ch more copious narrative.

For the annals of England, the Short History of England by J. R. Green is
a most excellent compend. For more elaborate works, the histories of Hume
and Macaulay bring the story of the British Empire down to about 1700.
For the more modern period, Lecky's History of England in the 18th
century is excellent, and for the present century, McCarthy's History of
Our Own Time, and Miss Martineau's History of England, 1815-52, are well
written works. French history is briefly treated in the Student's History
of France, while Guizot's complete History, in eight volumes, gives a
much fuller account, from the beginnings of France in the Roman period,
to the year 1848. Carlyle's French Revolution is a splendid picture of
that wonderful epoch, and Sloane's History of Napoleon gives very full
details of the later period.

For the history of Germany, Austria, Russia, France, Spain, Italy,
Holland, and other countries, the various works in the "Story of the
Nations" series, are excellent brief histories.

Motley's Rise of the Dutch Republic and his United Netherlands are highly
important and well written historical works.

The annals of the ancient world are elaborately and ably set forth in
Grote's History of Greece, Merivale's Rome, and Gibbon's Decline and Fall
of the Roman Empire.

Another class of books closely allied to biography and history, is the
correspondence of public men, and men of letters, with friends and
contemporaries. These familiar letters frequently give us views of
social, public, and professional life which are of absorbing interest.
Among the best letters of this class may be reckoned the correspondence
of Horace Walpole, Madame de Sevigne, the poets Gray and Cowper, Lord
Macaulay, Lord Byron, and Charles Dickens. Written for the most part with
unstudied ease and unreserve, they entertain the reader with constant
variety of incident and character, while at the same time they throw
innumerable side-lights upon the society and the history of the time.

Next, we may come to the master-pieces of the essay-writers. You will
often find that the best treatise on any subject is the briefest, because
the writer is put upon condensation and pointed statement, by the very
form and limitations of the essay, or the review or magazine article.
Book-writers are apt to be diffuse and episodical, having so extensive a
canvas to cover with their literary designs. Among the finest of the
essayists