STUDIES IN ENGLISH LITERATURE BEING TYPICAL SELECTIONS OF BRITISH AND AMERICAN Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1880, by HARPER & BROTHERS, In the Office of the Librarian of Congress, at Washington. PREFACE. The IN the prescribed curricula of most high-schools, English literature and rhetoric find an important place. Yet, perhaps, no subjects are less satisfactorily taught. study of English literature is, for the most part, confined to a cram on the personal biography of authors; at the best, it is a reading about literature rather than a reading in literature. The study of rhetoric is, for the most part, confined to the learning of abstract definitions and principles. This is an acquisition certainly not to be undervalued; for there is only a half-truth in Butler's famous aphorism, that "All a rhetorician's rules Teach nothing but to name his tools." Yet assuredly it is a barren knowledge, that of the "rhetorician's rules," unless these are seen and felt as they find spontaneous embodiment in the great creations of the masters of literary art. This volume of masterpieces is designed to occupy a place at the meeting-point of literature and rhetoric— to restore the twain to their natural and fruitful relationship. On the side of literature it is intended as the ac A $4 companiment of any class-book on that subject, furnishing a body of texts to be carefully read in connection with the biographical and critical study of particular authors, as pursued in the class-book. On the side of rhetoric it supplies a working outfit of definitions and principles, thus teaching the pupil to "name his tools;" and, further and more important, it applies the canons of the literary art to the analysis of the texts here presented. To this study I have given the name "Literary Analysis,” as a conveniently elastic designation under which may be brought a great variety of exercises, grammatical and rhetorical, logical and etymological. The Literary Analysis is a new feature (at least I am unacquainted with any class-book of selections in which the kind of work here developed is given); and it is one from which most valuable results are anticipated. For surely such studies as are called for in the present work cannot fail to bring the pupil into close and friendly contact with those mighty minds whose "volumes paramount constitute the literature of our language: so that he will no longer be reading merely about the masters, but reading the masters themselves-ascending with them into the "heaven. of their invention," and feeding his soul on the divine bread of their high imaginings. The choice of authors to be represented by typical selections in this volume has been no easy task, for in the splendid galaxy of our English and American literature are unnumbered stars. They are all fires, and every one doth shine.” In the embarrassment of riches, this principle of selection |