=English Literature.= England's isolation as an island has enabled her to develop a national literature continuously for nine centuries with only the slightest interruption from the world without. Foreign ideas have been introduced, certainly, but by Englishmen instead of by foreigners. Where a slothful race would have lain dormant and inactive, the vigorous and adventurous islanders have even led the way in two fields of literary endeavor, for fiction and the essay reached their successive stages of growth more quickly in England than elsewhere. Throughout poetry and prose, with but few exceptions, there is a blend of shrewdness and inspiration which in daily life is called common sense; Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, Browning continually sound the practical note, evincing their knowledge and appreciation of material affairs. Another trait is that of searching out the moral lessons in life and thought. "Books in the running brooks, sermons in stones" are constantly sought by English authors. Chaucer, Bunyan, Milton, Dickens, Carlyle, Browning, and many others from the forefront of English letters play the part of teacher and preacher again and again. POETRY Anglo-Saxon Literature Arnold, M. Blake Browning, E. B. Browning, R. Burns Byron Chaucer Clough Coleridge Dryden Goldsmith Gray Henley Keats Kingsley Macaulay Milton Morris, W. Old English Ballads Patmore Pope Rossetti, C. Rossetti, D. G. Scott Shakespeare Shelley Sidney Spenser Swinburne Tennyson Wordsworth FICTION Austen Barrie Blackmore Borrow Brontë Caine Defoe Dickens Doyle Eliot Fielding Gaskell Goldsmith Hardy Hughes Kingsley Kipling Lever Lytton Macdonald Macleod Malory Meredith Reade Richardson Scott Stevenson Swift Thackeray Watson HISTORY Carlyle Creasy Farrar Freeman Froissart Froude Gibbon Gladstone Green Grote Hodgkin Holinshed McCarthy Mahaffy Raleigh Smith, G. Symonds BIOGRAPHY Boswell Chesterton Evelyn Lewes Lockhart Pepys Southey ESSAY Addison Arnold, M. Bacon Benson De Quincey Hamerton Harrison Hazlitt Lamb Lang La Ramée Macaulay Milton Morley Pater Ruskin Sidney Steele Stephen Stevenson Thackeray Walton White, G. HUMOR Barham Carroll Cowper Dickens Gilbert Hood Hope Jerrold Sterne Swift Thackeray TRAVEL Hearn Kinglake Mandeville Stevenson Tyndall DRAMA Jonson Marlowe Shakespeare Sheridan ORATORY Bright Burke SCIENCE & PHILOSOPHY Bacon Carlyle Darwin Galton Mill More Ruskin Smith, A. Spencer RELIGION Bonar Bowring Brierley Browne, Sir T. Cowper Faber Heber Herbert Hooker Keble Lyte Milman Newman Robertson Toplady Watts Wesley Wyclif