be regarded as approximative. Cataloguing in this country is disgracefully careless. Many books published are every year omitted from the London catalogue. For example, out of 267 works published in the two counties of Lancashire and Chesire, only 31 are found entered in the last London catalogue. But I will take no account of omissions. I will even strike off the odd 120 from my total of 1,620, and say that English literature grows only at the rate of 1,500 works per annum. At this rate in ten years our literary product amounts to 15,000 books. Put the duration of a man's reading life at forty years. If he had to read everything that came out, to keep pace with the teeming press, he would have had in his forty years 60,000 works of contemporary literature to wade through. This in books only, over and above his periodical work, which we calculated would require pretty well all his time.

But as yet we have got only Great Britain. But England is not all the world, as Mr. Matthew Arnold reminds us (Essays, p. 43). By the very nature of things, much of the best that is known and thought in the world cannot be of English growth, must be foreign; in a survey of literature we cannot afford to ignore what is being said and written in the countries near us, any more than in politics we can afford to ignore what is being done by them. At present Germany and France are the two countries with whom we are most closely connected, and whose sayings are the most influential sayings in the world.

Germany is the country of books, and its output of books is enormous. The average annual number of books printed in that language is about 12,000. However, only a fraction of this total of German books deserves to rank as literature. Mere book-making is carried in Germany to a frightful pitch. The bad tobacco and the falsified wines of Mayence and Hamburg find their counterpart in the book wares of Leipsic. The German language is one of the most powerful instruments for the expression of thought and feeling to which human invention has ever given birth. The average German literary style of the present day is a barbarous jargon, wrapping up an attenuated and cloudy sense in bales of highsounding words. The fatigue which this style of utterance inflicts upon the mind is as great as that which their Gothic letter, a relic of the fifteenth century, inflicts upon the eye, blackening and smearing all the page. An examination of the boys in the Johanneum of Hamburg elicited the fact that sixty-one per cent. of the upper class were short-sighted. A large part of German books is not significant of anything-mere sound without meaning.

Putting aside, however, the meaningless, there remains not a little in German publication which requires the attention of one who makes it his business to know the thoughts of his age. The

residuum of these 12,000 annual volumes has to be sifted out of the lumber of the book-shops, for it embodies the thoughts and the moral ideal of a great country and a great people. Poor as Germany is in literature, it is rich in learning. As compilers of dictionaries, as accumulators of facts, the German bookmaker is unrivalled. The Germans are the hewers of wood and drawers of water for a literature which they have not got. All the rest of the European nations put together do not do so much for the illustration of the Greek and Latin classics as the Germans alone do-classics by whose form and spirit they have profited so little. It is one of the paradoxes of literary history that in this very country-Germany—which is the world's schoolmaster in learning the Greek and Latin languages, so little of the style and beauty of those immortal models passes into its daily literature.

If style and form alone were what gave value to literature, the first literature now produced in the world would be the French. All that the Germans have not the French have. Form, method, measure, proportion, classical elegance, refinement, the cultivated taste, the stamp of good society-these traits belong not only to the first class of French books, but even to their second and third rate books. No writer in France of whatever calibre can hope for acceptance who violates good taste or is ignorant of polite address. German literature is not written by gentlemen-mind, I speak of literature, not of works of erudition-but by a touzle-headed, unkempt, unwashed professional bookmaker, ignorant alike of manners and the world. In France a writer cannot gain a hearing unless he stands upon the platform of the man of the world, who lives in society, and accepts its prescription before he undertakes to instruct it. French books are written by men of the world for the world. This is the merit of the French. The weak point of French books is their deficiency of fact, their emptiness of information. The self-complacent ignorance of the French writer is astonishing. Their books are too often style and nothing more. The French language has been wrought up to be the perfect vehicle of wit and wisdom-the wisdom of the serpent-the incisive medium of the practical intelligence. But the French mind has polished the French language to this perfection at a great cost-at the cost of total ignorance of all that is not written in French. Few educated Frenchmen know any language but their own. They travel little, and, when they do travel, their ignorance of the speech of the country cuts them off from getting to know what the people are like. We must credit the French with knowing their own affairs; of the affairs even of their nearest neighbours in Europe they are as ignorant as a Chinese. Their newspapers are dependent for their foreign intelligence on the telegrams of the Times. Hence their foreign

policy has been a series of blunders. Had the merits of the case been known to it, could Republican France, in 1849, have sent out an expedition to Rome to set up again the miserable ecclesiastical government which the Romans had thrown off? I was reading in the Figaro not long ago a paragraph giving an accouut of the visit of a French gentleman in England. On some occasion he had to make a speech; and he made it in English, acquitting himsely very creditably. "M. Blanc," says the Figaro, "being a Breton, spoke English like a native Englishman, on account of the close affinity between the two languages, Breton and English." The Figaro is one of the most widely circulated newspapers in France. England is a country with which the French are in close and constant communication, and yet they have not discovered that the English tongue does not belong to the Keltic family of languages. That Germany is as little known to them as England I might instance in the most popular tourist's book of the day. Victor Tissot's "Voyage aux pays des Milliards" has reached something approaching to fifty editions. It is nothing but a tissue of epigrams and witty exaggerations, a farce disguised as fact, and taken by the French nation as a serious description of German life.

It is an error to say, as is sometimes said, that French literature is a mere literature of style. This finished expression embalms much worldly wisdom, the life experience of the most social of modern men and women; but it is an experience whose horizon is limited by the limits of France. It is a strictly national literature. It is, in this respect, the counterpart of the literature of ancient Athens. We, all the rest of us, are to the Frenchman barbarians in our speech and manners. He will not trouble himself about us. By this exclusiveness he gains something and loses much. He preserves the purity of his style. The clearness of his vision and the precision of his judgment, from his national point of view, are unimpaired. He loses the cosmopolitan breadth—the comparative standpoint. But the comparative standpoint is the great conquest of our century, which has revolutionised history and created social science and the science of language.

He who aims at comprehending modern literature must keep himself well acquainted with the contemporary course of French and German books, as well as of his own language; and these two are enough. A Spanish literature of to-day can hardly be said to exist, and the Italians are too much occupied at present in reproduction and imitation to have much that is original to contribute to the general stock of Europe.

English, French, German: the periodical and the volume publication in these three languages, year by year: you will say the quantity is prodigious overwhelming, if it were to be supposed that any reader must read it all. But this is not the case: what

the publisher's table offers is a choice-something for all tastes: one reads one book, another another. As I divided books into two classes, books of special information and books of general literature, so readers must now be divided into two classes-the general public and the professional literary man: the author, or critic, let us call him. I am not proposing that the general public should read, or look at, all this mass of current literature. It would be preposterous to think of it. You must read by selection; but for your selection you will be guided-you are so in fact-by the opinion of those whom I must now speak of as a class, by the name of critics.

Criticism is a profession, and, as you will have gathered from what has been said, an arduous profession; the responsibility great, the labour heavy. Literature is not your profession—I speak to you as the general public-it is at most a solace of your leisure hours; but the critic, he who sits on the judgment-seat of letters, and has to acquit or condemn, to examine how each writer has executed his task, to guide the reading community by distinguishing the good and censuring the bad-he really holds an educational office which is above that of any professor or doctor, inasmuch as the doctor of laws or of divinity is authorised to speak to his own faculty, whereas the critic speaks to the whole republic of letters. What is recreation to you is business to the critic, and his business is to keep himself acquainted with the course of publication in at least these three languages. Looking, then, at the mass and volume of printed matter to be thus daily and hourly sifted, you cannot think that the profession of critic is a sinecure.

And before he can be qualified to take his seat on the bench and dispense the law, consider what a lengthened course of professional training must have been gone through by our critic or judicial reader. When he has once entered upon his functions, his whole time will be consumed, and his powers of attention strained to the utmost, in the effort to keep abreast of that contemporary literature which he is to watch and report upon. But no one can have any pretension to judge of the literature of the day who has not had a thorough training in the literature of the past. The critic must have been apprenticed to his profession.

It has been calculated that in a very advanced and ramified science, e.g. chemistry, fourteen years are required by the student to overtake knowledge as it now stands. That is to say, that to learn what is known, before you can proceed to institute new experiments, fourteen years are necessary- twice the time which the old law exacted of an apprentice bound to any trade. The 5th of Elizabeth, which used to be known as the statute of apprenticeship, enacted that no person should for the future exercise any trade, craft, or mystery, unless he had previously served to it an apprenticeship of seven years at least. This enactment of 1563 was but the legisla

tive sanction of what had been for centuries the bye-law of the trade guilds. This bye-law had ruled, not in England only, but over all the civilised countries of Europe. It was a bye-law that had not been confined to trades. It had extended over the arts and over the liberal professions. University degrees are nothing more than the application of this bye-law to the learned professions. It required study for twenty-eight academical terms, i.e., seven years, to qualify for the degree of M.A. in the universities. Rather, I would say, that the line was not then drawn between the mechanical and the liberal branches of human endeavour; both were alike designated "Arts; and the term "universitas," now restricted to the bodies which profess theoretical science, was then the common appellation of all corporations and trade guilds, as well as the so-called universities of Paris and Bologna.

Regarding literature as a separate art, we might ask, How long would it require to go through the whole of it to become a master of this art? Even taking the narrowest definition of literature, it seems a vast surface to travel over, from Homer down to our own day! I say the surface, because no one supposes it necessary to read every line of every book which can call itself literature. Remember that in studying the literature of the past, other countries than France and Germany come in. I have dispensed our critic from occupying himself with the Italian and Spanish books of to-day. But with the books of the past it is different. Italy, in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, was the most civilised and literary country in Europe. And Spain has its classical writers. Their mere mass is prodigious. Life in Italy was rich and varied, and consequently so were the materials for that true narrative which is stranger than fiction. Villari has computed that the Italian republics of the Middle Ages enjoyed a total of 7,200 revolutions, and recreated themselves with 700 grand massacres. The longest single poem, I believe, extant, is an Italian poem, the Adone of Marini, who lived in the time of our James I. It contains 45,000 lines. As for Spain, one single author of the seventeenth century, Lopes de Vega, wrote 1,800 plays; his works altogether fill forty-seven quarto volumes. Alonso Tostado, a Spanish bishop of the fifteenth century, wrote nearly forty folios, having covered with print three times as many leaves as he had lived days. To come to England. Our William Prynne wrote 200 different works. Chalmers's collected edition of the English poets only comes down to Cowper, who died in 1800, and it fills twenty-one volumes royal 8vo, double columns, small type. The volumes average 700 pages. This gives a total of 14,700 pages, or 29,400 columns. Now it takes-I have made the experimentfour minutes to read a column with fair attention. Here is a good year's work in reading over, only once, a selection from the English poets. The amount of reading which a student can get through in