E-text prepared by Marius Masi, Jonathan Ingram, and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team (http://www.pgdp.net) Note: Project Gutenberg also has an HTML version of this file which includes the original illustrations. See 36298-h.htm or 36298-h.zip: (https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/36298/pg36298-images.html) or (https://www.gutenberg.org/files/36298/36298-h.zip) Transcriber's note: (1) Characters following a carat (^) were printed in superscript. (2) Macrons and breves above letters and dots below letters are not identified in this text file. (3) [alpha], [beta], etc. stand for greek letters. (4) A list of corrections is at the end of this e-book. [Illustration: Bodleian Library, Oxford. London, Frederick Warne & C^o.] AMENITIES OF LITERATURE, Consisting of Sketches and Characters of English Literature. by ISAAC DISRAELI. A New Edition, Edited by His Son, THE EARL OF BEACONSFIELD. [Illustration] London: Frederick Warne and Co., Bedford Street, Strand. London: Bradbury, Agnew, & Co., Printers, Whitefriars. PREFACE. A history of our vernacular literature has occupied my studies for many years. It was my design not to furnish an arid narrative of books or of authors, but following the steps of the human mind through the wide track of Time, to trace from their beginnings the rise, the progress, and the decline of public opinions, and to illustrate, as the objects presented themselves, the great incidents in our national annals. In the progress of these researches many topics presented themselves, some of which, from their novelty and curiosity, courted investigation. Literary history, in this enlarged circuit, becomes not merely a philological history of critical erudition, but ascends into a philosophy of books where their subjects, their tendency, and their immediate or gradual influence over the people discover their actual condition.