comedy were picked out from the rest as pre-eminently worthy to be read; seven of the later Alexandrian dramatists were allowed to form a band of Epigoni, below the great but among the good; twenty-four of Menander's comedies were selected as eminently worthy of transcription, and hence survived for the perusal of Photius after a thousand years. Of the canon of Scripture, Old and New, and the weighty controversies connected with it, it is needless to speak. In the modern literature the principle of the canon is less easy of application, on account of the difficulty of establishing an absolute criterion of style, and also of its greater complexity and variety. The supreme perfection of prose style, the felicitous expression to which nothing can be added and from which nothing can be taken away, has, perhaps, hardly ever been attained but by those authors of the first rank with whom the modern world has least concern. Rousseau may be an exception, but to canonise Bossuet will not be to find him readers, and who is to discriminate the temporary from the permanent in the enormous production of Voltaire? We should, moreover, be confronted by the want of any standard of excellence universally agreed upon. Athens or Alexandria could prescribe the laws of taste to obedient antiquity, but Pascal's writ does not run in Britain, or Carlyle's in France. The age of literary canons, in the sense of select authors prescribed for imitation, is gone by, and apart from individual examples and the admonitions which we occasionally receive from men of taste sensitive to the literary failings of their times, such as Matthew Arnold, the best way to maintain a high standard of authorship is the method of anthology, of a selection from those pieces which have actually striven and prevailed in the great literary struggle for existence, and thus practically demonstrated the qualities that keep a writer's name green.

Two systems have been followed in the confection of anthologies, each of which has its advantages. The first, especially recommendable for poetical anthologies, is the system of fastidious severity, which can only be carried out by a compiler of exquisite taste and consummate judgment. Such was the system on which Meleager,

the first Greek anthologist, framed his collection, which, so far as can be determined in the mutilated condition in which it has reached our times, did not contain a single piece unacceptable on poetical grounds Such was also the case with the first series of the late Mr. Palgrave's "Golden Treasury," which we are able to judge with more exactness than Meleager's, knowing not only what Mr. Palgrave admitted, but what he excluded. The same high standard, however, is incapable of application to selections of mixed verse and prose, since modern prose rarely attains the flawless perfection of much modern verse, nor, growing out of and leading up to other passages, can it usually possess the symmetrical unity of a complete poem. Another principle may here be invoked, and the selection may in a manner be entrusted to the public suffrage, those pieces being especially chosen which are known to have appealed with special force to the general heart and conscience. Such is the case with the selections which these remarks accompany. The great majority are here by universal suffrage, and the great extent of the collection, unparalleled in any similar undertaking, allows the general estimate to be reflected with a precision unattainable in an attempt to present "infinite riches in little room." The endeavour to indicate public feeling by a few favourite pieces would be like carrying a sample brick as a representative of a great city; it is otherwise where there is room for hundreds of such objects of general approval. If this character of echo of vox populi, vox Dei does not seem equally merited by all departments of this colossal gathering, the objector may reflect that the favourite literature of educated persons is not, like a plane surface, spread out everywhere and equally visible in every part, but, like the soil itself, a succession of strata through which the explorer must drive his shaft, and that the occurrence of Plato, for example, in the uppermost stratum, is a good reason for not expecting him lower down; that the lower strata have their indigenous products too; and that the business of a collection formed on this principle is to exhibit not one stratum but all, so long as all deserve the name of literature. This is assuredly the case; various as are the degrees of culture and the modifications of

taste here represented, not much will be found that does not incontestably belong to the world of literature, as distinguished from the world of bookmaking. While such a collection is especially profitable as a mirror of the nation's mental activity, and an echo of the general verdict, it might well have impressed an intelligent foreigner by the vigour, affluence, and variety of the Anglo-American intellect, and the splendour of the gifts bestowed upon the finer spirits of the mother country and her daughters, whether of Teutonic or of Celtic stock.

The large proportion allotted in this anthology to American literature is not without significance at the present crisis in the history of our race. We in Britain have learned to acknowledge a Greater Britain, greater actually in extent, potentially in worldwide importance, than our own. So frankly has the admission been made that the phrase recording it has become a household word, as famous and universally accepted as John Bull. But we are now beginning to see that the phrase cannot be limited to our colonial dependencies. Let any one ask himself the question: Supposing that Australia, for instance, were to assert political independence of Great Britain, would she therefore be excluded from Greater Britain? Assuredly not; for one tie that would have been snapped, twenty would remain-kinship, language, literature, religion, institutions substantially identical, commercial and social intercourse-after a short interval at most, the same affection as of old. But if this is true of the new colony, it must be equally true of the old. The rupture of political connections and the change of political institutions have made no breach between England and America. In reading the specimens of American literature in this collection we are at once aware that we are reading our own. They do not differ from us as do the specimens of the literature of France or Germany. They are racy of the soil, of course, and that soil is not the soil of England, but neither is it the soil of Scotland or Ireland. It is not two great literatures regarding each other across the Atlantic, but one colossal literature bestriding that vast

ocean.

What hope and encouragement this fact affords it is need

less to say, both as a revelation of the indefinite possibilities of the development of our literature in the future, and as an assurance of the mutual understanding of the two moieties of this great Englishspeaking nation which present circumstances do, and future circumstances will, so urgently require. A virtual identity of literary expression and literary sentiment which has grown up by the force of circumstances without encouragement, sometimes with discouragement, from statesmen and organs of public opinion, clearly points to affinities too deep to be unsettled by transitory circumstances, and which will, indeed, impress such circumstances into its service.

Apart from the great actual merits of American writers, the successful transplantation of English literature to the United States and "Greater Britain" is almost the most important event that has ever befallen it, indefinitely extending the chances of the one thing absolutely essential to its existence. There is, after all, no glory of British literature equal to that which is all but unique with it-its continuity. Shelley, who was not only a great poet but a great intellect, notes this when he says

Poesy's unfailing river

Which through Albion winds for ever.

This is the simple fact, save for the dull period of the fifteenth century, when literature all over Europe was mainly restricted to commentary and compilation, England has never wanted a successor to Chaucer, and the least superficially attractive ages of her literature have frequently produced the works of most sterling value. The same may be said of French literature as regards prose, not as regards poetry, which, unless versified logic and rhetoric be poetry, slept in France for two hundred and fifty years. Elsewhere, in Italy, Germany, Spain, Portugal, Greece, we everywhere behold the same phenomena of epochs of extreme brilliancy followed by long periods of silence or of the productiveness of perverted taste. England alone is always active to good purpose, and if some eras of her literary history are less exemplary than others, there is not one with which the nation or the world could

dispense. The prospect of her continued activity is obviously brightened by the new Englands she has created in the regions of the newly-discovered world, whether American, African, or Australian, most favourable to intellectual as well as to physical activity. Like the banyan tree, she has sent down shoots rooted in the earth, any of which may rival the massiveness and surpass the durability of the parent. Something like this has happened of old, when Roman literature, effete at home, was long preserved and cultivated by Spaniards, Gauls, Africans, and Egyptians, who were either descended from Roman colonists, or had imbibed the spirit of Latin letters. The barbarian deluge, however, overwhelmed the colonies and dependencies as well as the mother country—a catastrophe little likely to befall the widely-disseminated lands where English is the language of letters and of life. American and colonial literature, therefore, deserve profound attention from Britain, as the certain perpetuators of her own, as, even in their present undeveloped condition, redeeming this from the reproach of insularity, and as indefinitely enlarging its prospects both of permanence and of influence upon mankind. It would be rash to predict that the next English-speaking genius of the first rank will be born in America or Australia, but it would be equally rash to predict that he will not.

In one of the charming letters which Emerson wrote to Carlyle the philosopher is found telling his friend of his vain but strenuous endeavour to get through the whole of Goethe's work. "Thirtyfive I have read," he writes blithely, "but compass the other thirtyfive I cannot." Seventy volumes in all from one man! Little wonder that the Concord sage could find time for perhaps only twice as many as the present day finds time to remember.

For a moment this thought may seem discouraging, and derogatory to modern literature, especially when we consider the care taken to preserve, and the pains spent in interpreting, every scrap that has come down to us from antiquity. But this is not really the case, for what is the larger part of antique literature itself but a co-operative alliance for the performance of tasks too