verbs, apologs, and maxims, which
have come down to us from distant ages of man's history--the old
idylls and myths of the Hebrew race; the tales of Greece, of the
Middle Ages of the East; the fables of the Old and the New World; the
songs of the Nibelungs; the romances of early feudalism; the "Morte
d'Arthur"; the "Arabian Nights"; the ballads of the early nations of
Europe.

I protest that I am devoted to no school in particular: I condemn no
school; I reject none. I am for the school of all the great men; and I
am against the school of the smaller men. I care for Wordsworth as
well as for Byron, for Burns as well as Shelley, for Boccaccio as well
as for Milton, for Bunyan as well as Rabelais, for Cervantes as much
as for Dante, for Corneille as well as for Shakespeare, for Goldsmith
as well as Goethe. I stand by the sentence of the world; and I hold
that in a matter so human and so broad as the highest poetry the
judgment of the nations of Europe is pretty well settled, at any rate,
after a century or two of continuous reading and discussing. Let those
who will assure us that no one can pretend to culture unless he swear
by Fra Angelico and Sandro Botticelli, by Arnolpho the son of Lapo, or
the Lombardic bricklayers, by Martini and Galuppi (all, by the way,
admirable men of the second rank); and so, in literature and poetry,
there are some who will hear of nothing but Webster or Marlowe; Blake,
Herrick or Keats; William Langland or the Earl of Surrey; Heine or
Omar Khayyam. All of these are men of genius, and each with a special
and inimitable gift of his own. But the busy world, which does not
hunt poets as collectors hunt for curios, may fairly reserve these
lesser lights for the time when they know the greatest well.

So, I say, think mainly of the greatest, of the best known, of those
who cover the largest area of human history and man's common nature.
Now when we come to count up these names accepted by the unanimous
voice of Europe, we have some thirty or forty names, and amongst them
are some of the most voluminous of writers. I have been running over
but one department of literature alone, the poetic. I have been naming
those only, whose names are household words with us, and the poets for
the most part of modern Europe. Yet even here we have a list which is
usually found in not less than a hundred volumes at least.

Now poetry and the highest kind of romance are exactly that order of
literature, which not