through every book of holy living where its treasures are laid up, there blows the breath of one Spirit. Herbert and Bunyan are peers of a faith undivided in the hearts of their countrymen. It does not change, but is the same yesterday, to-day and forever. On the secular side, also, English nurture has been of the like simple strain. The instinct of adventure, English derring-do, has never failed. Holinshed and Hakluyt were its chroniclers of old; and from the Morte d'Arthur to Sidney, from the Red-Cross Knight to Ivanhoe, from Shakespeare's Henry to Tennyson's Grenville, genius has not ceased to stream upon it, a broad river of light. The Word of God fed English piety; English daring was fed upon the deeds of men. Hear Shakespeare's Henry: "Plutarch always delights me with a fresh novelty. To love him is to love me; for he has been long time the instructor of my youth. My good mother, to whom I owe all, and who would not wish, she said, to see her son an illustrious dunce, put this book into my hands almost when I was a child at the breast. It has been like my conscience, and has whispered in my ear many good suggestions and maxims for my conduct and the government of my affairs." The English Plutarch is written on the earth's face. Its battles have named the lands and seas of all the world; but, as was said of English piety, from Harold to Cromwell, from the first Conqueror to Wellington, from the Black Prince to Gordon, English daring--the strength of the yeoman, the breath of the noble--is of one stock. Race lasts; those who are born in the eyrie find eagles' food. This has planted iron resolution and all-hazarding courage in epic-drama and battle-ode, and, as in the old riddle, feeds on what it fed. English literature is brave, martial, and brings forth men-children. It has the clarion strength of empire; like Taillefer at Hastings, Drayton and Tennyson still lead the charge at Agincourt and Balaclava. As Shakespeare's Henry was nourished, so was the English spirit in all ages bred. This integrity of English nurture, seen in these two great modes of life turned toward God in the soul and toward the world in action, is as plainly to be discerned in details as in these generalities; and to state only one other broad aspect of the facts governing the continuity of literary genius in the English, but one that goes to the foundations, the condition that both vivifies and controls that genius in law, metaphysics, science, in all political writing, whether history, theory, or discussion, as well as in the creative and artistic modes of its development, is freedom. The freedom of England, which is the parent of its greatness in all ways, is as old in the race as fear of God and love of peril; and, through its manifold and primary operation in English nurture, is the true continuer of its literature.