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But from these general considerations it is time to come to the particular question which we proposed to treat: What English authors shall we read? Is Byron lo be included in the number and what place shall he occup’f?

Supposing our pupils have acquired a sufficient knowledge of the language to read any author without too much difficulty as to style and expression: what authors and what works shall. we read for the sake of the ideas that are embodied in them and the artistic perfection of the literary form?

In the first instance, as the study of English literature is to be a complement and, in a certain sense, a means of control to what our pupils may else have learned of modern civi- lisation, we should give the preference to that which is most particularly English, most cha- racteristic of the peculiar genius and idiosyncrasy of that people. We do not mean English oddities and whimsicalities, which would give a caricature rather than a portrait; but that which constitutes the proper task and part of the English among all other nations in the com- mon work of modern civilisation, those works by which they have chiefly exercised an influence abroad and in which they still appear most like themselves, an ethnographical and political individual. English history, from the time of the blending together of the Norman and the Saxon elements, shows an unbroken continuity of evolution, without any real revolution,(What they call their revolution does not deserve the name) of which no other modern nation offers an example.„The alteration(in our constitution),“ says Macaulay,„has been great. Yet there never was a moment at which the chief part of what existed was not old.“ Those ancient in- stitutions and forms of public life: parliament, trial by jury, selfgovernment in shire and borough, which in other countries have been petrified by stagnation or swallowed up by revolution, Eng- land has preserved and kept alive through all the centuries by continually modifying and adapting them to the altered circumstances and conditions of existence, and for the last hundred years they have been the pattern and model for reform and regeneration everywhere.

Just as Juda received from Providence a special mission in religion, Greece in arts, Rome in Jurisprudence, so to England seems to have been assigned the task of elaborating a political system adaptable to great communities of free men, such as never existed in antiquity, proper to conciliate order with liberty, authority with individual indepen dence, tradition and precedent with progress and reform.

Thus English historians, and in general those writers who give us a lively picture of the political and social state of the country at any given period, of its gradual transformation and the struggles that brought it about, seem to deserve our particular attention and a good place in the program of our English readings. They will generally require a good deal of ex- planation, and this, far from being a drawback, the more recommends them for the upper