But as travelers in lands of beauty and adventure may profitably spend an hour a day in searching the guide books for facts about what they have seen and directions for finding the most interesting places, so the reader, without sacrificing his spirit of freedom, may well equip himself with a few handbooks of literature. Suppose that Keats has interested us in Chapman’s Homer. Let us find out who Chapman was and when he lived. A fairly reliable book in which to seek for him is Professor George Saintsbury’s “History of Elizabethan Literature.” It is one of a series of histories in which the volume on “Early English Literature” is by Mr. Stopford Brooke, and the volume on “English Literature of the Eighteenth Century” is by Mr. Edmund Gosse. We find in Saintsbury’s handbook ten pages of biography and criticism of Chapman and extracts from his poetry. This is enough to give a little notion of Chapman’s place in literature and to suggest to the ordinary reader whether Chapman is a writer he will wish to know more fully. We find among Mr. Saintsbury’s comments on Chapman the following: “The splendid sonnet of Keats testifies to the influence which his work long had on those Englishmen who were unable to read Homer in the original. A fine essay of Mr. Swinburne’s has done, for the first time, justice to his general literary powers, and a very ingenious and, among such hazardous things, unusually probable conjecture of Mr. Minto’s identifies him with the ‘rival poet’ of Shakespeare’s sonnets. But these are adventitious claims to fame. What is not subject to such deduction is the assertion that Chapman was a great Englishman who, while exemplifying the traditional claim of great Englishmen to originality, independence, and versatility of work, escaped at once the English tendency to lack of scholarship, and to ignorance of contemporary continental achievements, was entirely free from the fatal Philistinism in taste and in politics, and in other matters, which has been the curse of our race, was a Royalist, a lover, a scholar, and has left us at once one of the most voluminous and peculiar collections of work that stand to the credit of any literary man of his country.” Here, in this paragraph, we stand neck-deep in the study of literature, its exhilarating eddies of opinion, its mind-strengthening difficulties, and also, we must confess, its harmless dangers and absurdities. Let us run over Mr. Saintsbury’s sentences again and see whither they take us.