Page:Le Morte d'Arthur - Volume 2.djvu/418

 and the New World at large, which we hope V,L& preserve Kant's " Perpetual Peace " under the auspices of the League of Nations at Geneva,

That is only one small item,, however, in a library list which is running on to the final centuries of its Thousand. The largest slice of this huge provision is, as a matter of course, given to the tyrannous demands of fiction. But in carrying out the scheme, publishers and editors contrived to keep in mind that books, like men and women, have their elective affinities. The present volume, for instance, will be found to have its companion books, both in the same section and just as significantly in other sections. With that idea too, novels like Walter Scott's Irankoe and Fortunes of Nigel, Lytton's Harold, and Dickens's Tale oj Two Cities, have been used as pioneers of history and treated as & sort of holiday history books. For in our day history is tending to grow more documentary and less literary; and "the historian who is a stylist," as one of our contributors, the late Thomas Seccombe, said, "will soon be regarded as a kind of Phcenix."

As for history, Everyman's Library has been eclectic enough to choose its historians from every school in turn, including Gibbon, Grote, Finlay, Macaulay, Motley, and Prescott, while among earlier books may be noted the Venerable Bede and the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. On the classic shelf too, there is a Livy in an admirable new translation by Canon Roberts, and Caesar, Tacitus, Thucydides, and Herodotus are not forgotten.

" You only, Books/' said Richard de Bury, " are liberal and independent; you give to all who ask." The variety of authors old and new, the wisdom and the wit at the disposal of Everyman in his own Library may well, at times, seem to him a little embarrassing. In the Essays, for instance, he may turn to Dick Steele in the The Spectator and learn how Cleomira dances, when the elegance of her motion is unimaginable and "her eyes

�� �