r or John Wesley,
Walter Scott or Samuel Taylor Coleridge, William Wordsworth or Thomas
Chalmers, Alfred Tennyson, Thomas Carlyle, or William Makepeace
Thackeray.

A similar list for American literature would place as leaders in
letters: Thomas Hooker or Thomas Shepard, Cotton Mather, Jonathan
Edwards, Benjamin Franklin, Philip Freneau, Noah Webster or James Kent,
James Fenimore Cooper or Washington Irving, Ralph Waldo Emerson or
Edward Everett, Joseph Addison Alexander or William Ellery Channing,
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, James Russell Lowell, or Nathaniel
Hawthorne.

2. The prosecution of the study might be carried on in one or more of
several ways, according either to the purpose in view or the tastes of
the student. Attention might profitably be concentrated on the
literature of a given period and worked out in detail by taking up
individual authors, or by classifying all the writers of the period {6}
on the basis of the character of their writings, such as poetry,
history, belles-lettres, theology, essays, and the like.

3. Again, the literature of a period might be studied with reference to
its influence on the religious, commercial, political, or social life
of the people among whom it has circulated; or as the result of certain
forces which have preceded its production. It is well worth the time
and effort to trace the influence of one author upon another or many
others, who, while maintaining their individuality, have been either in
style or method of production unconsciously molded by their _confreres_
of the pen. The divisions of writers may, again, be made with
reference to their opinions and associations in the different
departments of life where they have wrought their active labors, such
as in politics, religion, moral reform, or educational questions.

The influence of the great writers in the languages of the Continent
upon the literature of England and America affords another theme of
absorbing interest, and has its peculiarly good results in bringing the
student into close brotherhood with the fruitful and cultured minds of
every land. In fact, the possible applications of the study of
literature are so many and varied that the ingenuity of any earnest
student may devise such as the exigencies of his own work may require.

JOHN F. HURST,

_Washington_.

{7}

PREFACE.

In so brief a history of so rich a literature, the problem is how to
get room enough to give, not an adequate