mbered,
is very important in making a successful anthology, for an essential
quality of a volume of selections is that it should be easily
portable, that it should be a book which can be slipt into the pocket
and readily carried about in any wanderings whether near or remote.
An anthology which is stored in one or more huge and heavy volumes is
practically valueless except to those who have neither books nor
access to a public library, or who think that a stately tome printed
on calendered paper and "profusely illustrated" is an ornament to a
center-table in a parlor rarely used except on solemn or official
occasions.

I have mentioned these advantages of verse for the purposes of an
anthology in order to show the difficulties which must be encountered
in making a prose selection. Very little prose is in small parcels
which can be transferred entire, and therefore with the very important
attribute of completeness, to a volume of selections. From most of the
great prose writers it is necessary to take extracts, and the chosen
passage is broken off from what comes before and after. The fame of a
great prose writer as a rule rests on a book, and really to know him
the book must be read and not merely passages from it. Extracts give
no very satisfactory idea of "Paradise Lost" or "The Divine Comedy,"
and the same is true of extracts from a history or a novel. It is
possible by spreading prose selections through a series of small
volumes to overcome the mechanical difficulty and thus make the
selections in form what they ought above all things to be--companions
and not books of reference or table decorations. But the spiritual or
literary problem is not so easily overcome. What prose to take and
where to take it are by no means easy questions to solve. Yet they are
well worth solving, so far as patient effort can do it, for in this
period of easy printing it is desirable to put in convenient form
before those who read examples of the masters which will draw us back
from the perishing chatter of the moment to the literature which is
the highest work of civilization and which is at once noble and
lasting.

Upon that theory this collection has been formed. It is an attempt to
give examples from all periods and languages of Western civilization
of what is best and most memorable in their prose literature. That the
result is not a complete exhibition of the time and the literatures
covered by the selections no one is better aw