It is in the History of Animals that the student of literature will find the richest mine of allusions. The list of similes in Shakespeare explained by our author would fill a volume like this itself. Other writers, again, simply "lift" the book wholesale. Chester and Du Bartas write page after page of rhyme, all but versified direct from Bartholomew. Jonson and Spenser, Marlowe and Massinger, make ample use of him. Lyly and Drayton owe him a heavy debt. Considerations of space forbid their insertion, but for every extract made here, the Editor has collected several passages from first-class authors with a view to illustrating the immense importance of this book to Elizabethan literature. It was not without reason that Ireland chose justified, when making a selection of passages from the work for modern readers, in altering his text to this extent--and this only: he has modernised the spelling, and in the case of entirely obsolete grammatical forms he has substituted modern ones (_e.g._ "its" for "his"). In the case of an utterly dead word he has followed the course of substituting a word from the same root, when one exists; and when none could be found, he has left it unchanged in the text. Accordingly a short glossary has been added, which includes, too, many words which we may hope are not dead, but sleeping. In very few cases has a word been inserted, and in those it is marked by italics. Perhaps we may be allowed to say a word in defence of the principle of modernising our earliest literature. Early English poetry is, in general (with some striking exceptions), incapable of being written in the spelling of our days without losing all of that which makes it verse; but there can be no reason, when dealing with the masterpieces of our Early English prose, for maintaining obsolete forms of spelling and grammar which hamper the passage of thought from mind to mind across the centuries. Editors of Shakespeare and the Bible for general use have long assumed the privilege of altering the spelling, and except on the principle that earlier works are more important, or are only to be read by people who have had the leisure and inclination to familiarise their eyes with the peculiarities of Middle English, there can be no reason for stopping there, or a century earlier. At some point, of course, the number of obsolete words becomes so great that the text cannot be read without a dictionary: then the limit has been reached. But Caxton, Trevisa, and many others are well within it, and it is good to remove all obstacles which prevent the ordinary reader from feeling the continuity of his mother tongue.