Of these writers, Pope and Defoe are far the most important for us.
We have, down to this time of 1740, out of a literature covering eleven and a half centuries, recommended to the chief attention of the reader ten great authors,—Chaucer and Spenser, Shakspeare and Bacon, Milton and Taylor, Bunyan and Locke, Pope and Defoe. We now come to the Time of Novelists, Historians, and Scientists, a period in the history of our literature that is so prolific of great writers in all the vastly multiplied departments of thought, that it is no longer possible to particularize in the manner we have done in regard to the preceding ages. A sufficient illustration has been given of the methods of judging books and the results of their application. With the ample materials of [Table I]. before him, the reader must now be left to make his own judgments in regard to the relative merits of the books of the modern period. We shall confine our remarks on this last time of English literature to the recommendation of ten great authors to match the ten great names of former times. In history, we shall name Parkman, the greatest of American historians; in philosophy, Herbert Spencer, the greatest name in the whole list of philosophers; in poetry, Byron and Tennyson, neither of them equal to Shakspeare and Milton, but standing in the next file behind them; in fiction, Scott, Eliot, and Dickens; in poetic humor, Lowell, the greatest of all names in this department; and in general literature, Carlyle and Ruskin, two of the purest, wisest, and most forcible writers of all the past, and, curiously enough, both of them very eccentric and very wordy,—a sort of English double star, which will be counted in this list as a unit, in order to crowd in Emerson, who belongs in this great company, and is not by any means the least worthy member of it. One more writer there is in this time greater than any we have named, except Spencer and Scott; namely, the author of "The Origin of Species." Darwin stands by the side of Newton in the history of scientific thought; but, like his great compeer, the essence of his book has come to be a part of modern thought that floats in the air we breathe; and so his claims to being read are less than those of authors who cannot be called so great when speaking of intrinsic merit.
Having introduced the greatest ten of old, and ten that may be deemed the greatest of the new, in English letters, we shall pass to take a bird's-eye view of what is best in Greece and Rome, France, Italy, and Spain, and say a word of Persia, Germany, and Portugal.
THE GREATEST NAMES OF OTHER LITERATURES.
Greece, in her thirteen centuries of almost continuous literary productiveness from Homer to Longus, gave the world its greatest epic poet, Homer; the finest of lyric poets, Pindar; the prince of orators, Demosthenes; aside from our own Bacon and Spencer, the greatest philosophers of all the ages, Plato and Aristotle; the most noted of fabulists, Æsop; the most powerful writer of comedy, Aristophanes (Molière, however, is much to be preferred for modern reading, because of his fuller applicability to our life); and the three greatest writers of pure tragedy, Æschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides,—the first remarkable for his gloomy grandeur and gigantic, dark, and terrible sublimity; the second for his sweet majesty and pathos; and third for the power with which he paints men as they are in real life. Euripides was a great favorite with Milton and Fox.
To one who is not acquainted with these ten great Greeks, much of the sweetest and grandest of life remains untasted and unknown. Begin with Homer, Plato's "Phædo" and "Republic," Æschylus' "Prometheus Bound," Sophocles' "Œdipus," and Demosthenes' "On the Crown."
A liberal reading must also include the Greek historians Herodotus, Thucydides, and Xenophon.
Rome taught the world the art of war, but was herself a pupil in the halls of Grecian letters. Only three writers—Plutarch, Marcus Aurelius (who both wrote in Greek), and Epictetus—can claim our attention in anything like an equal degree with the authors of Athens named just above. Its literature as a whole is on a far lower plane than that of Greece or England. A liberal education must include Virgil's "Æneid," the national epic of Rome (which, however, must take its place in our lives and hearts far after Homer, Shakspeare, Milton, Dante, and Goethe), for its elegance and imagination; Horace, for his wit, grace, sense, and inimitable witchery of phrase; Lucretius, for his depth of meditation; Tacitus, for knowledge of our ancestors; Ovid and Catullus, for their beauty of expression; Juvenal, for the keenness of his satire; and Plautus and Terence, for their insight into the characters of men. But these books should wait until at least the three first named in this paragraph, with the ten Greek and twenty English writers spoken of in the preceding paragraphs, have come to be familiar friends.
Italy, in Chaucer's century, produced a noble literature. Dante is the Shakspeare of the Latin races. He stands among the first creators of sublimity. Æschylus and Milton only can claim a place beside him. Petrarch takes lofty rank as a lyric poet, breathing the heart of love. Boccaccio may be put with Chaucer. Ariosto and Tasso wrote the finest epics of Italian poetry. A liberal education must neglect no one of these. Every life should hold communion with the soul of Dante, and get a taste at least of Petrarch.