What is true of Milton is true of the young English mind, from Chaucer and earlier. In the beginning English literature was a part of European literature, and held a position in it analogous to that which the literature of America occupies in all English speech; it was not so much colonial as a part of the same world. The first works were European books written on English soil; Chaucer, Gower and Malory used the matter of Europe, but they retained the tang of English, as Emerson keeps the tang of America. The name applied to Gower, "the moral Gower," speaks him English; and Arthur, "the flower of kings," remains forever Arthur of Britain; and the Canterbury pilgrimage, whatever the source of the world-wandering tales, gives the first crowded scene of English life. In Langland, whose form was mediæval, lay as in the seed the religious and social history of a protestant, democratic, and labor-honoring nation. In the next age, with the intellectual sovereignty of humanism, Surrey, Sackville, Lyly, Sidney and Spenser put all the new realms of letters under tribute, and made capture with a royal hand of whatever they would have for their own of the world's finer wealth; the dramatists gathered again the tales of all nations; and, period following period, Italy, Spain and France in turn, and the Hebrew, Greek and Latin unceasingly, brought their treasures, light or precious, to each generation of authors, until the last great burst of the age now closing, itself indebted most universally to all the past and all the world. Yet each new wave that washed empire to the land retreated, leaving the genius of English unimpaired and richer only in its own strength. Notwithstanding the _concettisti_, the heroic drama, the Celtic mist, which passed like shadows from the kingdom, the instinct of the authors held to the massive sense of Latin and the pure form of Greek and Italian, and constituted these the enduring humane culture of English letters and their academic tradition. The permanence of this tradition in literary education has been of vast importance, and is to the literary class, in so far as they are separate by training, what the integrity of English nurture at large has been to the nation. The poets, especially, have been learned in this culture; and, so far from being self-sprung from the soil, were moulded into power by every finer touch of time. Chaucer, Spenser, Milton, Gray, Shelley, Tennyson are the capital names that illustrate the toil of the scholar, and approve the mastery of that classical culture which has ever been the most fruitful in the choicest minds. As on the broad scale English literature is distinguished by its general assimilative power, being hospitable to all knowledge, it is most deeply and intimately, because continuously, indebted to humane studies, in the strictest sense, and has derived from them not, as in many other cases, transitory matter and the fashion of an hour, but the form and discipline of art itself.