passages from Bacon's treatise on learning in his own day are studied in connection with certain of his essays, or counsels of experience, and along with selections from Elyot and Spenser which bear on the same subject, the training of those who were to rule Britain, we have a sounder principle of organization than that given by literary bibliography, annotation, and criticism of style; we have also an excellent method for understanding the mind of the Renaissance; and, best of all, we have solid contribution to the education of those of this new day who are to rule in our commonwealth and in the new and greater commonwealth of the peoples of the world. As to timeliness of interest, examples are to be found in the scathing satire on. war and governments in Swift's Gulliver, or in Thomas More's sarcasm on "a place in the sun" as given in Utopia, or in Hooker's judgment on the philosophy that led Germany to attack the world, or in the fine argument for a League to Enforce Peace contained in the extract from the Leviathan of Hobbes, or in the compact summary of the difference between the theory of government held by the late masters of Germany and the ideals of democracy set forth in the closing paragraph of Mills's essay on Liberty. This last example is one of many that are scattered through the book which serve to show the difference between the philosophy and ideals of militarist Germany and the philosophy and ideals of the allied democracies. Could anything be more timely from this standpoint than to have college men study Burke, not only for the splendors of his style, or as an illustrious exponent of the art of oratory, but for those great passages in which he sets forth the principles of justice, international honor, and free government? Consider, for example, in the light of present problems, his treatment of the nature of empire, or his warning against the attempt to draw an indictment against a whole people, or his conception of justice tempered with mercy-"not what I may do, but what humanity, reason, and justice tell me I ought to do"-or his insistence that the safety of the people consists not in documents and constitutions but in the spirit that informs them, a spirit as light as air, as strong as links of iron; or his definition of free government: "To make a government requires no great prudence. Settle the seat of power; teach obedience; and the work is done. To give freedom is still more easy. It is not necessary to guide; it only requires to let go the rein. But to form a free government; that is, to temper together these opposite elements of liberty and restraint in one consistent work, requires much thought; deep reflection; a sagacious, powerful, and combining mind." Throughout the book will be found such passages, sometimes familiar enough, but here thrown into

new relief because of the quickening of our sensibilities in a time of national danger and triumph, or because of the setting in which they are here placed. Take for example Wordsworth's vision of the old chivalry and old romance in France, with the appeal that the thought of them made to his poet's imagination, and then his meeting with a "hunger-bitten girl" and his friend's comment, "Tis against that that we are fighting." The incident illuminates, as by a lightning's flash, the problem of present life. Or who among the throngs of students who learn, wearily enough, something about Milton would miss the thrill that comes from recognizing a familiar spirit if his "lesson" should contain the passage from the tract on Reformation in England, here printed on pages 161-162, in which Milton, more than a century and a quarter before Burke, spoke passionately in defence of America and of the spirit that led eventually to the founding of a new nation across the seas; or if it contained the paragraph from the Tenure of Kings in which Milton proclaims the brotherhood of man: "Who knows not that there is a mutual bond of amity and brotherhood between man and man over all the world, neither is it the English sea that can sever us from that duty and relation." Such passages, made impressive because they become parts of a great tradition that the student gleans from the literature of centuries, are not transient steps toward a passmark; in the moments in which they are found there is stored up life and food for future years.

In order to bring out clearly the meanings that such a body of thought contains for us, the arrangement of the material differs widely from that usually employed. Chronology has been disregarded where it has seemed desirable to do so; dates have been supplied where necessary to the understanding of the selection, and not otherwise; the same author may be represented under different headings. More important than these matters of detail is the outline, or syllabus, which is supplied as a guide. Thus, the sixteenth century is not studied as a time when certain authors wrote at certain times various poems, dramas, and prose works. The ideas which enable one to enter into the mind of the Renaissance, so far as this is possible in an elementary course, are impressed upon the student's mind through definition and illustration. So throughout the book the plan of listing chronologically a large number of authors, with specimens of their work, is abandoned. The ideas that are expressed by the author of the selection are what the pupil is expected to master. The Table of Contents is therefore an integral part of the method of the book; it is to be carefully studied in order that the relationship of the particular selection to that section in which it is placed may be fully understood. Further helps will be found in the Index, which again is not a mere catalogue of facts, or a body of notes, but a commentary. It follows from what has been said that annotation, in the ordinary sense, is not a part of the plan of the book. The editors believe that overannotation, for elementary classes, not only deadens interest but confuses the student's mind by leading him to think that the results of his study are to be

tabulated like a dictionary or an encyclopædia instead of organized into a structure like a building.

In this combination of doctrine with discipline we find once more the old definition of Humanism. Such was the conception of the men who founded classical learning in the Renaissance. The discipline they sought in the orderly and precise study of the classics was not a philological discipline alone, a matter of syntax and Greek particles, but the rebirth of a civilization in the minds of men. And the doctrine was the translation of this discipline into terms of citizenship. For Vergerius and Vittorino in Italy and Erasmus and Thomas More in England sought always to train men to be governors. The movement took its strength from the desire to realize the great tradition of antiquity in order to translate it into an intense nationalism for new times. Italy knew little of her past; those who sought to create for her a soul founded their work on what they considered their true ancestry, ancient Rome, and, through Rome, Greece. Classical tradition was her tradition. So, too, Tudor England lacked national culture and sought the grounds for creating it in a similar study of a perfect civilization. There was reason, then, for the predominance of the classics in any scheme for the education of a gentleman. The new nations of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries found in antiquity, classical and Hebraic, their Great Tradition.

The bearing of these facts on our present educational and national problems is unmistakable. We stand at the end of an era, at the dawn of a new day. The rise of the modern state in the Renaissance was not more completely a phenomenon in that time than the conquest of the world by democracy is destined to become in our own. Our need is the same as theirs: to realize a new humanism, competent to guide through doctrine and discipline. Our need is greater than theirs, because the chief responsibility in those days rested on kings. About the only hope held out by Castiglione, in his treatise on courtiership, was that the prince might be a decent fellow, amenable to suggestions offered by wise courtiers. In those days the prince was the state. It is not so with us, now that all the world is to be the inheritance of democracy, either a democracy in which liberty is connected with order, or a democracy in which all things are levelled; nothing is secure, a new chaos in which hot, cold, moist and dry strive for momentary mastery and are gone.

Now this need, overwhelming as it is, is met by a racial tradition as rich and as clearly defined as that of classical antiquity. It is only of late years that we have become somewhat aware of this,-fitfully, uncertainly, partially aware of it. For example, the teaching of history in our schools has somehow missed the fact that England and America are united not only by blood and speech but by a common tradition extending back through centuries; that American free institutions took form from the institutions of England; and that the American Revolution was one step in the great evolution of free government, a step as significant for the mother country as for us. The full value of this stupendous

achievement, the joint working-out of free government, we have only begun to estimate. England is too often thought of as the abode of tyranny, the hereditary enemy of free America; the old battles are still stupidly fought over in our schools, and a prejudice is formed that is not only dangerous but destructive to that coöperation in democratic government which is the manifest destiny of England and America. Something of what all this means, or is capable of meaning, is revealed in this book, in which for the first time the deepest idealism of the two countries, their bible of democracy as expressed in their literature, is set forth as a unity and with the cumulative effect of a mighty evolution. The book, therefore, becomes a revelation of the doctrine and the discipline of an ordered liberty, of the way in which the best liberal thought of today grows out of a great tradition, the warp and woof of the life of a thousand years. The best possible preparation for the new life, no longer isolated and set apart, that America now enters upon is to see that these ideas are as widely diffused as possible, so that they may reach, in one form or another, every citizen, everywhere. And the best possible antidote to the madness of disordered liberty is to translate this idealism into what Walt Whitman called "personalities."

With such a tradition to draw upon for steadiness and vision, the opportunity of the teacher of English is immeasurably extended. The greatest need of the present in the field of higher education is, as Paul Elmer More has said, "to restore to their predominance in the curriculum those studies that train the imagination, not, be it said, the imagination in its purely æsthetic function, .. but the imagination in its power of grasping in a single firm vision, so to speak, the long course of human history and of distinguishing therein what is essential from what is ephemeral." The present volume, by enabling the student to enter into the mind of a past which is great in itself and vitally related to the present, invites the teacher of English literature to become what he has hitherto signally failed to be, a real champion of those elements in education which are faring ill amid the pressure of utilitarian subjects. Incidentally, such a preliminary study of the course of English literature affords the best possible basis for advanced study. Thus, a training in the fundamental ideas of the Renaissance is a better foundation for a scholarly and technical knowledge of Shakespeare or Spenser than is a survey, no matter how careful, of dramatic origins, or of Renaissance epic theory, or of the literary ideas of the Areopagus. So also in the Romantic period the first essential of thorough comprehension is a consideration of the intellectual, emotional, and spiritual experience which came to Englishmen as a result of the French Revolution. Thus the ninth, tenth, and eleventh books of Wordsworth's Prelude, which are not given in any book of selections commonly used in survey courses, become altogether the most important literary document of the age, constituting, as Legouis remarks, an inward history of Wordsworth's generation and showing how the nineteenth century was born out of the eighteenth. To pass lightly over a subject of such commanding importance, while attempting to focus the student's attention

on the development of medievalism, or even, choosing the better part, while encouraging him in pleasant rambles with Elia or Hazlitt through the by-ways of literature, is to put a weapon into the hands of those critics who condemn the English teacher as a pedant or a dilettant and to hasten the exodus of college men from the liberal arts course. If we wish to restore literature to its true place as the main fortress of liberal culture we shall revise our methods of dealing with it.

A peculiar advantage of studying literature in this way is the opportunity which it affords of bringing about a new integration of the entire curriculum of liberal subjects. It was perhaps the greatest advantage of the older classical discipline, intelligently conceived, that it dealt with culture as a unit. Thus in Milton's program of education the history, the science, the art, the philosophy of Greece and Rome were studied as a single subject matter, interrelated in all its parts. The common medium of all was literature. The fruit of education in the ancient tongues was the comprehension of a great civilization in its entirety, a closely woven knowledge of the best that had been thought and done by a great people. The time for such a re-creation of antiquity in the mind has long since passed. Greek and Latin, even for the few who surrender themselves to the claims of the most classical of courses, have shrunk to a mere department of knowledge. Rightly or wrongly, we have substituted modern culture for ancient as the material of humane discipline. And in so doing, as the defenders of the old system are ever ready to point out, we have failed to secure a comparable result. But this failure is due to no inherent deficiency in the subject matter. It is due rather to the fact that we have found no new unity to take the place of the old. We have divorced science from philosophy and history from art. The chief virtue of the modern professor consists in his ability to stick to his last. The teacher of science, the teacher of history, the teacher of philosophy, "each in his sea of life enisled," continues to dispense his private and peculiar knowledge, indifferent to its place or bearing in the sum of things. To the teacher of literature above all others falls the task of relating the work of other departments, for literature in the broadest sense contains the fruit of all. Unfortunately, however, too many teachers of English treat their subject as if it were no less isolated than the rest, and the emphasis in the available books of selections accentuates this tendency. In the course contemplated for users of this volume, literature is the record of man's achievement on this planet in modern times. It is indeed a criticism of life, and that in no narrow sense. An understanding of it demands that the student draw on all his resources of knowledge in many fields. Adequate instruction implies the closest coöperation between the teacher of English and the teachers of history, of ethics and metaphysics, of social science, of government. The method looks forward to a revision of the whole curriculum of liberal arts in the interests of singleness of impres sion. Meanwhile, the teacher of literature, if he is awake to his responsibilities, can do much to remedy the chief defect in our college program by revealing to the student the essential unity of human thought.