1. THE literature of a people tells its life. History records its deeds; but literature brings to us, yet warm with their first heat, the appetites and passions, the keen intellectual debate, the higher promptings of the soul, whose blended energies produced the substance of the record. We see some part of a man's outward life, and guess his character, but do not know it as we should if we heard also the debate within, loud under outward silence, and could be spectators of each conflict for which lists are set within the soul. Such witnesses we are, through English literature, of the life of the English-speaking race. Let us not begin the study with a dull belief that it is but a bewilderment of names, dates, and short summaries of onventional opinion, which must be learned by rote. As soon s we can feel that we belong to a free people with a noble past, let us begin to learn through what endeavors and to what end it is free. Liberty as an abstraction is not worth a song. It is precious only for that which it enables us to be and do.
et us bring our hearts, then, to the study which we here begin, and seek through it accord with that true soul of our country by which we may be encouraged to maintain in our own day the best work of our forefathers.
The literature of England has for its most distinctive mark the religious sense of duty. It represents a people striving through successive generations to find out the right, and do it, to root out the wrong, and labor ever onward for the love of God. If this be really the strong spirit of her people, to show