splendid luxury. In the year 641 A. D. the Arabians were at the lowest point of barbarism; yet in hardly more than a century the passionate devotion to culture began which was to endure five hundred years. Seats of education and study sprang up on all sides, the novel science of mathematics was prodigiously advanced, and under Haroun al Raschid and his still more glorious son Al Mamoun, the Golden Age of art and scholarship set in. From the Ninth century to the Sixteenth, no other nation could compare with the Arabians in the extent and value of their intellectual accomplishments. But thereafter, their fall was as rapid as their rise had been, and to-day they are once more the rude barbarians that they were more than a thousand years ago.

Meanwhile, in France and Italy, a renewal of literary activity had commenced, almost simultaneously with the religious enthusiam of the crusades. The Provençal poets, or Troubadours, created a new form of love poetry, using the Langue-d'oc which had been developed out of the ruins of the Latin. Dante, Petrarch and Boccaccio made the Italian tongue secure in immortal poems and tales. In England Chaucer, with his picturesque poems, terminated the period of Anglo-Saxon literature, and his successors ushered in the famous era of Elizabeth. In the Spanish peninsula, that part of the inhabitants which had resisted Moorish domination began in the Eleventh century to drive the invaders from their soil, and with the poetical romance of "The Cid," about 1200 A. D., established the language and genius of Castile. Portugal entered the field somewhat later. The Dutch produced a version of "Reynard the Fox" about 1250; and the literary activity of the Finns and Slavs had its origin in the same or the immediately succeeding ages. In the North, the Scandina vian bards had already produced the Fddas and Sagas, works of a truly national flavor, free from either Latin or Arabian influence, and rich with the evidences of a sombre and heroic imagination. Germany is to be credited with a Gothic version of the Bible, dating from the Fourth century; but the oldest extant product of native growth is the wonderful Niebelungen Lied in the Twelfth; since that time the stream of her literature has proceeded, with occasional interruption, down to the present day.

But of literature since the English Elizabethan period nothing will be specified in this outline. In our volumes will be found examples of its most characteristic and masterly achievements. It only remains to observe in this place that literature, in the finer sense of the term, is not to be confounded with the

mere contents of books. Anybody may write a book, but few in any age can write literature. Many definitions of the quality which makes a piece of writing literature have been attempted, but none of them are quite exhaustive. Authors who survive are not always those who announce great ideas. Neither, on the other hand, will the skilful saying of nothing avail. The secret lies in a subtle touch, a sympathetic temperament, an art to shape and to select. Again, the best literature produces the impression that it might have been written by one of our own epoch: it is modern-contemporary. In its most imaginative flights it keeps close to humanity. It seems to belong to us, and enlists our personal affection. Finally, no doubt, it involves a nameless felicity in the use of words, in the mode of presentation. There is in the immortal writers a native taste and tact which cannot be taught or analyzed.

In the five thousand pages, more or less, of these volumes will be found ample material for forming a sound literary judgment. Not all the best could be given, and sometimes it has been necessary to choose the most characteristic instead of the most attractive. But the reader who studies this work, and follows out the lines of reading which it indicates, will indefinitely augment his pleasures and widen his resources. Good books are the voice of the best men of this world, communicating their choicest thoughts. Never intrusive, always helpful, stimulating or entertaining, they bring the ends of the earth together, harmonize the ages, and cement the brotherhood of mankind.

a man.

THE moral character of a man eminent in letters, or in the fine arts, is treated-often by contemporaries-almost always by posterity-with extraordinary tenderness. The world derives pleasure and advantage from the performances of such The number of those who suffer by his personal vices is small, even in his own time, when compared with the number of those to whom his talents are a source of gratification. In a few years, all those whom he has injured disappear. But his works remain, and are a source of delight to millions. A great writer is the friend and benefactor of his readers; and they cannot but judge of him under the deluding influence of friendship and gratitude. We all know how unwilling we are to admit the truth of any disgraceful story about a person whose society we like, and from whom we have received favors. Just such is the feeling which a man of liberal education naturally entertains towards the great minds of former ages. The debt which he owes to them is incalculable. They have guided him to truth. They have filled his mind with noble and graceful images. They have stood by him in all vicissitudes-comforters in sorrow, nurses in sickness, companions in solitude. These friendships are exposed to no danger from the occurrences by which other attachments are weakened or dissolved. Time glides by; fortune is inconstant; tempers are soured; bonds which seemed indissoluble are daily sundered by interest, by emulation, or by caprice. But no such cause can affect the silent converse which we hold with the highest of human intellects. That placid intercourse is disturbed by no jealousies or resentments. These are the old friends who are never seen with new faces, who are the same in wealth and in poverty, in glory and in obscurity.-LORD MACAULAY.

F the beginnings of Egypt we know nothing. Geographical research seems to indicate that the Nile did not always occupy its present bed; there was, then, a time when Egypt was a desert, and when the people known to us as Egyptian had their abode further south in the African continent. Yet anthropologists, judging from mummies, statues, and other relics of the race, pronounce it Caucasian. There are some traces of a prehistoric connection with Southern Arabia. Be that as it may, at an epoch now purely conjectural, this ancient people appeared in the narrow and fertile valley to which they gave its name, and began the wonderful career which modern investigation has but partially traced out.

At this date-say seven thousand years ago-we find them already accomplished in art and science, and possessed of certain knowledges to which we as yet are strangers. No more majestic figure than the Sphinx of Gizeh has ever been hewn out of the living rock; and it is the earliest-known monument of man. The so-called Pyramid of Cheops surpasses not only in size, but in scientific construction anything attempted since; and some learned men have attributed to it a prophetic significance, which would lift it wholly above the present scope even of our conceptions. Unless, therefore, we ascribe to the ancient Egyptians a miraculous endowment or inspiration, these monuments must be regarded as the flower of a civilization long antedating their erection.

The Egyptians were a race of builders, and they built with a resolve for permanence which has never since been approached. Upon the walls of their edifices, upon column, plinth and architrave, and throughout the midnight recesses of their excavated tombs, they inscribed their annals. Here, in characters as sharp in outline and as vivid in color as on the day they were engraved and painted, we find the record of their creed, their exploits, their manners and customs. But the key to the ancient writing had been lost, and, until within the last hundred years, the records were inscrutable. In 1799 the "Rosetta Stone" was exhumed, containing identical texts in Greek, demotic and hieroglyphic characters. The Greek was easily read by European scholars, and by its aid the French savant, Champollion, patiently deciphered the mysterious hieroglyphics. The gates which had so long shut in the secrets of the past were thrown wide, and the adamantine lips of the Sphinx were parted to speak. But the tale thus laid open to our perusal turned out to be in large part as ambiguous as the cipher which had veiled it. We had invaded the tombs, we had pierced the pyramids, we had unswathed the mummies; but the message they had kept was still partially withheld. Kings were garbed as deities and demigods, history masqueraded as fairy tale; every statement was shielded by myth and allegory, and involved in symbol and metaphor. Able scholars, French, German, English and American, haye spent their lives in exploring, deciphering, comparing and interpreting these bewildering, yet alluring relics of a departed race. But the genius of this great people was wholly alien from our own, and we can but imperfectly comprehend them. The fundamental maxim of their philosophy seems to have been this: Mortal existence is brief; beyond death lies the only true life; man's duty is to make ready for it. Thus in the Cradle of Civilization we

find a Tomb.

The libraries of Egypt were its graves. Upon them are written the past, the present and the future, and within them were stored precious papyri, freighted with religious philosophy, national history, secular learning and the fruits of culture. The first inscriptions are perhaps six thousand years