The connection of literature with history is a many-sided question, and is not easily disposed of. As a matter of fact, the partnership between history and literature, so vaguely asserted and so complaisantly accepted in many quarters, is a combination in which the literature has usually gone to the wall. Indeed, the practical adjustment of history and literature wavers about between two equally fallacious schemes. One of these is to give the children the literature produced by the nation whose history they are studying; as for example, the Homeric poems when they study the history of Greece, that they may imbibe the true Greek spirit from the poems. Now, children of elementary age cannot distinguish, or even unconsciously feel, a national spirit in a poem. It is the broadly human, the universally true, elements and spirit that they feel. Besides, the Greek national spirit, the spirit of the characteristic Greek period, was not Homeric, and the literature of the characteristic Greek period would never do for the elementary children. In the case of Greek literature one cannot unreservedly demur because the Homeric poems are never bad for the children. But the same principle applied to other nations and their literature may bring disaster. The other scheme for relating history and literature is to choose the literature on the basis of the fact that it deals with some person or event or period with which the history is concerned; as, when we have a class in the history of the Plymouth colony, we give them Longfellow's "The Courtship of Miles Standish" for literature, which, except for one or two picturesque scenes, one would never choose as literature for young children; and as, when we study the American Revolution, we give them as literature some mature and sentimental modern novel, or some sensational and untrustworthy juvenile, choosing these merely because they profess to incorporate events connected with the historical period. The whole matter of the historical romance is important and complicated--too complicated and involving too many critical principles to be handled here. It must be sufficient to say in this connection what is sufficiently obvious to any thoughtful critic--that he who takes up and handles legitimately and justly an epoch, an event, or a group of historical persons, and at the same time produces good literature, is a master and produces a masterpiece--much too mature and developed for elementary children. Only Scott possessed the faculty of keeping generally in sight of his history, or of segregating it in an occasional _longeur_, and adding to it a rattling good story. But Scott is too mature and complex for elementary children up to the very oldest, and they are not likely to be studying the periods in history that interested him.