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From the INTRODUCTION. History may be called the record of the abnormal; it is from literature that we get to know the heart of a people. This may seem a strange claim when we consider that the historian is searching for truth among hard facts and figures, and the poet is building castles of the imagination. Yet it will be found that, while the poet is unconsciously giving us the true picture of himself and his times, the historian is no less unconsciously distorting the truth. Life is not, and never has been for any nation, a series of accessions and deaths of monarchs, battles, treaties, parliaments, and laws. The literature of a period, read side by side with its history, will serve to give a truer and completer picture of its men and its minds than the completest catalogue of dates, kings, and battles. It is desired to make this picture as complete as possible by the selections here presented. The reader will here find in turn most of the characteristics of that day - its simple piety in the carols and hymns, its superstitious love of the miraculous in Mandeville's Travels, its passion for chivalry and romance in The Man of Lawes Tale and Malory's stories, its childlike love of spring and flowers and birds in the opening songs, and something of the darker side of it in the fierce satire of Langland's Vision. Only one feature of it, the animal humor, uncouth and unashamed, is here of necessity suppressed. The Scope of this Book. - The history of literature might be represented on a barometric chart by a series of zigzags - periods of rise and fall - and at the top of each, generally speaking, there is one great name, to which predecessors lead and from which successors fall away. Such a list as this - Chaucer, Spenser, Shakespeare, Milton, Dryden, Pope, Wordsworth - might stand as a list of the epochs of our literature on the poetic side; and the object of this series is to exhibit the history of our literature from that point of view, to show how these great ones arose, what they did, and what followed them. The first epoch of intelligible English is that of Chaucer. Our first task, therefore, will be to show what there was in the beginning of our language to make the coming of Chaucer possible.

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