her, and by which of them his country will earn in the end
the greater honour. Though in our daily life we--perhaps wisely--make a
practice of forgetting it, our literature is going to be our most
perdurable claim on man's remembrance, for it is occupied with ideas which
outlast all phenomena.

The other day Mr. Bertram Dobell, the famous bookseller of Charing Cross
Road, rediscovered (we might almost say that he discovered) a poet.
Mr. Dobell has in the course of his life laid the Republic of Letters
under many obligations. To begin with, he loves his trade and honours the
wares in which he deals, and so continues the good tradition that should
knit writers, printers, vendors and purchasers of books together as
partakers of an excellent mystery. He studies--and on occasion will fight
for--the whims as well as the convenience of his customers. It was he who
took arms against the Westminster City Council in defence of the
out-of-door-stall, the 'classic sixpenny box,' and at least brought off a
drawn battle. He is at pains to make his secondhand catalogues better
reading than half the new books printed, and they cost us nothing.
He has done, also, his pious share of service to good literature.
He has edited James Thomson, him of _The City of Dreadful Night_.
He has helped us to learn more than we knew of Charles Lamb. He has even
written poems of his own and printed them under the title of _Rosemary and
Pansies_, in a volume marked 'Not for sale'--a warning which I, as one of
the fortunate endowed, intend strictly to observe. On top of this he has
discovered, or rediscovered, Thomas Traherne.

Now before we contemplate the magnitude of the discovery let us rehearse
the few facts known of the inconspicuous life of Thomas Traherne.
He was born about the year 1636, the son of a Hereford shoemaker, and came
in all probability (like Herbert and Vaughan) of Welsh stock. In 1652 he
entered Brasenose College, Oxford, as a commoner. On leaving the
University he took orders; was admitted Rector of Credenhill, in
Herefordshire, in 1657; took the degree of Bachelor of Divinity in 1669;
became the private chaplain of Sir Orlando Bridgman, at Teddington; and
died there a few months after his patron, in 1674, aged but thirty-eight.
He wrote a polemical tract on _Roman Forgeries_, which had some success; a
treatise on _Christian Ethicks_, which, being full of gentle wisdom, was
utterly neglected; an exquisite work, _Centuries o