Shadow, The Hans Christian Andersen Sindbad the Sailor, The First Voyage of. Arabian Nights 54 92 Sir Roger as a Host Joseph Addison 14 Sir Roger at the Play Song Sweetheart, Sigh No More A EDITOR'S FOREWORD RE there not already anthologies enough? many answers might be made, but two will sufficiently set forth the reasons why this series is not only worth while, but why it meets an existing demand. Most of the anthologies are costly. To own them, one must pay many dollars; not, perhaps, more dollars than they are worth, but more dollars than one may find it convenient to spare. The anthology to which this is the foreword is the least expensive work of its class. That is one of its two best reasons for being. The other is that this one differs from its predecessors in aiming less at quantity than at quality. It is impossible to make a large anthology without including many names that are not now, and never will be recorded on Fame's eternal bead roll. Perhaps some of the authors represented in these volumes may never attain that position, but the number of such is smaller than in any similar works. The Editor's plan has been to give copious extracts from the writers of admitted eminence, rather than briefer selections from a host of the lesser lights of literature. In many instances the authors now living have made their own selections, which gives special interest to the work. It is not always that an author knows what is his best, but the Editor is inclined to think that those who have named the selections by which they prefer to be represented here have chosen wisely, and to these authors the Editor gives sincere thanks. Thanks are also due to those who have approved of the selections made by the Editor; and thanks are due furthermore to the publishers who have graciously permitted the use of copyrighted material. In the case of all such material the Editor has been at pains to name the publisher so that the reader whose appetite is whetted by the extracts will know just where to go for more. The reading appetite grows with what it feeds upon and it is our firm conviction that these selections from the works of the masters will do much to create a wider circle of readers for the writings from which they have been chosen. Jeannette L. Gilder JOSEPH ADDISON JOSEPH ADDISON, poet, essayist and dramatist, was born at Milston, Wiltshire, England, May 1, 1672. His father, who later became Dean of Lichfield, instilled in his mind the love of literature. Young Addison attended first the famous Charter House School in London, and later matriculated at Oxford. Destined for the church, his talent for writing drew him into political life. His poem, "The Campaign," celebrating the victory of Marlborough, brought him a commissionership, and he was seldom without office until his death at Holland House, in 1719. His contributions to the "Tatler" and the Spectator" made him the most famous essayist of his time. His writings, instructive, imbued with a cheerful philosophy, a touch of gayety here and there, and of an almost faultless diction, live as models of their kind. The papers on Milton, Sir Roger de Coverley and "The Vision of Mirza" are his most famous works. the gloominess of the place, and the use to which it is applied, with the solemnity of the building, and the condition of the people who lie in it, are apt to fill the mind with a kind of melancholy, or rather thoughtfulness, that is not disagreeable. I yesterday passed a whole afternoon in the churchyard, the cloisters, and the church, amusing myself with the tombstones and inscriptions that I met with in those several regions of the dead. Most of them recorded nothing else of the buried person but that he was born upon one day, and died upon another; the whole history of his life being comprehended in those two circumstances that are common to all mankind. I could not but look upon these registers of existence, whether of brass or marble, as a kind of satire upon the departed persons; who had left no other memorial of them but that they were born and that they died. They put me in mind of several persons mentioned in the battles of heroic poems, who have sounding names given them, for no other reason but that they may be killed, and are celebrated for nothing but being knocked on the head. The life of these men is finely described in holy writ by "the path of an arrow," which is immediately closed up and lost. Upon my going into the church I entertained myself with the digging of a grave; and saw in every shovelful of it that was thrown up the fragment of a bone or skull intermixed with a kind of fresh mouldering earth that some time or other had a place in the composition of a human body. Upon this I began to consider with myself what innumerable multitudes of people lay confused together under the pavement of that ancient cathedral: how men and women, friends and enemies, priests and soldiers, monks and prebendaries, were crumbled amongst one another, and blended together in the same common mass; how beauty, strength and youth, with old age, weakness, and deformity, lay undistin< guished in the same promiscuous heap of matter. After having thus surveyed this great magazine of mortality, as it were, in the lump, I examined it more particularly by the accounts which I found on several of the monuments which are raised in every quarter of that ancient fabric. Some of them were covered with such extravagant epitaphs, that if |