214 LIBRARY OF OLD AUTHORS. 



LIBRARY OF OLD AUTHORS* 



MANY of our older readers can remember the anticipation 

 with which they looked for each successive volume of the 

 late Dr. Young s excellent series of old English prose-writers, 

 and the delight with which they carried it home, fresh from the 

 press and the bindery in its appropriate livery of evergreen. To 

 most of us it was our first introduction to the highest society of 

 letters, and we still feel grateful to the departed scholar who gave 

 us to share the conversation of such men as Latimer, More, 

 Sidney, Taylor, Browne, Fuller, and Walton. What a sense of 

 security in an old book which Time has criticised for us ! What 

 a precious feeling of seclusion in having a double wall of centuries 

 between us and the heats and clamours of contemporary litera 

 ture ! How limpid seems the thought, how pure the old wine of 

 scholarship that has been settling for so many generations in 

 those silent crypts and Falernian amphora of the Past ! No 

 other writers speak to us with the authority of those whose ordi 

 nary speech was that of our translation of the Scriptures; to no 

 modern is that frank unconsciousness possible which was natural 

 to a period when yet reviews were not ; and no later style breathes 

 that country charm characteristic of days ere the metropolis had 

 drawn all literary activity to itself, and the trampling feet of the 

 multitude had banished the lark and the daisy from the fresh 

 privacies of language. Truly, as compared with the present, 

 these old voices seem to come from the morning fields, and not 

 the paved thoroughfares of thought. 



Even the Retrospective Review continues to be good read 

 ing, in virtue of the antique aroma (for wine only acquires its 

 bouquet by age) which pervades its pages. Its sixteen volumes 

 are so many tickets of admission to the vast and devious vaults 

 of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, through which we 

 wander, tasting a thimbleful of rich Canary, honeyed Cyprus, 

 or subacidulous Hock, from what dusty butt or keg our fancy 

 chooses. The years during which this review was published 

 were altogether the most fruitful in genuine appreciation of old 

 English literature. Books were prized for their imaginative and 

 not their antiquarian value by young writers who sate at the 

 feet of Lamb and Coleridge. Rarities of style, of thought, of 

 fancy were sought, rather than the barren scarcities of typo 

 graphy. But another race of men seems to have sprung up, in 



* London : John Russell Smith, 1856-64. 



