HARVARD 47X 179 Ertered according to Act of Congress in the year 1876, BY HENRY N. HUDSON, In the Office of the Librarian of Congress, at Washington. PRESSWORK BY GINN & Co., BOSTON, U.S.A. PREFACE. THE TEXT-BOOK OF PROSE here offered to the public is intended as a sort of companion-volume to the Text-Book of Poetry published a few months ago. Both volumes have originated in the same experiences, and the contents of both are ordered on the same principle, namely, that of teaching English literature by authors, and not by mere literary chips and splinters. Both the method of the work and the reasons for that method are set forth with some fulness in the Preface to the former volume. I have seen no cause to recede at all from the statement there made of them; and as a repetition of them here would be something ungraceful, I must be content with referring the reader to that Preface, merely remarking withal, that the matter was no recent or sudden thing with me, but the slow result of the experience and reflection of many years. And I am moved to renew my protest, if that be the right name for it, against putting young students through a course of mere nibbles and snatches from a multitude of authors, where they cannot stay long enough with any one to develop any real taste for him, or derive any solid benefit from him. I shall hope to be excused for observing, further, that the miscellaneous selections now so commonly in use involve one error of so gross a character, that it ought not to be left unnoticed. Those selections make a merit, apparently, of ranging over as wide a field of authorship as may be, and value themselves in proportion to the number of authors included. So their method is to treat the giants and the pigmies, the big guns and the popguns of literature on a footing of equality: nay, you shall often find the smaller made even more prominent than the greater; perhaps because the former are more apt to be popular than the latter. For instance, two pages will be given to Macaulay, or to a writer of still lower grale, where one is given to Jeremy Taylor or Addison or Burke. So, again, some fifth-rate or sixth-rate author, whose name is hardly known out of Boston, comes in for a larger space than is accorded to Daniel Webster. Or, once more, Edgar A. Poe's vapid inanities done into verse, where all is mere jugglery of words, or an exercise in verbal legerdemain, are made quite as much of as the choice workmanship of our best American poets, Bryant, Longfellow, and Whittier. This is an application of the levelling principle so unjust and so inexpedient, that we may well marvel how it should be tolerated in any walks of liberal learning and culture. No thoughtful person, I take it, will have any difficulty in gathering that this volume is made up, like its predecessor, with a special view to the oldest and ripest pupils in our high-schools and seminaries and academies. These pupils, it may well be supposed, are old enough and ripe enough to unfold at least the beginnings of literary and intellectual taste, so as to be at home and find delight in tasteful and elegant authorship, where the graces may do something towards making the ways of learning ways of pleasantness to them. Of the three authors here drawn upon, two are, by general suffrage, the very greatest in the prose literature of the English-speaking world, while the third is, I believe, generally and justly held to be, by all odds, the first in the prose literature of our own country. In the case of Burke and Webster, the works from which I had to select are somewhat voluminous, and it is quite likely that my selections are not in all cases the most judicious that might have been made. On this point I can but plead that, after an acquaintance of many years with those authors, I have used my best care and diligence in looking out such portions as seemed to me to combine, in the greatest degree, the two qualities of literary excellence and of fitness to the |