significantly, brought in our age that has now passed its first flower, but has yet long to run. These are the three great ages of English poetry. In the interval between the second and the third, the magnificently accomplished school of the eighteenth century gave to English an age of cultivated repose, in which Pope, its best example, lived on the incomes of the past, and, together with the younger and the elder men he knew, exhibited in literature that conserving and positive power which is the economy of national genius; but even in that great century, wherever the future woke, there was a budding romanticism, in Collins, Gray, Walpole, Thomson, Cowper, Blake. Such was the history of English poetry, and the same general statement will be found applicable to English prose, though in a lower tone, due to the nature of prose. Taken in the large, important as the positive element in it is, the English literary genius is, like the race, temperamentally romantic, to the nerve and bone. This view becomes increasingly apparent on examination of the service of this literature to civilization and the individual soul of man, which is the great function of literature, and of its place in the world of art. "How shall the world be served?" was Chaucer's question; and it has never been absent from any great mind of the English stock. The literature of a nation, however, including, as here, books of knowledge, is so nearly synonymous with the mind in all its operations in the national life, as to be coextensive with civilization, and hardly separable from it. Civilization is cast in the mould of thought, and retains the brute necessity of nature only as mass, but not as surface; it is the flowering of human forces in the formal aspect of life, and of these literature is one mode, reflecting in its many phases all the rest in their manifestations, and inwardly feeding them in their vital principle. The universality of its touch on life is indicated by the fact that it has made the English a lettered people, the alphabet as common as numbers, and the ability to read almost as wide-spread in the race as the ability to count. Its service, therefore, cannot be summarized any more than the dictionary of its words. It is possible to bring within the compass of a paragraph only hints and guide-marks of its work; and naturally these would be gathered from its most comprehensive influences in the higher spheres of intellect and morals, in the world of ideas, and in the person of those writers who were either the founders or restorers of knowledge. Such a cardinal service was the Baconian method, to take a single great instance, which may almost be said to have reversed the logical habit of the mind of Europe, and to have summoned nature to a new bar. It is enough to name this. Of books powerful in intellectual results, Locke's Essay is, perhaps, thought of as metaphysical and remote, yet it was of immeasurable