One has only to run over the list of the foremost names in literature for the past seventy-five years. There is Tolstoi, in Russia, clearly one of the great world writers, but a doctrinaire through and through. There are Renan, Victor Hugo, Taine, Thiers, Guizot, in France; Wordsworth, Coleridge, Carlyle, Ruskin, Newman, Huxley, George Eliot, Mrs. Ward, in English literature, and in American literature Emerson, Whitman, and Thoreau. All these writers had aims ulterior to those of pure literature. They were not disinterested observers and recorders. They obtruded their personal opinions and convictions. They are the writers with a message. Their thoughts spring from some special bent or experience, and address themselves to some special mood or want. They wrote the books that help us, that often come to us as revelations; works of art, it may be, but of art in subjection to moral conviction, and they are directed to other than purely æsthetic ends. They gave expression to their individual tastes and predilections; they were more or less tethered to their own egos; they may be called the personal authors, as their predecessors may be called the impersonal. They are not of the pure breed of men of letters, but represent crosses of various kinds, as the cross of the artist with the thinker, the savant, the theologian, the man of science, the reformer, the preacher. These personal authors belong to the modern world rather than to the ancient; to a time of individualism rather than to a time of institutionalism; to an industrial and democratic age, rather than to an imperial and military age.