small annual subscription, I could have access to all its treasures. This little library would be nothing now. It had much in it that was trashy then; but somebody, either from high appreciation, or want of any, had made it a present of a whole collection of valuable historical works. These were old, dusty, and did not seem to be at all in demand, and so were always ready at my call.

My first book from this little shop was Plutarch's Lives of all the celebrated men of Greece and Rome, in several large volumes. It was an exceedingly fortunate selection. I know not how I came to make it, but I have read nothing since that delighted or profited me more. It gave me a decided and a strong taste for biographical and historical studies. Within the two following years, I read the whole of Rollin's great history of the ancient world, the history of Greece and Rome, histories of the various countries of Europe, and biographies of their great men; Hume and Smollet's History of England and America, Robertson's Charles V., Johnson's lives of the poets, and, in fact, almost all the standard historical works of that period. What a world was here to be suddenly opened to a youth who had known only the poverty and obscurity of a little New England country town!

To the question how I found time for so much reading in an employment that required so much daily labor and care, I answer, I became so interested in what I read, it took me so completely out of the world in which I had been living, that I found rest in a change rather than a suspension of activity. I read late into the nights. I read on Sundays. I read whenever and wherever I could find or make opportunities.

As overseer it would not do for me to be seen reading before others in factory hours. So I always kept my books hidden in the day-time, in the cotton-room, and several times each day, when all was going well, and my presence was not needed, I disappeared, ran up stairs, got behind the bales of cotton, pulled out my book, and was soon on the banks of the Ganges or the Nile, among the isles of Greece, at Rome, Constantinople or Moscow, in London, Paris, Spain, or with

Columbus in pursuit of new worlds. Many times have I gone down to tighten loose belting, clear the cards of cotton seeds, increase or diminish the speed of the machinery, or settle some dispute that had arisen among the operatives, and then returned to the old attic to hold communion with Plato or Socrates; to Demosthenes declaiming in Athens, or Cicero before the Roman Senate; to follow Alexander or Cæsar in their long victorious marches, or see them returning with kings and queens and their long captive trains, under splendid triumphant arches, amid excited, thronging, shouting multitudes that had come out to meet them.

Oh, how charming and refreshing were those hours snatched from labor, and given to such scenes and companions, behind those old cotton bales! Thanks, Oh, how many thanks, are due for our many-sided nature, through which we are able to get so many lives into one! Solomon says, "Stolen pleasures are sweet." But I can say from experience that stolen knowledge is sweeter, and far more profitable.

Another reason why I accomplished so much in those two years was, that my life was concentrated, not frittered away in social excitements or frivolous amusements, as the young life of the present so generally is. In this I do not take any credit to myself. My choice was "that or nothing." It was all work and no play that used to make so many dull boys. It is now all play and no work that makes so many men toys. There was little outside of my daily duties to interest me in any way. The few persons with whom I had any intercourse, the dull little town in which I lived, all my surroundings were of the humblest and most uninspiring character. So I was driven to my books for all my means of excitement and progress. I lived alone, and as the great problems of existence, of time and eternity presented themselves to my mind, I had to meet and solve them for myself in my own way. Of that way all may learn who care to go on with me in the recital of other struggles, external and internal.

R.

IO

TAINE'S HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERA

TURE.

BY A. D. MAYO.

FEW American men of forty-five, who read new books at twenty, can forget the sensation produced by the first republication of Macaulay's miscellaneous essays, in several volumes, in this country. It was the practical introduction to the great reading public in America of the brilliant papers hitherto known only to the comparatively small class in Great Britain who read the reviews and magazines a quarter of a century ago. Dr. Bellows startled the poet Wordsworth, in his old age, by telling him that his poems were more widely read and better appreciated in America than in England. This can be truly said of the great body of criticism, that has been gathered from the British periodical literature of the last thirty years and poured in a never-failing stream upon the reading public this side the water. Macaulay, Jeffry, Wilson, Hazlitt, Lamb, Coleredge, DeQuincy, Carlyle, Ruskin, Matthew Arnold, Leigh Hunt, volume after volume, have been devoured by the college students and multitudes of young people in all walks of life. In American criticism, Whipple, Emerson, Lowell, White, Hudson, and others, have furnished estimates of English Literature as comprehensive and delicate as the age has produced. A charming new volume could be gathered from a series of articles on the modern English poets and novelists which appeared in the "National Review," a quarterly published for several years in London, now suspended. In all the higher qualities of criticism, this series of articles will bear comparison with the best of the school of Coleredge and DeQuincy.

The fact is coming to be understood that in the region of Poetry, Romance (which is the drama of the present day), and Criticism, the present century has been not only the richest in the English language, but one of the most remarkable in the history of literature. And it is equally true that

this great body of writers, from Scott to Longfellow, has found, and is still finding, its largest and most appreciative public this side the water. The Literati of Great Britain is still a class as exclusive as the nobility, or the priesthood of the Church of England. The great interests of the British people go on with astonishing unconcern in regard to its existence. If the system of cheap publication is increasing the number of English readers, there is rarely found in any large class abroad that susceptibility to new ideas, readiness to respond to broad and profound views of life, and eagerness to follow every subject into new and untried realms, that characterizes the American reading public. Doubtless in the capacity for massive and accurate scholarship, and the power of sustained production, the British mind yet vastly surpasses the American. These are the fruits of a scholastic culture and a literary caste enduring for generations. But already the popular education and cosmopolitan life of our country have developed a reading public better able to profit by and do justice to all European literatures than any that now exists.

It is not surprising, therefore, that the translations of the brilliant French critic in art and literature, H. A. Taine, have been widely read, and that his last ample book, on English Literature, has overcome the popular prejudice against two-volumed essays, and is greedily devoured everywhere. Indeed, since the advent of Macaulay, nothing so brilliant, and so on the popular key of intelligent appreciation of English literature has appeared in our language. Without the blending of fine literary discrimination and profound religious instinct that characterizes Madame de Stael, less apt to catch the delicate shades that discriminate superior minds than St. Bernie, Taine unites in the most remarkable degree the French vivacity and habit of swift generalization with a shrewdness and common sense rarely found in a continental writer. The glory of the best English criticism (and in the criticisms of poetic literature nothing better than that of the school of Coleredge has ever been seen) is its mingling of profound insight, fine discrimination and practical

knowledge of human nature. DeQuincy, Wilson, Whipple, Hazlitt, interpret Literature by its relations to the whole of human nature as it actually exists in living men. The vice of German criticism is the same as the French; in different regions of life, both estimate books according to their agreement with preconceived systems of nature and man, and string the periods of literature like glittering beads on a golden thread of theory-alas! that sometimes the thread should not be golden, but rather a very poor tow-string of a

conceit about the eternal realities of existence.

Taine would not be a Frenchman, unless he introduced his brilliant History with a decisive philosophy of Universal Man. He represents, though in a generous and rather inconsistent way, that growing school of thinkers who empty man of original, free, spiritual existence, and substitute the influence of various fatalistic forces in his creation. Man is morally what he is made by " race, circumstance, and epoch." Religion is "a phenomenon of imagination and credulity." Man grows a temporary crop of philosophies, literatures, faiths, civilizations, according to his natural limitations; indeed, is himself but a dancing ball, kept aloft by the play of a fountain and the pressure of the surrounding atmosphere. The advantages of this system of " man in six easy lessons is that it is wonderfully clear and compact, and can be learned by any clever sophomore. We remember a theological student who wrote to us for "one book of moderate size which would give all that mental and moral philosophy amounted to," — evidently not being of that muscular type of Christian that could carry off a small theological library in his side pockets. His longing for a simple theory that accounts for all things is met by the fatalistic theory that man is the product of a few forces that can be scientifically measured. The disadvantage of this system is, that it omits in its calculation what the human race has always called man ; that mysterious indestructible spirit, by which he is always found outside any philosophy in which he was ever imprisoned, which assimilates all circumstances to character, and in every critical moment of his individual or social existence