The World's Best Books : A Key to the Treasures of Literature

by Frank Parsons

Probably these examples, with those to be found in the [notes to Table I]., are amply sufficient to show what is meant by grouping the lights of literature about a single point so as to illuminate it intensely; but one more specimen will be given, because of the interest the subject has for us now and is likely to have for many years.

The Tariff Question may be studied in Ely's "Problems of To-day," Greeley's "Political Economy," Carey's "Principles of Social Science," E. P. Smith's "Manual of Political Economy," Byles's "Sophisms of Free Trade," Thompson's "Social Science and National Economy," Bastiat's "Sophisms of Protection," Mill's "Political Economy," Sumner's "Lectures on the History of Protection in the United States," Fawcett's "Free Trade and Protection," Mongredien's "History of the Free Trade Movement," Butt's "Protection Free Trade," Walters' "What is Free Trade," "The Gladstone-Blaine Debate," etc.

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TABLE V.

Showing the Distribution of the Best Literature in Time and Space, with a Parallel Reference to some of the World's Great Events.

[It was impossible to get the writers of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries into the unit space. The former fills a space twice the unit width, and the latter, when it is complete, will require five units.]

Greece	B.C. 1000	Israel David, The Psalms
	900
	800		Rome founded
Æsop	700
	B.C. 600	India Budha	Nebuchadnezzar, king of Babylon Republic established at Rome
The Golden Age of Grecian Literature Pindar Æschylus Herodotus Sophocles Thucydides Pericles Euripides Xenophon Aristophanes Socrates	500	Mahabharata Ramayana (Epics of India)	Darius, king of Persia Greece Battle of Marathon Battle of Thermopylæ Battle of Salamis Cincinnatus at Rome Ezra at Jerusalem
Plato Aristotle Demosthenes	400		Alexander The Gauls burn Rome
	300		Wars of Rome against Carthage Hannibal in Italy
	200		Greece becomes a Roman Province Rome The Gracchi, Marius, and Sylla
Rome. Augustan Age, 31 b. c. to a. d. 14. Reatinus Ovid Sallust Livy Cicero Lucretius Virgil	100		Rome Julius Cæsar Pompey Civil War, Empire established
Tacitus Plutarch Juvenal Pliny	A.D.	Josephus	Jerusalem taken by Titus Pompeii overwhelmed Romans conquer Britain
Epictetus Marcus Aurelius	100		Church Fathers
	200		Aurelian conquers Zenobia
	300		Under Constantine Christianity becomes the State religion Roman Empire divided
	400		Angles and Saxons drive out the Britons Huns under Attila invade the Roman Empire
	500		Christianity carried to England by Augustine
English Literature Cædmon	600	Arabia Mahomet
Bæda Cynewulfda	700		France Charlemagne founds the Empire of the West
Ælfred, 850-900	800		Danes overrun England Ælfred's glorious reign
	900		Chivalry begins Capetian kings in France England Saint Dunstan Papal supremacy
	1000	Persia Firdusi's Shah Nameh	Chivalry begins Capetian kings in France England Canute the Great 1066. Norman Conquest Peter the Hermit First Crusade
Geoffrey of Monmouth	1100	Persia Omar Khayyám Germany Nibelungenlied Spain Chronicle of the Cid	England Plantagenets Richard I. France Second and Third Crusades Saint Bernard
Layamon Roger Bacon	1200	Persia Saadi	England 1215. Runnymede, Magna Charta Edward I.
Mandeville Langland Wycliffe Chaucer Gower	1300	Italy Dante Petrarch Boccaccio Persia Hafiz	England Chivalry at its height The Black Prince Gunpowder France Battles of Crecy, Poictiers, and Agincourt
Lydgate Fortescue Malory	1400	Germany Thomas à Kempis Arabian Nights (probably) Persia Jami	England Henry VIII. shook off the Pope Movable Type Discovery of America Joan of Arc Wars of the Roses
More Ascham Lyly Sackville Sidney Marlowe Fox Spenser Hooker	1500	Italy Ariosto Tasso Galileo France Montaigne	Copernicus Kepler The Armada England Henry VIII., Elizabeth Germany 1515. Luther's Reformation France Massacre of St. Bartholomew
Jonson Bacon Herbert Shakspeare Newton J.Taylor Chapman Hobbes Beaumont & Fletcher Walton Milton Locke S. Butler Bunyan Pepys Dryden	1600	Spain. Cervantes Calderon Germany Kepler France Descartes Corneille Racine Molière La Fontain	1620. Plymouth Rock and the "Mayflower" 1649 Cromwell 1660 Restoration 1688 Revolution William and Mary France. Louis XIV.
Addison Cowper Otis Steele Burns Jay Pope Rogers Adams Defoe Hume Hamilton Swift Edwards Madison Berkeley A. Smith Jefferson J. Butler Bentham Pitt Moore Gibbon Burke Thomson Johnson Fox Young Boswell Erskine Gray Malthus P. Henry. Goldsmith Mackintosh Sterne Paine	1700	France Montesquieu Le Sage Rousseau Voltaire Germany Munchausen Lessing	1776. American Revolution 1789-94. French Revolution England Marlborough
Scott Herschel DeQuincey Byron Whewell Whately Bryant Ricardo Jeffrey Drake Carey Brougham Wordsworth Faraday S. Smith Keats Lyell C. North Shelley Agassiz N. Webster Payne Whitney H. H. White Keble A. Gray D. Webster Halleck Hallam Sparks Key Prescott Story Macaulay Lewes Gould Hood Milman Cooper Poe Buckle Disraeli Read Merivale Dickens Tennyson Hildreth Thackeray Browning Freeman Bronté Lowell Draper Hawthorne Longfellow Froude Irving Carleton Walpole Hughes Ingelow Lecky Kingsley Whittier Parkman Eliot Mill Bancroft Collins Spencer Whipple Macdonald Ruskin Twain Hunt Arnold Jerrold Wallace Curtis Choate Clarke Holmes Lincoln Landor Mansel Phillips Tourgée Carlyle Everett Holland Emerson Sumner Howells Darwin Garfield Mrs. Whitney Huxley Gladstone Miss Alcott Dana A. D. White Bellamy Tyndall Beecher Gronlund Lubbock P. Brooks Gilman Proctor Lamb Holley Davy Hazlitt Dodge Proctor Lamb Jewett Davy Hazlitt Burroughs Bright Rives Stowe Fiske Aldrich Hearn Curtin Warner Burnett Hale Curtis Edwards Higginson	1800	Germany Schiller Goethe Kant Fichte Hegel Schelling Niebuhr Schlosser Heine Haeckel Helmholtz Grimm Froebel France La Place Guizot De Tocqueville Comte Hugo Dumas Balzac Renan Taine Russia Pushkin Lermontoff Bashkirtseff Tolstoi Denmark Andersen Poland Sienkiewicz	1807. Fulton's Steamboat Wellington 1815. Waterloo 1815. White wives sold in England 1830. Passenger railway 1833. Matches 1844. Telegraph 1845. Mexican War 1860. Rebellion 1863. Emancipation 1870. Franco-German War 1874. The Telephone Emancipation of serfs in Russia
	1900

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REMARKS ON TABLE V.