and pedantic to present Shakespeare in that of the sixteenth: between the two some line of demarcation had to be drawn, and we therefore placed it at the point which seemed to be indicated by common sense. Up to Lydgate and Occleve the old spelling is retained because it is frequently required by rhyme and metre: in mediaeval prose and in poetry, from Skelton onwards, it is discarded as no longer necessary. To the latter rule Spenser is the single exception, and the reason in his case is too obvious to need remark. For purposes of teaching we would suggest that the examples in Chapters II, III, V, and VI be read aloud before they are studied from the printed page. Their sound will prove more familiar to the ear than their freedom of orthography to the eye. There is one more point to which attention may be drawn. One of the worst of the Idola tribus is, as Bacon says, an excessive love of symmetry and exactitude. We are far too liable to arrange our facts in neat classes and categories and to impose on nature schemes of our own devising. Against this mistake readers of the present volume may at the outset be warned. It has, of course, been necessary to group the examples under separate heads, to arrange them in chapters, and to put forward certain leading principles in the light of which this arrangement can be explained. But it must not be inferred that the history of our literature can be pigeonholed and systematized with such formal precision. Many of the chapters overlap :-Barbour and Mandeville, for instance, were both contemporary with Chaucer:-and in the stream of our literary progress there are many examples of ebb and flow, of eddy and backwash, which could not be fully described without swelling our pages to twice their number. All that is here attempted is to give the chief ideas by which successive generations were in the main inspired, to illustrate them with such fullness as should render them intelligible, and to place them as nearly in chronological order as is compatible with their clearness of presentation. The work, in short, is not a history of literature but a statement of literary aims and methods; and it will have achieved its purpose if it helps to determine the point of view from which the history can most profitably be studied. G. E. H. W. H. H. |