century; most of them fall in the nineteenth or twentieth century. But they are selected not because they are of this or that period, but primarily for the reason that they are fine examples of the art of letters, and illustrate what living literature is and always will be, so long as men can read and think and feel the force and attraction of winged words, couched in the noble tongue which was native to those who use it, and is the priceless heritage and possession of all who communicate their thought in English speech.

The first half-dozen volumes of the series offer authors, British or American, who are strictly contemporary. Interest in writers of our own day naturally precedes interest in the older, even standard writers. So far as appeal is concerned, literature, like charity, begins at home, both as to time and place. Later, some of the elder masterpieces will be offered, like a novel of Scott's, or George Eliot's, or a play by Sheridan or Goldsmith. But it should be realized and recognized that the work of modern men such as Stevenson, or Huxley, can lay claim to equal consideration so long as it is sound as art and sane and tonic in the representation of life. An author of to-day is not of necessity to be treated as a suspect, although he has not so long been tested by critical opinion. It is believed that the contemporary writers included here have produced masterpieces deserving inclusion in any fair, broadminded, and enjoyable study of the native letters. That is why they are presented herewith, and given prominence. R. B.

THOMAS HENRY HUXLEY

I

THOMAS HENRY HUXLEY was a man of science who was also a man of letters; and there are very few scientists who have attained the literary skill which Huxley acquired by persistent endeavor-by making sure, first of all, that he had something to say, and then secondly, by taking the utmost pains to say this with absolute precision. It was because he was a man of science that, as a man of letters, he never descended to "fine writing," falsely so called. He was not one of those often deluded writers who are like savages, "not content," as Sir Philip Sidney said, "to wear earrings at the fit and natural place of the ears, but they will thrust jewels through their noses and lips because they will be sure to be fine."

He never constructed his ornament, but he often decorated his construction by illuminating figures of speech, always pertinent to his theme. He declared his belief that "science and literature are not two things but two sides of the same thing"; and he put this principle into practice. "A good writer," so Brunetière asserted, "is simply one who says all he means to say, who says only what he means to say, and who says it exactly as he means

to say it." In other words, Huxley is unfailingly conscientious and unfailingly clear. Indeed, he is as clear as Macaulay, who is a master of clarity, but Huxley never sought the glittering effects which we cannot fail to discover in Macaulay's serried sentences-"marshall'd battalions, bright in burnished steel."

Huxley is a man of science with that ingrained desire to be exact and with that abiding abhorrence of any statement not mathematically demonstrable, which are the precious possessions of the men of science and which are only rarely achieved by the men of letters, often betrayed into exaggerated statements by the sound of their sentences, by the color of their words, and by their artistic delight in verbal artifice. "So far as I know myself," he declared in 1891, only four years before his death, "after making due deduction for the ambition of youth and a fiery temper, which ought to (but unfortunately does not) get cooler with age, my sole motive is to get at the truth in all things"; and we may add that his sole motive in writing was to set forth the truth, as he saw it.

In an address on "Universities, Actual and Ideal," which he delivered in 1874 as Lord Rector of the University of Aberdeen, he asserted that in a university the very air the student breathed "should be charged with that enthusiasm for truth, that fanaticism of veracity, which is a greater possession than much learning; a nobler gift than the power of increasing knowledge; by so much greater and nobler than these, as the moral nature of man is greater than the intellectual; for veracity is the heart of morality."