PREFACE. W HEN Ælfred was crowned king of Wessex, it seemed as if the Danes were to blot out not only the English power but the English tongue, and put Danish in the place of English throughout these islands. The same Elfred who made the first Cyclopædia of earlier English song and story saved the English land and folk and speech from Danish thraldom. The English language held its own when, later, Danish kings did rule the land; it showed its irrepressible vitality during three centuries of depression under Norman-French supremacy, and triumphantly reasserted itself in greater flexibility and vigour than before. The area of its currency has grown with the political and commercial sway of the people who speak it. In Alfred's time the Low Dutch dialects called English, and spoken by a few hundred thousand islanders, were unknown outside the island. Queen Elizabeth ruled scarcely three million subjects, many of whom were not of English speech; while to many more in the north and west, who heard it or essayed to read it, Shakespeare's literary London dialect was barely intelligible. And now English, with no essential differences, is the mother-tongue of more than a hundred and twenty millions of men and women, scattered over all the quarters of the planet. Some fifty millions of Britons at home and abroad rule about a fourth of the inhabitants of the globe. In the United States the daughter nation now reckons her seventy-five millions, mainly of British stock, and, with trifling exceptions, all of English speech. To multitudes of the darker-skinned subjects of the British crown, English is only less familiar than their own vernaculars, and English literature a main instrument of education. English is becoming more and more the language of commerce among men of all kindreds. And the writings of English authors, now read and studied by the educated of all races, are an element of culture in every civilised country. For it is not by reason of the vast numbers of those who speak it, or of the other myriads for whom it is a second vernacular, an indispensable lingua franca, that English claims. rank amongst languages, but in virtue of the thoughts that breathe and burn in English words. English literature is in the fullest sense of the term a great literature; the English pen has been mightier than the English sword or the English steam-engine. Is it the irony of history that in the nation of shopkeepers one singer after another should be found endowed with a double portion of the spirit of poesy? And if it be saidas often it is said that we are the most materialistic nation on the face of the earth, we have a cloud of witnesses to the contrary : our divines, our sages, our poets, our storytellers, our men of science, our historians, have uttered in our tongue words which the world. will not willingly let die. It is no dream indeed that the other sheaves have made obeisance to our sheaf; Shakespeare is not the only Englishman who has won the willing homage of the world. In that vast English library which has been steadily growing for fourteen hundred years, there is happily much that concerns us not, much that is no part of our national inheritance. There are more than enough of books that are no books, of literature that does not deserve the name, of poems that are not poetry, of prose which is a mere waste of weary words. Even so, of English books new and old that it is worth our while to know, or know about, there are many more than would suffice for a lifetime of hard reading. British publications multiply by thousands in a year, and American volumes at an almost equal rate. The flood, constantly swelling, threatens to engulf even the strongest swimmer. Year by year the need becomes greater for an approved mentor, a comprehensive guide; and such a Vademecum Dr Robert Chambers devised and called, not unjustly, a CYCLOPÆDIA OF ENGLISH LITERATURE, the first of its kind in Britain. On a plan greatly more comprehensive than the time-honoured Elegant Extracts of Vicesimus Knox, this Cyclopædia of English Literature like all the old cyclopædias systematic and not alphabetic, and following the chronological order as obviously the only practicable one-aimed to give a conspectus of our literature by a series of extracts from the more memorable authors set in a biographical and critical history of the literature itself. Dr Chambers laid the plan in 1841, and for realising it secured the help of his friend Dr Robert Carruthers of Inverness. The outcome of their joint labours, which began to appear before the close of 1842, was completed in two volumes in 1844, and was brought down to date and reprinted in 1858. It was revised and extended under the charge of Dr Carruthers in 1876; and a fourth reissue, again incorporating new matter, took place a dozen years later. But a keener interest in our older literature and a fuller knowledge of it, new facts, new theories, and new light on a thousand points, the increasing supply of new materials for selection, the continued activity of accepted authors, the rise of new and brilliant stars, and all that is implied in the unabated continuity of the literary life of the nation, have rendered necessary a much more thorough-going revision and reconstruction; a completely new edition is imperatively demanded. 'Tis sixty years since-just sixty years since Dr Chambers began work on the first edition. Coleridge had then been dead for half-a-dozen years, but Southey was still laureate and Wordsworth was in vigorous health. Tennyson had not yet published those two volumes that gave him a secure place amongst English poets. John Ruskin, Charles Kingsley, and Matthew Arnold were still at Oxford, and William Morris was a schoolboy. Marian Evans, at Griff, had as yet no literary ambitions, and George Meredith had not sent his first contribution to Chambers's Journal. Macaulay was M.P. for Edinburgh, but had not published his Lays or begun his History. The reputation Carlyle had made by the French Revolution was but five years old, Thackeray's first volume was lately published, and Dickens had issued only a very few of the long series of his stories. Darwin had not yet put on paper the first rough sketch of his evolution theory, and Huxley was a young medical student. Emerson was hardly known in England; Longfellow and Lowell had each published but one volume of original verse; and 'The Autocrat of the BreakfastTable' had made but a few desultory efforts in literature. Howells was an infant, and Henry James was not yet born. A vast proportion of what gives character to modern letters had not yet been written or thought out. Upper and Lower Canada had just been united, the New Zealand Company had only begun to plant the colony, and the first great rush of free settlers had not yet given promise of the future Commonwealth of Australia. Sixty years after Dr Chambers and Dr Carruthers addressed themselves to their task, we stand in a new century, and, as regards literature, in a new world. In the new edition, of which the first volume now appears, the essential plan has been retained. The aim has been to carry that plan out even more perfectly, and to make the new work more fully representative of our present and past literary history at the commencement of the Twentieth Century than the first edition was for the middle of the Nineteenth. Neither then nor now has a pedantic attempt been made to draw a hard-and-fast line between what is by right and what is not a part of pure or national literature, and to include only what wholly approves itself before the strictest canons of the higher criticism of the day. The selection was made on a more catholic, comprehensive, and historical plan: nobody being excluded whom the general consensus of the ages has adjudged worthy of remembrance. In literature more than in most things human die Weltgeschichte ist das Weltgericht, history is the supreme and final judge; in the end it is the best books that live. Our enterprise has a quite definite aim, and from the nature of the case its scope is limited severely limited by the boundlessness of the materials with which it deals. It is not, and is not meant to be, an anthology of the perfect models of our prose and verse, a chrestomathy of purple patches, a collection of elegant extracts. The acknowledged gem should be there, if the man is mainly known by some one noble passage, one sonnet, one song, one aphorism or sententious saying; but something there should be, as a rule, to illustrate his average achievement, the standard by which he may fairly be judged. Nor does the work profess to be a marrow of our literature, or to give the spirit and quintessence of the several authors; still less does it aim to Johnson will no longer have a hundred and thirty pages intercalated between the sections devoted to him, nor Scott more than two hundred pages; each author is presented continuously and once for all. Reference is further facilitated by improved typography. render its readers independent of the authors The essential plan of the original Cyclopædia of English Literature, approved by generations of diligent readers and the testimonies of many who have themselves earned the best right to testify, has been adhered to and developed. The extension from two to three volumes of like size has made room for the much-required addition of new materials in all sections of the work. Old English literature, formerly discussed in three pages, now occupies more than ten times the space; Middle English has no longer only some twenty pages allotted to it, but ninety. In the first volume alone over fifty authors not named or hardly named in the older issues are treated-shortly, but it is hoped fairly-and illustrated by selections from their works: Roper and Cranmer, Sir Thomas North and Philemon Holland, Florio and Zachary Boyd, Gervase Markham and Kenelm Digby, William Prynne and Samuel Rutherford. Thomas Campion, who had been forgotten by the world, is now in his rightful place; Aubrey, formerly dismissed in a sentence or two, is now represented by a series of characteristic paragraphs. And as it is profitable not merely for the relief of contrast but for our insight into progress and decadence to glance at the handiwork of the eccentric, the hopelessly mediocre, and even those justly or unjustly condemned to the lower circles of literary lost souls, the Ogilbys and the Flecknoes, the Stanyhursts and the Drunken Barnabys, Coryate's Crudities and Boorde's Peregrinations, are treated as having their part in our literary history. Additions and changes of all kinds are innumerable. The inconvenient arrangement by which an author was dealt with as poet, dramatist, novelist, essayist, and historian in separate sections of the work has been departed from. The historical surveys prefixed to the several sections are entirely new, and so are a large proportion of the critical and biographical articles; a larger number have been almost entirely rewritten; no single article remains as it was, historical facts having been verified and corrected, and critical judgments carefully reconsidered. In very many cases the illustrative extracts are all different from those formerly given; where the passages in the old issue seemed well suited for the purpose in hand, they have been scrupulously verified, and, in the case of the more interesting authors, as a rule extended and added to. There has been a constant effort to secure passages interesting in themselves, and least likely to suffer through separation from their context. Appropriating a famous classification, we trust there may in our three volumes be found no passages that are not for some reason worth reading at least once, few that are worth reading once but once only, far more that are worth at least two or three readings in a lifetime, and very many that are worth reading again and again for ever. The work of the editorial staff has been much more largely supplemented than formerly by contributions or series of contributions from the admirably competent pens of writers of approved authority, as from Dr Stopford Brooke, Professor Bradley, Professor Hume Brown, Mr A. H. Bullen, Mr Austin Dobson, Dr Samuel R. Gardiner, Mr Gosse, Professor W. P. Ker, Mr Lang, Dr T. S. Law, Mr Sidney Lee, Mr A. W. Pollard, Professor Saintsbury, Mr Gregory Smith, Dr William Wallace, and others whose names will be found appended to their articles. American authors will, in the second and third volumes, contribute articles on American men of letters and their works. In this first volume old English literature as a whole and all the writers who used to be called Anglo-Saxon-Cadmon, Bæda, Ælfred, and the rest-are dealt with by Dr Stopford Brooke. Mr A. W. Pollard has charged himself with Middle English and almost all the writers down to Reformation times-Layamon, the Ormulum, the Chronicles and Romances, Piers Plowman, Chaucer and his successors, Wyclif, Malory and the Morte d'Arthur, the Miracle-Plays, Heywood, Udall, Wyatt and Surrey. There are essays from the pen of Mr Gosse on the Elizabethan and Jacobean literature, on the Anthologies, on the Elizabethan Song-Writers, on the Elizabethan SonnetCycles; as also on Sir Philip Sidney the poet, Spenser, Webster, Ford, and Shirley. Mr Gosse has also revised, as amended and retained from the old edition, the articles on Ben Jonson, Donne, Wither, Carew, Herrick, Lovelace, Suckling, Crashaw, Vaughan, D'Avenant, and Cowley. Shakespeare is by Mr Sidney Lee. To Dr Samuel Rawson Gardiner we owe the discussion of the Puritan movement. Mr A. H. Bullen has described for us the Restoration literature, and has revised Beaumont and Fletcher, Middleton, Marston, and Massinger. Professor Saintsbury's contribution to the first volume is on Dryden. Professor Hume Brown has written on James I., Knox, and Buchanan; Mr George Neilson on Huchown; and Dr T. S. Law on the Scots Wyclifite Testament and Archbishop Hamilton's Catechism. Some eminent men of our own time-among them the late Mr Blackmore-have assisted in choosing the passages by which they were content to be represented. Others, like Mr Meredith and Mr Hardy, have read a proof of our little lives of them, and given them an autobiographical sanction. The representatives of some great writers have both revised the articles and approved the selections made; Lord Tennyson and Mr Barrett Browning have laid us under this double obligation. To far more than can here be named we are deeply and gratefully indebted. Very many of the articles show the accurate scholarship, the keen insight, the incisive style, of Mr Francis Hindes Groome, a trusty colleague whose invaluable help has unhappily been withdrawn by illness. The editor has rewritten a large number of articles, but is specially responsible for most of those on men who had no place in the former issues, and for the major part of the articles, new or revised, on Scottish literature. Every article has been carefully read in proof by the editor and at least one other fellowworker. The carefully selected fac-similes and portraits a conspicuous and not unimportant feature of this edition-have all been executed expressly for this work by Messrs Walker & Boutall (now Messrs Walker & Cockerell). The portraits, nearly three hundred in number, have been reproduced from the most authentic available likenesses in the National Portrait Gallery, and other public and private collections. To the directors of the National Portrait Gallery and to the Palæographical Society especially our thanks are due for permission to reproduce portraits and facsimiles. And all who write or revise biographical articles must constantly and gratefully refer to the Dictionary of National Biography. Our language and our literature are the only property of our large and scattered family in which all its members share equally. More than any other single influence, perhaps, our general acceptance as standard literature of a certain series of books in the common language has tended to make our very mixed race one in temper, sympathy, aspiration: Norman, Iberian, Celt, are we, but all of us Angles in speech, the instrument of thought, the vehicle of our feelings. Queen Elizabeth's statesmen and soldiers and sailors had given England a new place in the councils of Europe, the Elizabethan poets had lent a new glory to the Tudor court and capital, English literature had reached its zenith, ere Scotsmen, by increasingly general consent, gave up the old Anglian tongue of the northern lowlands-Anglian, and so even more strictly English than the southron speech--for the tongue of Bacon and Shakespeare, of Hooker and Raleigh, and accepted the English Bible at once as their literary standard and their rule of life. Scotsmen have since contributed their quota to the stream of English literature, only the more truly English from the reinclusion of the Anglian northerners. The Celtic tongue of the Highlands has steadily given way before book-English. And the use of this common tongue has educated Highlander and Lowlander into one people, has remoulded Scotsman and Englishman into brothers-german, as no warfare had done, as neither Church nor constitution had made possible, as no legislation could ever accomplish. At no time has English thought been more thoroughly English in spirit and temper than since the gathering in of the outlying sheep into the fold. Till towards the end of the seventeenth century, Scottish authors, as using a different idiom, are dealt with in separate sections-a separation not needed in the case of Welshmen and Irishmen (see page 831); and after the Revolution, authors of Scottish birth, save those writing in dialect, are fully naturalised in the British republic of letters. The Irish have no monopoly of Celtic blood, and are not even mainly Celtic in origin: Gaelic reached Erin with the first Celtic invaders from Britannia; so that even their Celtic tongue is a bond with the greater British island. Much more the tongue that has, save in the remoter districts, superseded it. However much Irish scholars may cherish the Gaelic, it is only as a secondary language, a literary luxury, a patriotic heirloom; spiritually, Irishmen have learnt incomparably more from the great body of English writers than from the ancient Irish bards or story-tellers. Happily there is no risk of Irishmen becoming altogether, or even almost, as Englishmen are; but in their common literary inheritance, in a literature to which they contribute their fair proportion, there is security for a modus vivendi not yet fully realised, there is a power working on both sides towards mutual understanding and sympathy. Even now Irishmen glory in the triumphs of their countrymen whether by race or birth, and hardly even an irreconcilable would seriously demand a home-rule in literature that should make Ussher and Berkeley, Burke and Goldsmith, Swift and Sheridan, aliens on Irish soil. Neither Virginian colonists nor Pilgrim Fathers were keenly interested in literature as such. It was the English temper that led them into the wilderness; and it was the same spirit as had again and again moved their forefathers in the past of English history that led them finally to repudiate the English king and government. But they had no thought of renouncing any essential of their English birthright; Puritan or Cavalier, they clung to the tradition which, over seas as in the mother-land, in literature as in life, makes for freedom, fair play, sanity, reserve, commonsense, steadiness, breadth, depth, strength, and individuality. However far we may fall short of our ideals, we have essentially the same standards of uprightness, honour, dignity, the same delight in calm, open-eyed rashness.' With them as with us, the absence of universally binding standards and models makes the attainment of artistic style more difficult; independence tends to lawlessness; what is wanting in grace and polish has to be atoned for by vigour, simplicity, originality, and the free-play of imagination; and substance must supply the lack of academic or classical form. They too, like us, have their burden of uninspired pseudo-philosophy, feeble fiction, lamentable comicalities. Blood is thicker than water, common lineage is more than geographical collocation or political constitution; of still more account for the true federation of peoples are intellectual and spiritual sympathies, common aspirations, like principles. Erelong American writers attained a distinctive note, ever most welcome in literature. But this is a development from within, not an approximation to foreign models. American humour is different from English humour, but it is vastly more akin to English humour than to any French or Spanish or German type. Chaucer and Spenser, Shakespeare and Bacon, Raleigh and Ben Jonson, are theirs by inheritance as much as they are ours; the migration across seas did not make Dryden or Pope, Addison or Steele, Johnson or Gibbon, alien to them; and the change of government at the close of the eighteenth century and the beginnings of their own national literature did nothing to hinder the full appreciation and loving study of Wordsworth and Coleridge, Shelley and Scott. Sartor Resartus first attained to book form in Massachusetts; and even yet some British authors find in America their most appreciative audience. As the English tradition has remained dominant in the constitution of the nation and the life of the people, our kindred both by lineage and language, so American literature has remained an offshoot, a true branch of English literature. work it has from the beginning been treated as an integral and important part of the literature of Greater Britain. We do not look on Longfellow or Poe as foreigners, or read the histories of Prescott, Motley, and Parkman as if written by strangers. In this What holds of the United States is still more obviously true of the British dominions beyond seas; in Canada, South Africa, Australasia, our kith and kin have remained true to us and to themselves, and their literature is but a part of ours. Amongst them as in the United States we gladly recognise a growing individuality, a flavour racy of the soil; but the newest growths are but vigorous shoots from the English stem. Many of our most typically English writers, though they have chosen to remain Englishmen in the stricter sense, were not born within our four seas, but in farther Britain or the remoter |