LIBRARY OF OLD AUTHORS.* 



MANY of our older readers can remember the an- 

 ticipation with which they looked for each suc- 

 cessive 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 bind- 

 ery 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 feel- 

 ing of seclusion in having a double wall of centuries 

 between us and the heats and clamors of contemporary 

 literature ! 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 

 amphorce of the Past ! No other writers speak to us 

 with the authority of those whose ordinary 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 it- 

 self, and the trampling feet of the multitude had banished 

 the lark and the daisy from the fresh privacies of lan- 



* London : John Russell Smith. 1866 - 64. 



