The rest of Mr. Saintsbury’s remarks, those about English character, have this significance for us: One cannot read books, or study literary problems, without studying the people who produced them. The study of literature is the study of national characteristics. The reason we Americans know so much more about the English than the English know about us, is that we have been brought up on English literature, while the Englishman has only begun to read our literature. Mr. Saintsbury’s reflections on the Philistinism of the English open at once to the reader large questions, philosophic in their nature, but not too philosophic for any ordinary person to think about, the question of the relation of English literature to Continental literature, and the question whether the English, who have produced the greatest of all modern poetry, are in comparison with their neighbors a notably poetic race. One of the best works on English literature for the student to read and possess, that by the Frenchman Taine (the English translation is excellent), is based on a philosophic inquiry into the nature of the English people. There is, so far as I know, no analogous study of American literature, though Professor Barrett Wendell’s “Literary History of America” might have developed into such a book if the author had taken pains to think out some of his clever, fugitive suggestions. The best books on the literature of our country which I have seen are Professor Charles F. Richardson’s “American Literature” and the “Manual,” edited by Mr. Theodore Stanton for the German Tauchnitz edition of British and American authors, and published in this country by the Putnams.