library list which runs already to the final centuries of the
Thousand. The largest slice of this huge provision is, as a matter of
course, given to the tyrannous demands of fiction. But in carrying out
the scheme, publishers and editors contrived to keep in mind that
books, like men and women, have their elective affinities. The present
volume, for instance, will be found to have its companion books, both
in the same section and even more significantly in other sections.
With that idea too, novels like Walter Scott's _Ivanhoe_ and _Fortunes
of Nigel_, Lytton's _Harold_ and Dickens's _Tale of Two Cities_, have
been used as pioneers of history and treated as a sort of holiday
history books. For in our day history is tending to grow more
documentary and less literary; and "the historian who is a stylist,"
as one of our contributors, the late Thomas Seccombe, said, "will soon
be regarded as a kind of Phoenix." But in this special department of
Everyman's Library we have been eclectic enough to choose our history
men from every school in turn. We have Grote, Gibbon, Finlay,
Macaulay, Motley, Frescott. We have among earlier books the Venerable
Bede and the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, have completed a Livy in an
admirable new translation by Canon Roberts, while Caesar, Tacitus,
Thucydides and Herodotus are not forgotten. "You only, O Books," said
Richard de Bury, "are liberal and independent; you give to all who
ask." The delightful variety, the wisdom and the wit which are at the
disposal of Everyman in his own library may well, at times, seem to
him a little embarrassing. He may turn to Dick Steele in _The
Spectator_ and learn how Cleomira dances, when the elegance of her
motion is unimaginable and "her eyes are chastised with the simplicity
and innocence of her thoughts." He may turn to Plato's Phaedrus and
read how every soul is divided into three parts (like Caesar's Gaul).
He may turn to the finest critic of Victorian times, Matthew Arnold,
and find in his essay on Maurice de Guerin the perfect key to what is
there called the "magical power of poetry." It is Shakespeare, with
his

"daffodils That come before the swallow dares, and take
The winds of March with beauty;"

it is Wordsworth, with his

"voice ... heard
In spring-time from the cuckoo-bird,
Breaking the silence of the seas
Among the farthest Hebrides;"

or Keats, with his

".... moving waters at their priest-like task
Of cold ablution round