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 what, in fact, as distinct from scientific treatises and all other "things in books' clothing," is "literature"?

The unfortunate word has indeed been sadly abused. In popular usage it has come to resemble an old bag stuffed out and burst in a hundred places by all kinds of contents, so that we hardly know whether it could not be made to hold anything "written," from to-day's newspaper or the latest law reports, to Assyrian inscriptions, the picture-writings of the Aztecs, or the hieroglyphics of Egypt. Even professed scholars have contributed little towards the prevention of this cruelty to words. For example, Sismondi, one of the pioneers of literary history, though starting in his Littérature du Midi de l'Europe (1813) with the suggestive promise that he intended "above all to illustrate the reciprocal influence of the peoples' history, political and religious, on their literature, and of their literature on their character," vitiates from the outset any scientific treatment of his subject by leaving its nature unexplained. It is the same with Hallam. Shirking any effort to define the meaning of "literature," or even indicate the necessary difficulties in any such definition, Hallam uses the word (as he tells us in the preface to his Literature of Europe) "in the most general sense for the knowledge imparted through books;" and so treats it as a common, and apparently useless, label for a perfect farrago of subjects—logic, astronomy, the drama, philology, political economy, jurisprudence, theology, medicine. Even immense improvements in the extent and depth of historical studies have done little to redeem the use of the word "literature," the origin of languages having for the most part diverted attention from that of the forms of writing as dependent on social evolution. Hence, such excellent scholars as J. J. Ampère, Littré, Villemain, Patin, Sainte