Page:The Prince (translated by William K. Marriott).djvu/322

- 2 - the New Europe which we hope will now preserve its peace under the auspices of the League of Nations set up at Geneva,

That is only one small item, however, in a library list which runs to over seven hundred and sixty volumes. 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 the directors 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 even more significantly in othei sections. With that idea too, novels like Walter Scott's Ivanhoe and Fortunes of Nigel, Lytton's Harold, and Dickens's Tale of Two Cities have been used as pioneers of history and treated as a sort of holiday history books. History itself in our day 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 Phoenix." But in the history department of Everyman's Library we have been eclectic enough to choose our history men from every school in turn. We have Grote, Gibbon, Finlay, Macaulay, Motley, Prescott; we have among earlier books the Venerable Bede and the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, and we have just completed a Livy in six volumes in an admirable new translation by Canon Roberts.

"You only, Books," said Richard de Bury, "are liberal and independent; you give to all who ask." The delightful variety the wisdom and the wit which are at the disposal of Everyman in his own library may well, at times, seem to him a little embarrassing. He may turn to Dick Steele in the Spectator and learn how Cleomira dances, when the elegance of her motion is unimaginable and "her eyes are chastised with the simplicity and innocence of her thoughts." He may turn to Plato's Phædrus