In addition to the service so done in the advancement of civilization by the discovery of new truth, as great benefaction is accomplished by the continual agitation and exercise of men's minds in the ideas that are not new but the ever-living inheritance from the past, whose permanence through all epochs shows their deep grounding in the race they nourish. In English such ideas are, especially, in the view of the whole world, ideas of civil and religious liberty in the widest sense and particularly as worked out in legal and political history. The common law of England in Blackstone is a mighty legacy. On the large public scale, and as involved in the constitutional making of a great nation, the Federalist is a document invaluable as setting forth essentials of free government under a particular application; and for comment on social liberty, Burke, on the conservative, and Paine, on the radical side, exhibit the scope, the weight and fire of English thought. Of still greater significance, for the mass and variety of teaching, is that commentary on man's freedom which is contained in the operation of liberty and its increase as presented in the long story of England's greatness recorded in the works of her historians from Holinshed to Macaulay, with what the last prolific generation has added. They are exceeded in the dignity of their labors by Gibbon, whose work on Rome, which Mommsen called the greatest of all histories and is often likened to a mighty bridge spanning the gulf between the ancient and the modern world, was a contribution to European learning; but the historians of English liberty have more profitably served mankind. At yet another remove, the ideas of liberty--and the mind acquainted with English books is dazzled by the vast comprehensiveness of such a phrase--are again poured through the nation's life-blood by all her poets, and well-nigh all her writers in prose, in one or another mode of the Promethean fire. These ideas are never silent, never quiescent; they work in the substance, they shape the form and feature, of English thought; they are the necessary element of its being; they constitute the race of freemen, and are known in every language as English ideas. They give sublimity to the figure of Milton; they are the feeding flame of Shelley's mind; they alone lift Tennyson to an eagle-flight of song. In the unceasing celebration of ideal liberty, and its practical life in English character and events, the literature of England has, perhaps, done a greater service than in the positive advancement of knowledge, for it is more fundamental in the national life. Touching the subject almost at random, such are a few of the points of contact between English books and the civilization of men.