Now having our idler safe down as far as the fall of Constantinople in 1453, he is in very good courses; for here are trusty hands waiting for him. The cardinal facts of European history are soon learned. There is Dante’s poem, to open the Italian Republics of the Middle Age; Dante’s “Vita Nuova,” to explain Dante and Beatrice; and Boccaccio’s “Life of Dante,”--a great man to describe a greater. To help us, perhaps a volume or two of M. Sismondi’s “Italian Republics” will be as good as the entire sixteen. When we come to Michel Angelo, his Sonnets and Letters must be read, with his Life by Vasari, or, in our day, by Herman Grimm. For the Church, and the Feudal Institution, Mr. Hallam’s “Middle Ages” will furnish, if superficial, yet readable and conceivable outlines. The “Life of the Emperor Charles V.,” by the useful Robertson, is still the key of the following age. Ximenes, Columbus, Loyola, Luther, Erasmus, Melanchthon, Francis I., Henry VIII., Elizabeth, and Henry IV. of France, are his contemporaries. It is a time of seeds and expansions, whereof our recent civilization is the fruit. If now the relations of England to European affairs bring him to British ground, he is arrived at the very moment when modern history takes new proportions. He can look back for the legends and mythology to the “Younger Edda” and the “Heimskringla” of Snorro Sturleson, to Mallet’s “Northern Antiquities,” to Ellis’s “Metrical Romances,” to Asser’s “Life of Alfred” and Venerable Bede, and to the researches of Sharon Turner and Palgrave. Hume will serve him for an intelligent guide, and in the Elizabethan era he is at the richest period of the English mind, with the chief men of action and of thought which that nation has produced, and with a pregnant future before him. Here he has Shakspeare, Spenser, Sidney, Raleigh, Bacon, Chapman, Jonson, Ford, Beaumont and Fletcher, Herbert, Donne, Herrick; and Milton, Marvell, and Dryden, not long after. In reading history, he is to prefer the history of individuals. He will not repent the time he gives to Bacon,--not if he read the “Advancement of Learning,” the “Essays,” the “Novum Organum,” the “History of Henry VII.,” and then all the “Letters” (especially those to the Earl of Devonshire, explaining the Essex business), and all but his “Apophthegms.”